Placing Hospitality: Iranian Citizens and Afghan Refugees in the City of Shiraz

Abstract

Iranian hospitality is not enacted only at the border, but in the everyday interactions between Iranian citizens and Afghan refugees at sites of national significance in and around the city of Shiraz. In my thesis I take the broad notion of hospitality—as articulated by Jacques Derrida and engaged with by numerous scholars over a number of decades and across a broad range of disciplines—and place it in the Shirazi locale. I argue that shifting policies and practices towards refugees between 1979 and 2014 run parallel to shifting notions of what it means to be Iranian. The tension between Islamic and historical-nationalist discourses of identity forms the background for my exploration of hospitality in the context of the relationship between Iranians and Afghans in Shiraz. I seek to understand the interplay between identity and hospitality as expressed through the notion of ‘Iranian hospitality,’ which itself emerges out of variously competing and intersecting Islamic, historical and literary narratives. Narratives of identity and hospitality adhere to particular sites in and around the city of Shiraz. I locate three sites (or clusters of sites) around which some of the most significant myths of Iranian nationalism have been woven and over which Shiraz exerts a certain proprietorship. These sites can be broadly categorised as religious sites (amongst which I include two major shrine complexes within the city), historical sites (centred primarily on the Persepolis ruins located just north of Shiraz) and literary sites (focussed on the mausoleums of two Shiraz-based classical Persian-language poets). I explore these sites both in terms of their symbolic significance in Iranian constructions of the hospitable nation and as lived spaces in which Iranian citizens and Afghan refugees interact (or, indeed, fail to interact). Techniques of social anthropology lie at the very heart of my thesis. By inserting myself, as an ethnographer-guest, into a space of hospitality, I have sought to explore how hospitality maps onto the city and its surrounds. Furthermore, by tracing modalities of inclusion and exclusion in the urban space I offer an alternative to state-centric narratives of migration. In this thesis I have examined how a principle of hospitality comes to be articulated and experienced in Iran. I have shown that such a principle is not static but in fact shifts and changes over time and in accordance with shifting notions of identity. As I have interrogated the idea of Iranian hospitality in light of the occasionally fractious relationship between Iranian-citizens and Afghan-refugees in the city of Shiraz, I have exposed tensions and contradictions in the Iranian construction of national identity. At the same time, I have concluded that within the current hostile environment for Afghan refugees in Iran, the potential for hospitality remains. Show more