National, Communitarian and Ethnic Cultures and the Industrial Economic Market in Iran

 N. Fakouhi

Abstract

Globalization is an economic process striving to create a relative uniformity in cultural consumption, thus it seeks creation of new markets for the same mass products, and an increase in financial and corporative gains. Nonetheless, the homogenizing process of globalization gradually is facing instances of tough resistance in the form of disobedient sub-cultures and different versions of communitarianism. The worldwide cultural revitalization enforces ethnic and identity discourses which strongly resist acculturation attempts put forward mainly by the Western cultures. Thus, despite these pressures, in reality a rigid resistance has been shaped worldwide, within the past twenty years, through the re-birth of ethnic and communitarian entities which are adamantly after reinforcing their own identity attachments to avoid cultural omission. Such a re-birth has, in turn, created vast markets which can be called ethnic-communitarian markets. These markets present identity-communitarian goods, otherwise they use their identity-communitarian attachments to propagate or sell their products.

Iran encompasses diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups. Considering the strong and deep ties between the Iranian national identity and its variant local identities, Iran possesses great potentials in the area as described above. The present paper, based on findings of a meta-analytical project, attempts to demarcate these potentialities within the framework of indices and Iran’s global standing. These capacities are explored among four Iranian ethnic groups chosen for this survey, which are the Iranian Arabs, Azeris, Blooches, and Kurds. The cultural goods we consider are defined in three domains of tourism, media, and food. The final aim of this paper is to facilitate a more articulated, and less strained, relations between three levels of identity in the modern world: global, national, and local.

This paper is part of a research project sponsored by Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the winter of 2005.

Key Concepts: Communities, Identity, Economic Anthropology, Ethnic Marketing, Local Food, Media, Tourism.  

• < Prev
• Next >