Peering into the anthropological mycosphere
A tribute to Sue Wright
Bob Simpson
To step into a forest is to encounter a very complex ecosystem. One might identify individual trees of different sizes, shapes and species, but there is a highly complex system of interdependence in play which connects what is visible with much that cannot be seen. Peter Wohlleben (2016), a former forester, has written passionately about this ‘hidden’ aspect of forest life. The imagery he chooses to animate our perceptions of the forest is, not surprisingly, a thoroughly social one. Trees have social networks, friendships and families, and across their life course they share resources, support one another and even experience pain and emotion. In short, trees are portrayed as social beings living in communities that are analogous to human ones. One element that has been crucial in understanding how trees might be understood as having ‘lives’ in this way is the relatively recently fathomed ‘mycosphere’. Beneath the forest floor are fungal networks of extraordinary complexity. These microscopic threads, called ‘mycelium’, radiate throughout the forest environment connecting tree root systems and delivering the nutrients needed for the forest to grow and reproduce over time. Mycelial strands, cords and rhizomorphs operate like the forest's world wide web, sending chemical signals between trees and carrying materials, such as soil nutrients, water and plant sugars, around underneath the forest floor. The point I want to convey here is that the stand-alone structures that are visible above the forest floor are only possible because of what goes on beneath it and that this is made up of an incalculable mass of networks and links. My proposition is that the forest ecosystem is an apt metaphor for the way in which anthropologists produce their particular forms of knowledge. In this article, I want to draw attention to what goes on beneath the anthropological forest floor and to stress just how important it is to sustaining what we see above it. More specifically, I want to consider some of the mycorrhizal threads that have connected Sue and myself and why these have been important in my own intellectual journey. Moreover, I want to use the mycosphere metaphor as a way to draw attention to the immense contribution that Sue has made to anthropological scholarship over the last forty years.
Of course, the mixing of mushrooms and anthropological knowledge production is not new. Over a decade ago, the Matsutake Worlds Research Group produced a novel account of intellectual collaboration amongst anthropologists and how it might be applied to the study of a particular species of mushroom – the Matsutake (MWRG 2009). In the Group's multi-perspectival account of Matsutake, Miyako Inoue makes an argument similar to the one I am developing here. As she states: ‘“The individual” is a dramatically social production. We know that our work is enabled by means of intellectual production purchased with real capital – what we call “resources” in the university – and that it is rooted in social relations of intellectual production’ (MWRG 2009: 397; emphasis mine). An important consequence of this observation is that ideas are rarely freestanding but, in keeping with the analogy sketched out above, circulate endlessly through the intellectual and personal mycosphere that lies beneath the manifest world of anthropological knowledge production. The articles, books and presentations of the singular, unsupported anthropologist as hero often give little clue as to the densely textured traffic that goes on behind such productions. I would suggest that this underexplored dimension of what we do is an important component of an ethnography of anthropological knowledge-making that is yet to be written. In it, we might find clues regarding creativity and the origination of ideas; how certain ideas come to gain velocity and influence; the formation of anthropological world views and factions; and the role of affective relations, mutuality and support in giving sustenance to academic endeavour. In short, we are talking about the relational reproduction of the discipline, a collective practice at which Sue has been something of an exemplar throughout her career.
There are, of course, pointers in the direction of these underlying networks and their significance. Authorship is a case in point. Hitherto, the single-author production has tended to be the norm in anthropology. However, single authorship gives little clue as to the different kinds of academic labour that go into research and the academic publications that result. Where north–south relations are concerned, structural inequalities are rendered opaque and especially so where non-academic partners are concerned. With the growth of multi-disciplinary projects involving complex collaborations, these norms have been challenged and pushed in the direction of greater inclusivity (for example, see Jeffery 2014; Miles et al. 2021; see also Sue's co-ordination of URGE [University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanisation] for knowledge exchange, secondments and joint publications between Aarhus, Bristol and Auckland universities). In work carried out with Salla Sariola on international collaborations in biomedical research in Sri Lanka (Sariola and Simpson 2019), we attempted to write this dimension into our own account. We characterised our work as ‘multi-peopled’ and, rather than focussing on the individually owned marks of scholarship, considered how we might properly acknowledge the efforts and inspirations of others by way of ‘blurred agency’ (Reed 2011: 177; see also MWRG 2009: 383).
Another gesture towards the anthropological mycosphere is to be found in dedications and acknowledgements. Dedications are usually brief and appear as part of the front matter of a book. They often identify a particularly significant connection to a parent or teacher. Acknowledgements usually go into more detail and reveal much more about the web of connections that underpin any anthropological production. Short ones are found at the end of articles and are generally limited to those who have directly enabled the work in question. Those at the beginning of substantial monographs, however, can be quite lengthy and will name check kin, teachers, students, friends, intellectual influences, key informants and collaborators, and all manner of other enablers encountered during an individual's academic journey. Indeed, consistent with the shift towards a more explicit account of just what goes on in the black box of anthropological knowledge production, written documentation of the anthropological mycosphere seems to be becoming more extensive. Whilst further reflection on the functioning of the anthropological mycosphere would be a fertile line to explore, this is not my primary purpose here.
Brooks
I had heard of Sue long before I met her. My PhD supervisor at Durham was David Brooks. David was an original and rather unorthodox scholar. He was an authority on the relations between tribes and the Iranian state. In the 1960s, he had carried out fieldwork amongst the Bakhtiari of Iran. The Bakhtiari are semi-nomadic pastoralists living in the Zagros Mountains in south-west Iran. His analyses of Bakhtiari political leadership, religion, gender and pastoralism were based upon extensive fieldwork and were way ahead of their time. Each year, the Bakhtiari undertake an extraordinarily perilous migration with their flocks to and from pastures high in the mountains. David, along with his wife Marianne, had travelled on their migration several times. To do the trek once was achievement enough to give him legendary status among scholars of the Middle East, but to then do it again was an extraordinary achievement. He almost died from cholera whilst in the field and was also later very badly injured when, in 1966, a car ploughed into the one in which he was sitting. As a result of the accident, he lost his spleen and part of a lung and severely damaged his diaphragm. His tribulations in Iran compromised his health for the rest of his life. David had numerous PhD students, but none of us came close in our own fieldwork endeavours to the intensity or duration of his engagement with the Bakhtiari. All, that is, except Sue. Although a Durham graduate in history, Sue was doing her DPhil in anthropology at Oxford with David as a close advisor on her work on tribal political organisation in Iran's move towards modern statehood. Sue was living in the village of Doshman Ziari, which was in a valley to the south of where David had worked. Sue's work settled on attempts to understand conflicts arising from development projects. There were strong resonances with David's work, as in both instances they were interested in documenting ethnographically how local resistance to top-down bureaucracy, planning, and the exercise of naked power impacted upon marginal groups. David was highly impressed by Sue's fieldwork ‘over in the next valley’ and regularly fed in updates about her progress as I struggled away with my own doctoral work.
Local government
Sue finished her doctoral work in the mid-1980s, which was about the same time that I finished mine. At that time, a lot of PhD students were tumbling out into an academic landscape that Margaret Thatcher was happily bulldozing into a very different shape than that which existed when we began our doctorates. Once again, through David, I was kept up to date with Sue's progress. In the absence of employment that drew directly on her evident expertise in matters Iranian, she had taken a job as a researcher with the Department of the Environment. This research had her looking into rural development in the United Kingdom, and she later worked as a rural community worker for the Cleveland Council for Voluntary Service. My own career had taken a similarly domestic turn, and I found myself working as a jobbing social scientist on a research project that explored the costs and effectiveness of conciliation in divorce disputes. This in turn led to work that considered disputes more widely including situations in which people found themselves in conflict with local government. As an anthropologist trying to find a way into the study of power and bureaucracy in the local state in the United Kingdom, there was not a lot to go on – except, that is, for Sue's work, which gave important pointers as to how anthropological methods and theory might be brought to bear on the seemingly unexotic worlds of rural development policy and practice in the United Kingdom. Sue was instrumental in showing how knowledge gained from one context – the village of Doshman Ziari and its dealings with the state – might be helpful in understanding what was going on in the County of Cleveland. Along with Cris Shore, she was able to open up a new field of enquiry – the anthropology of policy. The other thing that percolated through from Sue's work was her exemplary and unerring focus on the grassroots. This perspective was enabled by the simple act of listening to what it is that people have to say. For me, and indeed many others, this was indeed nourishment flowing through the anthropological mycosphere.
Applied anthropology
At some point in the late 1980s, I actually met Sue. I don't recall the occasion, but we certainly already had a lot in common. One of the areas where I was able to gain a great deal of insight was applied anthropology, which at the time tended to be seen as the poor relation of mainstream academic anthropology. Sue and others had recognised that a lot of trained anthropologists found themselves in situations in which they were using their anthropological knowledge and skills but were invariably isolated and usually on a one-way ticket out of the discipline. As a way of creating some sense of community and exchange of perspectives within this anthropological diaspora, Sue was instrumental in setting up the British Association for Social Anthropology in Policy and Practice (BASAPP), an organisation with a membership and a newsletter that provided a forum for sharing experiences. BASAPP was launched at a meeting at the London School of Economics in 1988. The event brought together a wide range of professions and occupations with presentations on policy-related topics such as social work (Iain Edgar), Bangladeshi community education (John Eade), ageing and residential care (Jenny Hockey), overseas development (Graham Clarke), suicide (Malcom Young) and community care (Jean Collins). The BASAPP network provided very fertile ground out of which a plethora of projects and initiatives was to emerge. BASAPP was also a precursor to the establishment of Anthropology in Action in the late 1980s, which Cris Shore took over as editor in 1991. From its modest beginnings, Anthropology in Action has matured into an international network with a widely regarded open access journal.
Teaching and learning
Running through much of the anthropology and policy agenda was a thread that focussed on vocations, practice and pedagogy. Once again, Sue was at the forefront in setting this agenda and working hard to build networks and communities of interest. In 1992, I had started a lectureship at Durham University's newly formed Queen's Campus at Stockton. This was a wholly new campus charged with a mission to widen participation in an area – Teesside – that was very poorly served by higher education and had also been devastated by Thatcher's assault on manufacturing industries in the region. In its early years, the human sciences degrees that we delivered were a fantastic success for students and staff. We recruited entirely new cohorts of non-traditional students and taught them with radically different methods and approaches. (For a fuller account of the Queen's initiative in human sciences, see Coleman and Simpson 2004.)
There was not a great deal to go on regarding the teaching of mature students, the form and function of access courses, alternative forms of assessment, the place of vocationalism in anthropology curricula, fieldwork projects in the undergraduate curriculum and many other topics that were of little interest to those teaching anthropology in more orthodox settings. However, dialogue took place in another part of the anthropological mycosphere that Sue had a very big part in creating. This was the National Network for Teaching and Learning Anthropology. Much of the work of the National Network for Teaching and Learning Anthropology was captured in an important volume she co-authored with Stella Mascarenhas-Keyes in 1995 (Wright and Mascarenhas-Keyes 1995). The Report on Teaching and Learning Social Anthropology in the United Kingdom provided a very important, and possibly the first, snapshot of the state of play of anthropology teaching in the United Kingdom. It provided a context for an exchange of ideas (which might in later decades be designated as ‘best practice’). Sue was also instrumental in securing a substantial award of £267,996 from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) for a National Development Programme for Teaching and Learning Anthropology.
Under Sue's leadership, the outstanding work of the National Network for Teaching and Learning Anthropology laid the foundation for the Centre for Learning and Teaching – Sociology, Anthropology and Politics (C-SAP), which was funded by HEFCE. C-SAP was established at Birmingham University in 2000, and Sue was its first director. The Centre produced briefing documents, held conferences and workshops, and developed a journal, Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences (LATISS), and under Sue's perceptive approach to management and policy, the anthropological mycosphere was now extending well beyond the anthropologist's patch of forest floor.
Indeed, the widening of Sue's interests and influence extended significantly with her move in 2003 to Denmark to take up the post of Professor of Educational Anthropology at the School of Education of Aarhus University. This move opened the way for Sue to develop a series of initiatives in learning and teaching, not only in Denmark, but across Europe and beyond. These initiatives include New Management, New Identities? Danish University Reform in an International Perspective 2004–2008, Universities in the Knowledge Economy (UNIKE) 2013–2017 and the establishment of the Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF) in 2016. All three of these initiatives have served to develop and extend the threads along which ideas and energies might flow. CHEF in particular has been crucial in developing a critical appraisal of what universities are and what they do, but more importantly it provides a forum for exploring alternative visions of what they might become in the future. Beneath these impressive achievements, we might glimpse a dense network of undergraduate students, PhD students, post-docs, and international collaborators who have, largely due to Sue's efforts, been mobilised and facilitated as an active and productive community.
Brooks again
My most recent engagement with Sue brought us full circle and back to our shared mentor, David Brooks. Following David's death in 1994, Sue became his literary executor. This was indeed an honour but also a responsibility, if not to say a headache, as it involved excavating David's mass of papers and notes and then transporting them and storing them, first in Birmingham and later in Copenhagen. Sue and I had long shared the view that something must be done to bring David's work to a wider public. It seemed a great shame that his work was mostly unpublished and that his extensive research materials were gathering dust in twelve large boxes. Following a visit to Sue in Copenhagen in 2015, we agreed on a plan of action. Sue and her research assistants, Dalir Barkhoda and Viktoria Hofbauer, began reading, scanning, retyping and digitising the many pages of notes that David had generated. This was no mean feat as David's handwriting was notoriously illegible. At the Durham end, I secured funds for student interns (Evie Tabor, Olivia Whitaker and Isabel Davies) to work on materials for a website, with each student working over three successive summers. The resulting website successfully captured much of David's work including unpublished materials on dance, gender, politics, migration, pilgrimage and religion as well as his photographs, fieldwork diaries and lectures.1 The quality of the archive that we were able to assemble was helped considerably by Sue's meticulous care and attention in managing and collating David's materials. This was a discipline she had acquired during her first degree in history. In 2017, David's physical archive was donated to Durham University's Archives and Special Collections Department, where it is now located and available for future researchers to make use of.
Ever with an eye on where things might go next, Sue had seen an opportunity to bring together in Durham three important archives documenting the history, culture and politics of twentieth-century Iran. The first of these was already in place and contained the work of the late Anne Lambton (of the region's well-known Lambton family), who carried out fieldwork in Iran between 1930 and the 1950s. The second was the archive of David Brooks, who had worked in Iran during the 1960s. The third archive is to be based on Sue's own work, which took place in the 1970s. In future years, these collections will mark Durham out as an important destination for researchers interested to know more about Iran in the twentieth century. Before the pandemic hit, Sue was busily trying to get further funds via the National Archives’ Testbed Fund to improve online access to the collections. Similarly blighted by the pandemic was a contribution to Durham Oriental Museum's New Silk Road Exhibition. This was to be a display based on textiles donated by Sue with interviews and commentaries from the communities that made them back in Iran. All in all, Sue's work makes for a very significant contribution to the anthropological mycosphere as it relates to work on Iran.
Conclusion
The very large number of publications, reports and research projects that bear Sue's name are testament to her contribution to what is above ground and apparent in the forest of contemporary anthropological knowledge. Yet an altogether different but no less important layer of activity is what I have characterised as the anthropological mycosphere: the complex tangle of personal relationships and networks that Sue and her work have stimulated through her energetic and inclusive approach to intellectual labour. It is through these connections that all manner of academic and personal support and sustenance travels, mostly by way of occasional and unmarked interactions. Sue has been an exemplar in this regard, as she has demonstrated dedication and professionalism that is always shot through with consideration and kindness to others.
The mycosphere analogy is illuminating but only up to a point. Any ecosystem involves thinking about not just what goes on within it but what it itself is contained within. It goes without saying that this wider containment brings impacts and consequences. An important aspect of Sue's work has been to remind us of the vulnerability of the anthropological ecosystem. More specifically, she has worked to highlight the damage that the neoliberal turn inevitably does as it commodifies, managerialises, instrumentalises and rationalises everything in its path. In the midst of these transformations, what is at stake, as Sue has been at pains to point out throughout her career, is not just the visible outcomes of academic production, but also the delicate filigree of connections that promote and sustain the social life of contemporary anthropology.
Studying tribal groups in rural Iran: Interview with Sue Wright
Dalir Barkhoda
Susan Wright, or Sue as her friends and colleagues call her, is well known for her critical research on educational anthropology, the anthropology of higher education, audit culture and the field of anthropology of policy that she set up with Cris Shore. However, Sue started her career as an anthropologist of Iran, and that topic is the focus of this interview.
Dalir: Why did you start your anthropology with Iran? What were you looking for in 1970s rural and tribal Iran?
Sue: I had done a BA degree in history. That focussed very much on kings and queens, wars, treaties and diplomacy. But I was really interested in how ordinary people lived their lives when these kings and queens and wars were going on, and we never really touched that. How do people organise their ordinary life when there are big changes in society? I thought of Iran because, at that time, in the Middle East, there was a big movement towards the settlement of nomads. Iran was doing it in a very spectacular way. The Shah was conducting his ‘White Revolution’, with the idea that if nomads were settled, they would become agriculturalists; and if people became agriculturalists, they would stop feeling tribal and would begin to feel like citizens of Iran. This was a whole process of trying to create cultural change in Iran.
Dalir: When did you conduct research in Iran, and how did you choose the community you studied?
Sue: I first went to Iran to do fieldwork in 1974. I had gone as a tourist in 1970 and had travelled all over Iran. I was in Kurdistan at one point, and we were going through villages where the Shah had asked for a road to be put through the middle of a village, with a roundabout at each end, with a statue of him at one end and of his father at the other. It was an old village, which over years had built itself into a hill, and they'd cut right through the middle of that hill, so that high up on either side you could see the half of a house that they had just cut through. I was shocked at that level of autocracy and violence. It was difficult to find out what was going on. It was at that point that I decided that I wanted to study Iran.
There were about ten anthropologists from the West who had studied tribal and rural Iran. They all had gone for big tribes that were famous in the national history of Iran. I was interested in studying a smaller, lesser-known tribe that had been squeezed by the bigger tribes. I was also interested in entering the field through the ordinary people rather than getting permission from the tribal leaders to come top down. That made it very difficult. There were no maps or information about those small tribes. Later, in the Public Records Office, I found a map of the area where I had ended up studying. It was in the cross between four maps, and when I put the four maps together, there was a big white space and the word ‘unsurveyed’.
I went to Shiraz University because that was set up to study Fars Province. I went to Fars Province because that was one of the areas where the settlement of nomads had been strongest. I visited the Sociology, Anthropology and Development departments to see what they were doing. There was one lecturer who was studying tribal Iran, but he was not there at that time. Others were mainly studying voting habits in Chicago or things totally unconnected. I went to the Geography Department, and there was a very pleasant man, but he looked at me and said: ‘We do not go outside of Shiraz; there is dust and there are fleas’. Eventually, I found a research unit that was studying contraceptive practices amongst women. Mainly men were studying this, which I thought was curious. Anyway, they were going out to the villages and tribal areas. They took me with them, introduced me, and explained what I would like to do. Then we left so the people in the village could discuss whether they wanted to put up with me or not.
Dalir: I imagine there were other challenges, linguistic and cultural. How did you manage to overcome these?
Sue: This was a Lori-speaking group. The oldest generation didn't speak the national language, Farsi. They spoke Lori. The generation my age mainly spoke Lori but with some Farsi tucked in, and the young children were going to school, and they were learning Farsi. So they spoke both. It was a complicated linguistic situation. I learnt mainly from the people my age, so I spoke Lori, with some Farsi words, but the Farsi had a very Lori accent.
The people of the village decided they were going to teach me their language. The children knew how to learn a language because they had learnt it at school. Every morning, a little boy or girl would appear and say we were going for a walk. I would get my notebook and pen, and as we walked the child would say: ‘This is a wall, this is a fence, that is my aunt, this is milk, that is the sky’. Every time they said something, I had to write it down, and in the evening they would test me on my homework. One day, they said ‘Boz Chi-eh?’ Well, I knew I had learnt boz that day, but I couldn't remember what a boz was. I just could not remember. They were doing all sorts of antics to imitate a boz. I could not work it out at all. The man of the household was killing himself with laughter – entertainment value is one of the things anthropologists provide. So he said to his eldest son ‘Go and get one’. The boy went outside, and after a while came back with a very large black male goat who walked into the house and on to the carpets. The kids thought it was hilarious and said ‘This is boz’. That was the way I learnt the language.
There was another issue. I was a young woman from the country that had been one of the imperial powers influential in Iran. The villagers my age spent the first months really quizzing me. Why does Britain still have colonies? How come I can come and study them, but they are not at Oxford studying? They had a very sharp idea about why they were poor, and why other parts of the world were not. So we developed a deep discussion, where I said: ‘Well yes, I accept that the imperial past of Britain has put me in a position where I could grow up in a welfare state. I did not die at childbirth, which could have happened. I got a good education. I have had opportunities that nobody in Iran from their background had’. But on the other hand, I did not agree with what the British government did in the past or was doing at the time. For example, Britain had transferred its navy from coal to oil in the First World War at Iran's expense. Even though I had studied British–Iranian diplomatic history, they were far more knowledgeable than me, and it was an education for me. It was both an exchange of information and a discussion about why they would put up with me there. At the end, we reached an agreement that I carried the history of Britain but did not agree with it, and they decided I could stay.
Dalir: You collected data from many different spaces and contexts. Could you explain how you got access to those spaces? For example, the spaces of both men and women.
Sue: I decided to study a whole tribal section because the villages and the politics were connected with each other in a tribal section. There were twelve tribal sections in the whole tribe. This section consisted of a main village and five smaller villages; some people were still nomadic; and there was a village in the winter quarters as well. In 1974, I did three months of fieldwork in one of the smaller villages, then returned to England and came back a year later to the main village. By that time, there had been a serious conflict in the whole tribe and in every tribal section. The main village consisted of an upper village and a lower village. The two were, if not fighting, then at loggerheads.
To start with, I lived with a family in the lower village. They said: ‘Do not go to the upper village and do not go to any bad houses in the lower village’. It was not easy as a complete foreigner knowing what is a bad house when you look over the village and it was just roof after roof after roof going down the hillside. I did not know where I could go. They used to call the gendarmes ‘chickens’ because the gendarmes did not know boundaries either, and I don't think they actually called me a chicken, but it was in that kind of way that chickens walk around and do not know what belongs to one space and what belongs to another space. They had to show me how to learn space.
I realised that space was often organised through kinship. So I started collecting genealogies, which was a thing anthropologists did at that time. This showed the history of the tribal section was one of successive waves of refugees coming from conflicts in other tribes or in the settled villages. Those that stayed had agreed to work for an established family for seven years clearing land for agriculture or herding sheep and goats, and then they would be given one of the patron's daughters in marriage, and some of the land or sheep. The tribal section consisted of some large lineages and forty to fifty smaller ones. I ended up with genealogies for 2,500 people and most of it in my head, so that in any conversation I would know the relationships between the people present and with anyone they were talking about. That meant I could sense when they were negotiating tensions – and I could carefully avoid adding to the continuing conflicts.
The other thing I did was I joined in. It was interesting because I could do most of the jobs that the men did, but I couldn't do any of the women's tasks. The women tried to show me how to make bread. One of the stages is to knead the bread into balls, which is called chuneh zadan. I was good at that, but when it came to rolling it out with a tiny thin rolling pin on a big round board, I ended up [with] the centre stuck round the rolling pin and a hole like a map of Africa in the flatbread. Collecting firewood, taking a donkey up the mountain, using an axe, threshing with a pitchfork – I could do all that. They were all men's jobs.
The other thing was that at university, when you are talking to somebody, you look them in the eyes. But that was what men did. When women talked to men, they did not look into their eyes. So nothing in my behaviour fitted being a woman there. I was clearly not a man, but socially fitted better there. The women would find a way to lodge me in their activities; the men were very respectful when I helped them with their work. In the evening, the men would meet to discuss the day's happenings and interpret often highly tense political situations. They would invite me, and, as the only woman present, they would sit me in the best position next to the fire, at the top of their pecking order, but fenced off from it by surrounding me with cushions. I just sat there silently and took it all in, and then, the next day, whilst working with them, I would check whether I had understood the discussion correctly. So they found ways to fit me in and enable me to move between gendered spaces during the day.
Dalir: You have written about the role of tribal education in the community. How important was it?
Sue: It was really important. A programme had been set up by Bahman Begi from the Qashqai tribe. They called it ‘white tent’ education, as the teacher would travel with the nomads as they migrated and use a white tent for the school. Bahman Begi had set up a tribal teacher-training school in Shiraz and a high school for the brightest kids, many of whom went on to university. The Qashqai tribal leaders had disliked this programme for different reasons, so the tribe I was with had seen this as an opportunity and had sent boys to train as teachers from the start. As soon as the programme was opened to women, some girls from this tribe became the very first women teachers.
The traditional picture of being a nomad is to have sheep and goats and go up and down mountains. But their economy was never able to rely just on sheep and goats. They had always had some agriculture, grown grapes to sell in the town or make into grape syrup, and, at some points, been smuggling. So they had always been scanning the horizon to see which activities were moving up economically and which were becoming less feasible. I saw them including the tribal education system in their scanning. But unlike other opportunities, it was open for both men and women.
By the time I got there, in the main village, there were 240 households, and there were 200 teachers from those 240 households, and half of them were women. They were posted all over the country. This made a terrific difference to gender relations. Women were earning the same as the men teachers, and their income was more than the father's combined activities. So a daughter was earning more than her father. This led to debates about women having more say over their own position. The year I was there was known as the ‘year of no’ because several women refused to marry the men they had been betrothed to in childhood, who had become agriculturalists or nomads. Marrying a farmer meant giving up teaching, as they needed a male companion to travel. They wanted to marry another teacher and be posted to the same school in another part of the country.
Dalir: How did those women's economic position affect the social organisation of the community?
Sue: There was this very important concept of ekhtyar, the power to make decisions on your own, or having enough autonomy to decide by yourself. But it's not ‘either-or’; you can have degrees of ekhtyar. When women had finished their work in the house and in the afternoon took portable tasks to gather in sunny spots, their conversations quite often concerned whether somebody had it or not. Some of the women teachers had so much ekhtyar they were even able to join the men's meeting in the evening. They would not be part of the men's pecking order and would sit by the door post. Sometimes they would say things and their voices would be heard. The amount of ekhtyar a woman had would be shown in the way in which she was taken seriously by her husband. Many of the male teachers respected their wives’ points of view really seriously and strongly.
Dalir: So it had increased women's political power in the community?
Sue: Not overt power. The men were still making decisions. But I called it ‘influence’.
Dalir: Your presence in Iran coincided with a very critical period of time before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Did you see any signs or expectations of change in the community?
Sue: In Tehran and in this tribal area, there was an expectation that there was going to be a big change. It was in the air. Nobody knew when or how, but something was going to happen. The Shah's regime was so authoritarian and so disliked, and so frightening. The distance between the middle class he had built up with the bureaucracy and the military, in contrast to the poverty in the countryside was so extreme. I mean the village where I was had no road, no electricity and no water supply. It had a school, and that was it. So something was going to change, and there was a lot of political debate about it. There were many different factions of left and middle and who knows what. Religious groups were also beginning to grow up, and debates were going on all over the place about what kind of society they wanted.
In the village, they had a big conflict in the period when I was not there. Each tribal section split into two sides, one connected to the tribal leaders and the other to what they called the ‘enlightened youth’. It was very much about different ways of developing a polity, what kind of political system they wanted. The tribal leaders had been dismissed, and they were trying to reassert their power through positions in the bureaucracy. They were using these positions to try and rebuild top-down hierarchical control of the villages. The teachers, on the other hand, were using literacy and development projects to try and create a more equal society. In the main village, they organised the funding to build a water supply and bathhouse by dividing the village into three strata: the teachers who had a salary contributed most; farmers and herders who had some income paid less; and those with nothing contributed with their labour. This was called a sherik (‘sharing’), with everybody from the lower village taking part. They were demonstrating that they did not need to be in a hierarchical relationship; they could build a more equal society.
A war happened between 1974 and 1975, whilst I was not there. In another tribal section, there had been a really bad fight. Many had fled to the shanty town outside Shiraz. Some of the teachers worked with them and returned to the tribal area to build a model village. There were ten households. They built one house as a storeroom for their possessions. Then they worked together for one day on one house, the next day on the next house, so they all progressed together. Meanwhile, everybody slept in a tent. This whole process really politicised me: watching how people thought in detail about how to interact with each other as part of a bigger story about what kind of tribal polity and what kind of Iran they wanted to be part of.
One day, I was helping build this village. It was after dark, and I was with the men and women sitting around the fire, outside of course, because there was not a house to sit in. One of the villagers had been to Shiraz and came in very late. He stood at the edge of the circle, saying Salam (‘Hello’), and all the formalities started around greetings, bowing and putting hands on chest as a sign of respect. We began to make a space for him to come and join the circle, but one of the men said: ‘Stop, stop. If we are going to be an equal society, how do we say hello to each other in a way that it is equal instead of all this obeisance to each other?’ That level of reflexivity, that level of political thinking, was just a complete eye-opener to me. That was the style of what was going on in those years running up to the Revolution.
Dalir: After the Revolution and in 1990s, you returned to Iran. How did you find people and their perspectives towards the future compared to the time you just described?
Sue: It was a complete revolution, in the sense that very little that I knew from the time before was still the dominant way of thinking. When I came back sixteen years later, even the kinship systems had completely changed. The fight in 1975 had been between two named groups. When I was sitting with one of the people who had been senior in one of the named groups, his son came in and said: ‘What does that name mean?’ They did not even use the same names for the division between the villagers. The tribal education programme had been stopped. The two main sides, the supporters of the tribal leaders and the supporters of the teachers, had both been defeated in the Revolution. They had both gone to Shiraz or fled elsewhere.
One of the biggest changes was the way they held meetings. I had to report every week to the local governor. Government minders followed me around to make sure I was behaving, and they came with me to report to the governor. They told the governor about the level of poverty and the problems. So the governor said: ‘Well I will come out and visit’. Immediately [after] he arrived, all the men sat in a circle, all at the same level with the governor, and they told the governor about the problems. I had never seen that before. They called it a shura, and they told me that it had grown up during the Revolution. The Jihad, the students’ movement for reconstructing the villages, had come out, and they had set up this way of meeting to find out what the villagers needed. They then mobilised students to build what was needed. When I returned to England and began researching shura, I found that they had sprung up all over the place, even in the Ministry of Nuclear Power during the Revolution. There was an upsurge of participatory democracy around the time of the Revolution, which then got closed down again. So, many things were different afterwards.
Dalir: How do you position your findings in regard to the available literature on Iran at that time?
Sue: The dominant thinking about the tribes in the literature portrayed them as a segmentary lineage system in anthropological terms. This idea, borrowed from African anthropology and highly simplified in its travel from Africa to the Middle East, was that everybody in a tribe is part of a hierarchical order based on kinship, and everybody knows where everybody else is in this order. That way of organising large groups of people without the need for government was what had interested the African anthropologists.
The very first day I got an impression of a completely different life. We went into a room, a house, which was quite dark. It was rectangular. We came through the door at one end, and there was a fireplace in the middle of the long wall. There were three carpets on the floor, nothing else. They ushered me in first because I was the guest. What was I meant to do? The student, who was with me, knew that I was totally stuck, and said: ‘Go and sit down beside the fire’. I stood there, still not quite knowing how you sit. The student came and stood next to me. Then the host went to the other side of the fireplace, and they sat down with their legs crossed. So I sat down in the same way. Then another man came into the house to see this foreigner. Immediately, everybody stood up. So I stood up. Then it was all bafarmaid, bafarmaid (‘after you’). They were juggling as who was going to sit where. I was told to stay where I was. The student kept his position beside me, and the newcomer sat beside him. Then another man came in. Everyone stood up, the same performance as before, and this one ended up third in line, after me and the student. Everyone who came in, there was this ritual of standing up [and] saying bafarmaid before trying to pull the newcomer to sit higher up the arc of men that formed between me and the door whilst he politely tried to sit further down the line. I thought: ‘Well, if they have got a lineage structure based on a genealogy, where everybody knows where they are in the system, why are they having all this negotiation about who is where in the pecking order?’ So, immediately, there was a problem. Anthropologists love a problem when the literature and what you actually see ethnographically do not line up.
I was lucky to find my anthropological problem from day one. I spent the time trying to understand how the political organisation of this tribal area worked. There were lots of small lineages, not one big overarching one. Each of the tribal sections had a separate story of origin and separate lineages. And the tribal leaders had a different lineage. Partly because I studied a small tribe without a powerful history, and also because I entered via the people rather than from the khans’ perspective, my analysis of how that form of tribal politics worked, and how it related to the state at the time, differs from many of the other anthropological tribal studies.
Dalir: You are working on making your Iran fieldwork publicly accessible. Could you say more about that?
Sue: You know about this, as we are working on it together. You have digitised this massive genealogy, and we have sat for hours going through various names, and who is related to who, and does this bit of the genealogy link up with that bit? Now we have got those two-and-a-half, nearly three thousand names, all sorted. Each one has a specific number. I have four thousand photographs, which I annotated with the help of two people from the fieldwork area when they visited me. You have gone through those and tagged the faces in them, and translated the annotations into Farsi with the name of the places where they are standing, and the names of tools they are holding, and what they use them for. We are now at the stage of sorting out how the pictures and the genealogies link with my sketch maps of every house in every village and every tent camp. I have also already digitised and annotated the sound recordings, and they are already available on a website.
The idea is to put this information onto a website. People from the fieldwork area are sending me emails saying: ‘You took a picture of my grandmother or my great-grandmother making bread in 1974; have you got any more information about my family?’ The website will enable people from the tribal area to look up their own relatives and information about the ways that people were living at that time.
Dalir: One of your recent contributions to Iranian studies was editing and putting David Brooks’ archive on Durham University's webpage. How have you done that?
Sue: Durham University's archive will hold three sets of fieldwork from rural Iran: the work of Anne Lambton from the 1950s; David Brooks’ study of the Bakhtiari in the 1960s, and mine from the 1970s. This will be a valuable resource for researchers of rural Iran and the history of Iran. We also developed a website about David Brooks’ material – us two with Viktoria Hofbauer and, at Durham, Professor Bob Simpson and one of his students. Six of us are doing this together. David produced a massive archival study of the Bakhtiari because the Bakhtiari were woven into the history of the British oil interests in Iran. Apart from the tribal political system, his interests were in gender, religion, pilgrimage and dance. The first time I saw David Brooks, he was dressed as a Bakhtiari in a lecture hall in Durham, enacting the dance and explaining its symbolism.
Dalir: Tell us a more about your relationship with David Brooks.
Sue: David examined my PhD and gave me fantastic feedback. So, I went to see him in Durham. I was there three days. We just sat and talked. I mean, he went off and gave a lecture every now and then, but otherwise we sat and talked tribal Iran for three days. It was just sheer joy. After the Revolution, I could not work on Iran anymore, so I started working on Thatcherism and the transformation of governance in Britain. My fieldwork site was not far away from where David lived, so I used to go and visit him every month, and he was very sick at that point. I would tell him what I was working on. He meanwhile would have been listening to the news and watching television and would come up with the most amazing symbolic understandings of the language of Thatcherism. Every visit, we had these fantastic conversations. Then he asked me to be his literary executor. I differ from him a bit. I was very inspired by his symbolic interpretations, but where he would start ethnographically and then gradually ascend into more and more abstraction, I keep my analysis much more grounded in the ethnography.
Dalir: How has your work on Iran shaped your anthropological work in other fields and contexts?
Sue: When I returned to England and started working on my material from Iran, I knew far more about the politics and what was going on in Iran than I did about England. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 occurred at the same time as the Revolution was happening in Iran. Following on from that, I got a job researching how ordinary people in villages engaged with the governance system in England. The people who appointed me jokingly said they wanted me to ‘do tribe and state’ in England. So, I had a direct kind of transfer from my interest in how people are engaged in big systems of transformation in Iran through to England.
In both Iran and England, I focussed on keywords that seem to capture a moment of change. You hear something happening to the meaning of a keyword that you cannot quite grasp, and you follow it in different instances and over time, and gradually begin to see what is happening to the word itself and how it points to wider changes in society. In Iran, the word was sherik (‘sharing’), which had been used to describe the hierarchical relation established when a refugee agreed to work for a number of years clearing land for agriculture or herding sheep for an established family. But when developing the water supply and bathhouse in the main village, or when building the model village, sherik was used to depict their concerted efforts to create a society with equal relations between people. In England, the word was individual. Mrs Thatcher famously declared ‘There is no such thing as society. There are just individuals and their families’ with the idea that every individual is primarily responsible for looking after the interests of their family in competition against everyone else. In that quote, the ‘individual’ was a person and a family. But the government also talked about individuals as individual hospitals, individual schools, everything became an individual in competition with everything else, and everything was in a pseudo-market constructed by the government.
I followed the shift from the welfare state where the keyword was society, whose meaning was supported by an arch of words – community, public, family, individual – in what I call a ‘semantic cluster’. In that welfare state cluster, individual was one of the least important words. I followed how that semantic cluster was dismantled during the 1980s and early 1990s. A new cluster around the individual formed in a cluster with competition, market [and] enterprise. They became the governing terms under Thatcherism. I traced that emergent discourse in political speeches, in House of Commons debates and the media, and in everyday life, and how these terms were included in legislation and then turned into administrative systems in a local authority. In the same local authority area, I did fieldwork in a village that was impacted by Thatcher's closure of big industry, marginalisation and poverty. In their everyday life, I saw what sense or nonsense they made of the new meanings of these familiar words, when they encountered them through legislated changes to their schools, housing, or unemployment benefits. I also followed their attempts to assert alternative ways of living focussed on ‘community’ or ‘voluntary’ activities, organised by ‘women’ (not ‘individuals’) for ‘children’ or the ‘elderly’ (not ‘families’). So, I did a parallel study of political transformations in very different contexts. That is the way I do my anthropology.
The other thing was that this whole process politicised me. As a student at Oxford and Durham universities at the time, you were taught that as a woman nothing that you ever said or did would be of any interest to anybody or of any value in the world. This was very clear. Yet in the tribal area in Iran, every word I said, everything I did, was interpreted and read. They were all interpreting and reading everybody else too, and it made me aware that actually in every utterance and action we are shaping our society. This is within a social framework, but we are also shaping that. That is really the approach that I have taken to my studies of universities. If a university is a community of scholars and students, how do we act within it? How do we shape it? Okay, we are given very constraining conditions now within which to shape it, but nevertheless there are spaces for manoeuvre. There are ways we can shape our environment. That really informed my big European project about university futures in which I was training a cohort of PhD students – we had about twenty affiliated to the programme. I wanted them to use reflections on their positioning and room for manoeuvre as PhD students to think about how they wanted to shape the institutions that they go to work in as lecturers or research leaders or whatever they do. That political reflexivity is the other big influence that Iran has had on my anthropology.
Exploring Iranian fieldwork with Susan Wright
Judith Okely
Sue Wright proved to be a supportive ally when we met at different conferences and workshops. In addition to having studied and done fieldwork in Iran, she had also done field research in Europe. The latter challenged Maurice Bloch's ethnocentric presumption that the study of Europe was irrelevant because it was ‘easy’ and ‘known’ (Houtman 1988). Given her work in Iran, Sue was inevitably close to my most inspiring and supportive colleague at Durham, David Brookes, who, before her, had done pioneering fieldwork in Iran.
For my then forthcoming book Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method (Okely 2012) in which I interviewed some twenty anthropologists of sixteen nationalities, Sue proved to be a superb interviewee. As I explain elsewhere (Okely 2015), such methodology that I rarely resorted to in fieldwork proved vital for my study, and despite positivist presumptions the results were ever more revealing when I had already known the interviewee. There are aspects in our discussion of her early work in Iran which hinted at her future research concerns and brave professional manoeuvres. We had, of course, already exchanged casual information about our respective fieldwork (mine amongst English Gypsies and some aged residents of rural Normandy), but it was not until I taped my interview with her that I learnt the details of her amazing, innovative and ingenious research in Iran. Extensive quotes by her would be reproduced alongside others from across the globe in each relevant themed chapter. Like many anthropologists who are prepared to reveal the factors behind their choice of locality, Sue, by then a postgraduate, revealed that her decision was based on her supervisors’ suggestions and her own creative sense of curiosity.
First, Sue rejected the hierarchical elitist perspectives of the educated Iranians she initially encountered. Educated largely in the United States, they self-identified as metropolitan elites and looked down on the rural poor, including nomads. From the outset, Sue critically recognised the overbearing power of the state and focussed her enquiry on its subordinates. Most dramatically, she witnessed the consequences of the Shah's massive, brutal destruction of treasured historic towns in order to facilitate the movement of relatively wide tanks. Here was physical proof of the state's power. The Shah had literally bulldozed through people's living rooms.
Again, Sue's persistence was demonstrated in her initial unsuccessful attempts to gain access to rural tribes beyond Shiraz and to various allegedly ‘expert’ university departments. Despite their official labelled identities, none of these ‘experts’ could help with access. They even warned her not to go near the rural localities, as apparently her life would be at risk. Retrospectively, I see similarities with my own initial research problems in gaining access to Gypsies. My initial employer, a seconded civil servant who oversaw the 1960s survey of Gypsies in England and Wales (MHLG 1967), insisted I read every local authority report on the Gypsies or Travellers seemingly as a factual introductory literature review. Instead, I found endless racist categorisation and ignorant negative stereotypes. The reports talked of acceptable ‘true full-blooded Romanies’ in contrast to ‘half-blooded’ ones, who were mainly thieves. Like Sue, here was the power of the state, albeit at varied local levels, reflecting national ignorance.
Eventually, thanks to her determination and quest for grounded knowledge, Sue discovered a small institute studying birth control amongst tribal women. As with gifted anthropologists embracing serendipity, Sue seized the chance to accompany a student working at that institute who loved mountain-walking and who had been shocked by the poverty of the rural tribespeople who he had befriended. Sue accompanied him on the challenging mountain treks. Soon, this young man proved to be a trusted intermediary for meeting the tribespeople. Thanks to his rapport with both the British outsider and the tribes, Sue was welcomed by the rural residents. Here again was evidence of the crucial role of the local ‘assistant’ to the ethnographer, as had earlier been innovatively explored by Roger Sanjek (1993).
In our interview, Sue recognised that her initial ideas were so broad that they did not change. However, her way of going about fieldwork in the one smaller locality changed between the 1970s and 1980s, given the Revolution in Iran. Her concentration on a limited community nevertheless revealed a wider context, something which quantitative-based disciplines have denied. There are resonances here with Edmund Leach's (1967) pioneering essay, which convincingly argues that his experience of residing long term in just one village in Sri Lanka revealed the system, in contrast to Stanley Tambiah's early sociological reliance on mass questionnaires administered to individual householders in multiple villages.
Sue answered my specific question by describing to me her varied forms of participant observation. While proving ‘not very good’ at cooking rice, she was subsequently denied such participation by the tribeswomen. Instead, she was encouraged to assist in women's other manual labour. More significantly, Sue, the outsider, was permitted to work with the men. As a lone woman, she learnt to assist in harvesting with considerable skill and work with donkeys and horses. Some of this proved ‘backbreaking’. Here again, we see how the participant observer challenges the preferred positivist notion of the detached observer in other social science disciplines.
Participation became so absorbing that Sue learnt not only consciously how to sit in the indigenous gendered culturally acceptable way, but also unconsciously, to her own surprise. Superbly, through months of dialogue with these rural people, she learnt about hitherto-unknown shocking dimensions of British colonial involvement in Iran. At first, her British specificity made her vulnerable to blame sharing. But gradually, her expressing sincere disagreement with her country's policy helped create mutual understanding and trust between her and the rural residents. She learnt aspects of British colonialism never revealed in her schooling nor, indeed, in her undergraduate degree in history.
To conclude, Sue Wright's detailed account of her fieldwork demonstrates classic qualities of the dedicated anthropologists of her and earlier generations who depended on intellectual and physical curiosity matched by determination – all this in an era where there were no university courses on anthropological fieldwork. We depended on Malinowski's (1922) insistence that the researcher should ‘pitch his tent’ in the village and on the celebrated and much-cited appendix to Street Corner Society (Whyte [1943] 1955). So much depended on embracing serendipity and individual initiative. This was something Hortense Powdermaker (1967) explored, but her semi-autobiography was never put on reading lists. Such initiative qualities Sue Wright has embraced throughout her career. Her early scepticism rather than deference to the state has continued to be a key factor in her analyses and negotiations with seemingly unapproachable authorities. Perhaps her full and final recognition as Professor beyond the United Kingdom, namely in Denmark, exposes something critical about her country of origin. Professor Susan Wright's work is much to be commended and celebrated.
Note
https://davidbrooksarchive.webspace.durham.ac.uk/ (accessed 2 October 2023).
References
Coleman, S. and B. Simpson (2004), ‘Knowing, doing and being: Pedagogies and paradigms in the teaching of social anthropology’, in D. Drackle and I. Edgar (eds), Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology (Oxford: Berghahn), 18–33.
Houtman, G. (1988), ‘Interview with Maurice Bloch’, Anthropology Today 4, no. 1: 18–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3032876.
Jeffery, R. (2014), ‘Authorship in multi-disciplinary, multi-national North-South research projects: Issues of equity, capacity and accountability’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 44, no. 2: 208–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2013.829300.
Leach, E. (1967), ‘An anthropologist's reflections on a social survey’, in D. Jongmans and P. Gutkind (eds), Anthropologists in the Field (Assen: Van Gorcum), 75–88.
Malinowski, B. (1922), The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge).
MHLG (Ministry of Housing and Local Government) (1967), Gypsies and Other Travellers (London: HMSO).
MWRG (Matsutake Worlds Research Group) (2009), ‘A new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology: Matsutake worlds’, American Ethnologist 36, no. 2: 380–403. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27667568.
Miles, S., A. Renedo and C. Marston (2021), ‘Reimagining authorship guidelines to promote equity in co-produced academic collaborations’, Global Public Health 17, no. 10: 2547–2559. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2021.1971277.
Okely, J. (2012), Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method (London: Berg).
Okely, J. (2015), ‘Dialogues with Anthropologists: Where interviews become relevant’, in K. Smith, J. Staples and N. Rapport (eds), Extraordinary Encounters: Authenticity and the Interview (New York: Berghahn), 128–156.
Powdermaker, H. (1967), Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (London: Secker and Warburg).
Reed, A. (2011), ‘Inspiring Strathern’, in J. Edwards and M. Petrovic-Steger (eds), Recasting Anthropological Knowledge: Inspiration and Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 165–183.
Sanjek, R. (1993), ‘Anthropology's hidden colonialism: Assistants and their ethnographers’, Anthropology Today 9, no. 2: 13–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/2783170.
Sariola, S. and B. Simpson (2019), Research as Development: Biomedical Research, Ethics, and Collaboration in Sri Lanka (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Whyte, W.F. [1943] (1955), Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Wohlleben, P. (2016), The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (London: William Collins).
Wright, S. and S. Mascarenhas-Keyes (1995), Report on Teaching and Learning Social Anthropology in the United Kingdom (Brighton, UK: National Network for Teaching and Learning Anthropology).