Fariba Adelkhah, Or the One Thousand And One Borders of Anthropological Fieldwork

This text is the introduction to the special issue of Critique Internationale. The issue is available here.

In solidarity with Fariba Adelkhah, who has been imprisoned in Iran since June 5, 2019, the editorial committee of Critique internationale has decided to publish four of her articles. These articles are a testimony to her years of painstaking research, honoured on December 15, 2020 by the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize for “Female Scientist of the Year”. Today, our valued colleague is still denied her freedom, kept under house arrest with an electronic bracelet, not allowed any contact outside her family,1 and of course, deprived any hope of being able to continue her research.2 This editorial decision is therefore a gesture of support and commitment to her struggle to “save research”3 and have the specificity of research recognised in a country where scientific investigation is most often assimilated to “spying”, “propaganda”, or even an “attack on national security”. In Iran, like in other countries unfortunately, the fact that there is no official status for researchers, nor a clear definition of the profession, leave even the most courageous and upstanding academics vulnerable. Like Fariba, they often face misunderstandings not only from the regime, but also from some of their colleagues. Both in Iran and within the diaspora there is a reticence to accept the specificity of research as a profession: the process of distancing, denaturalisation, and shifting the limits of understanding; a knowledge that draws its legitimacy from its methodological rigour and robust empirical material and not “the” truth accredited by one authority in particular.

At a time where field work in “high risk” or “difficult” countries is complicated by “security issues”; where the transformations of the principles of research evaluation make it more costly to conduct fieldwork that requires long-term immersion; where disciplinary purity, thematic hyper-specialisation, and methodological orthodoxy disparage and hinder the pluri-disciplinarity and innovation in research that are so fundamental in understanding change and new situations4, the publishing of these four articles is also of significant scientific importance. It is for all of these reasons that rather than focusing on her career trajectory,5 this introduction will focus on Fariba Adelkhah’s scientific approach and her fieldwork practices in all their specificity and originality.

It is her anthropological research on Iran6 and Afghanistan7 that are the most well-known, but what best defines her research practice and illustrates her approach is undoubtedly her anthropology of travel. This concept does not simply refer to a shift in physical space. Indeed, many of her studies explore migration, trade, pilgrimage, the movements of clerics, and the experience of exile.8 Fariba is constantly “going on fieldwork” and “going further in-depth”, to develop new interpretations, and explore uncharted places.9 But travel is also a way for her to use fieldwork to make, unmake, and remake the core scientific questioning of her research, and perhaps even more, of her approach. It was in following Afghan clerics between Kabul (in Afghanistan), Qom (in Iran), and Najaf (in Iraq), that she met the contacts who would open the doors to a certain clerical sphere in Qom, and which progressively led to her new field of research, the fiqh and the way it adapts to social transformation. It was while she was in the field analysing and writing about the Hazaras people, that she came to know Pashtuns and Tajiks, through a “side-step” strategy. In this way, she would often explore the “opposite” notions or practices to those she was focused on, in order to better deconstruct the latter and understand their borders and constant reinventions (in this case the notion of an ethnic group). This scientific journey is made of detours and paths less travelled, moments where the researcher moves away from the subject to return to it from a different angle. It is also the expression of her passion for research. As I myself observed, working by her side in Qom, as an anthropologist of religion, Fariba always marvelled at this city, in which seventy nationalities live side-by-side, where there are hundreds of religious schools and thousands of clerics, dozens of bookshops, libraries open all the time, and all the books one could possibly need, including in translation.

For her, travel is not exotic and far away, and fieldwork is not conducted “elsewhere”. On the contrary, it is close and intimate, in both senses of the word. Although her fieldwork has always been centred in and around Iran, Khorasan (the region in the north of Iran where her family originates from), and Afghanistan, what is meaningful in her trajectory is the much broader understanding her research gives to these two concepts.

She has a very close relationship with the field, a proximity with what is remote, not only geographically, but also culturally and intellectually, a proximity that is maintained constantly by email or telephone calls with people she meets in the field, gifts sent and received, but also through her perspective as a researcher on these places, objects, and people. Above all, she always feels like the fieldwork takes her to new places, opening new horizons and perspectives on her society, her environment, and her relationship with the world.

This connection with her fieldwork is even more intimate because of her understanding of the social sciences themselves, and particularly anthropology. For her, this is an approach that requires opening oneself up to other people, demands full commitment, and an understanding differences and freedom. In her own words, it means “freedom through difference”, but also the “freedom of differences”. In this context, intimacy is clearly not friendship, family, or emotional relationships. It is a concern for the other, although that does not necessarily prevent conflict or discord. All forms of exchange and relationships, even those from a distance, produce intimacy when they give rise to interactions that are unexpected, outside the norm, based on respect and communication, and which take place over a certain length of time. Fariba is an expert in this way of doing things. She knows how to listen, to perceive what is curious or unusual in everyday banality. She knows how to shed light on these “small nothings” that are so frequent they become invisible, even though they give meaning and are connected to actions or phenomena in all their social and political significations. Her research on gifts are a perfect illustration of this. Drawing on common expressions (“giving is good”), frequent social interactions (small gifts of soup or cakes on Thursday night), and ordinary economic practices (the few tomans extra a client leaves the taxi driver or a shopkeeper with the instruction to “give it to the poor”), she demonstrates the central place of charity and evergetism in the social and political relations of Iran today.

Fariba also has a gift – and this is by no means unimportant – for provoking interest and curiosity in others, allowing them to listen and respond, to invite her to their house, to take into consideration not only her requests, but also the difference, and the unexpected, that she brings with her. She demonstrated this masterfully in her work on Afghanistan, where she was successfully welcomed into Hazara families,10 but also in Iran, where she was accepted into the fiqh classes reserved for men,11 or in the fruit and vegetable markets (again very masculine) controlled by all kinds of “thick necks” (gardan koloft).12

Sciences Po, Paris. 2020. Copyright: Sciences Po and Fariba Adelkhah Support Committee

From this perspective, failures are also intimate, in the extent to which refusal of interaction from certain contacts, or tensions and conflicts, necessarily lead the researcher to review their core issue, reformulate their questioning, or refine or overhaul the research methods. This leads to the transformation of the fieldwork itself, taking it on unforeseen paths. For example, there were fieldwork sites in Afghanistan that were sometimes very difficult for Fariba, who was perceived as “Iranian” (which of course she is) by people who had suffered at the hands of Iran and who projected their hate and rancour onto her. But although mistrust and hostility were a hindrance in certain sites in Afghanistan, they also led her to think about the ills of Iranian society, the responsibility of all Iranians, particularly intellectuals and including herself, and to work on the Iranian Afghans and their social and political situation in Iran.13

If fieldwork is the most fascinating part of research for Fariba, it is because it has one thousand and one different aspects. It is not a place (not Iran or Afghanistan, not a madrasa or a mosque), nor a point in time; it is the way she describes her approach, as focused on understanding everyday practices that only fieldwork reveals and gives meaning to. In January 2020, in organising the CERI seminar “Thinking while thinking of them”, in honour of our colleagues detained in Iran, I decided on the title “Sociology and social anthropology of politics”. The first part of the title echoed the work done by Roland Marchal, who was arrested at the same time as Fariba and who was then still in prison in Iran,14 the second part of the title echoed Fariba’s work. In this way I wanted to emphasise the fact that her work lies at the crossroads of anthropology (as a discipline), society (as both a point from which to observe and as an object of research), and politics (understood through its political relations, and political meaning). Fariba would probably agree with the intention of my title, but not its tautological formulation. For her, anthropology is a way of thinking about the social, in other words, the relationships, connections, and interactions within society (whether the object is a family, a community, a political party, or an administration) and it is political because all connections are political.

Following the fundamental principles of research on the popular modes of political action, developed at CERI under the direction of Jean-François Bayart,15 Fariba’s approach consists in systematically shedding light on the actors – and their practices – that are not ordinarily considered part of the “political world”, but also emphasising places, institutions, and teachings (mosques, bazaar, buses, religious meetings etc.) that are not considered political. If we accept that politics is not a separate sphere, a specific place, elitist, controlled by classes who claim to be or are seen as legitimate in representing it, then shopkeepers in the Bazaar, bus drivers, housewives, pilgrims, smugglers, fishermen are all political actors, from the moment they take on these roles and find themselves in power relations. Fieldwork enables observation, data collection, problematisation and conceptualisation within a single approach. It avoids blindly applying preconceived categories onto actions, actors, groups, facts, or phenomena. It constitutes a continuous interaction working its way towards ever more intricate questioning, providing material for reflection on general problems whilst preserving the specificities of the object under consideration. This approach leads to the progressive elaboration of problematisations and conceptualisations that are able to dialogue with other studies, all the while emphasising the singularity of the situations behind this generalisation, far removed from the search for an impossible general theory.16 It also explains why Fariba does not study discourses as such, but rather practices and the discourses associated with them. She describes her heritage as being through the African studies specialists she knew at the EHESS (Georges Balandier, Maurice Godelier and Claude Meillassoux), and her teacher Gérard Althabe who trained her in anthropology for fieldwork and through fieldwork. During the first two years of her doctoral study and along with a group made up essentially of women, she conducted fieldwork on subjects as varied as the world of business, fruit and vegetable markets, poodle markets or flea markets before beginning her own fieldwork on the Islamic women in revolutionary Iran.17

One of Gérard Althabe’s lessons, which Fariba never forgot and constantly reiterated, is that anthropology is only a science if it accepts to study in a similar way things that happen here and elsewhere.18 Gérard Althabe was a precursor to anthropology close to home, and a critique of Levi-Strauss and his exotic and distant conception of the profession and the field. As early as the 1970s, he considered that the anthropologist is part of their fieldwork from the moment they approach it and becomes an element in their own study. Without adopting a post-modern position, Fariba has always followed this approach. As an anthropologist of the everyday, she is neither an alien nor a tourist, she does not have an exotic or nostalgic perspective on her field site, but examines it in all its banality and includes herself in it. This is where we find the intimacy mentioned above.

This approach, and the understanding of fieldwork as the expression of intimacy also explain why Fariba always undertakes it with such empathy. The guiding idea of her research, if one was to be found, might be the study of “change where it is not expected”, which is why all her studies are so nuanced in their reflection of the complexity of social facts and how they change. Her research also reflects her particular attention to the arguments, rationalities, and irrationalities of the people she studies. They demonstrate her deep respect for difference, which is the underlying principle in all her research and the belief that we can find ourselves through understanding others.

This can be seen even in her very early work, with her doctoral thesis on Islamic women who supported the Iranian revolution in the name of religious values, even as Fariba herself was moving away from religion, seeing it as belonging to the world of tradition and family confinement, when she left Iran (but did not abandon it) to pursue her dream of emancipation and study in France. Far from stigmatisation, in this work Fariba was looking to recognise the differences of these women, even as they were both the “same and different” to her. Like her, they acted in society, both free and restrained; they might like reading, travelling, shopping, might be concerned for their family, even though they did not have the same attitude to religion and politics as she did. The understanding of what has made these women “Islamic women” was the defence of difference before being the defence of freedom, because recognition of difference supposes the other has a freedom of action and choice.

This principle can also be seen in her work on the “thick necks”, or smugglers, who are by definition “other”; they are in fact absolute otherness in relation to Fariba the anthropologist.19 Of course, this position cannot be explained by a desire to be “just” or moralistic. It is indeed her anthropological perspective that leads her to study these actors’ relationship with the world, with goods, with money, with God, and with family. In other words, by not restricting them to their professional sphere, she shows them in all their ambivalence, and in so doing reveals their humanity, their simplicity, and their normality. Like anyone else, and like Fariba herself, they go and buy bread, they go shopping for their children, they express naive and touching discourses about their families. What she suggests, is that difference is above all produced by situation, and that anyone, however much they may seem “other”, is banal, even close, because their particular label (“thick necks” or smugglers) in fact conceals a reality of different levels or social worlds that overlap in each individual. In these conditions, if it is associated with the ambivalence and plurality of the sites and aspects in which the other is observed, alterity also enables a process of identification. This is why Fariba can talk with empathy and tenderness about these people.

Fariba Adelkhah. Copyright: Sciences Po, Paris.

However, fieldwork is also the site for subversion, critique, and discomfort. And what is the most efficient form of subversion if it is not irony and joy? Fariba’s writing are peppered with moments where she teases, tells stories that are mercilessly funny, and that reveal people’s humanity, the complexity of situations that are always full of paradoxes, contradictions, irrationalities, and that de-dramatize conditions that are often difficult or even painful. She is indeed herself the target of this irony, because although she takes her vocation as a researcher seriously (so seriously!), seriousness itself is foreign to her. Like the chillies she left alongside the collages she made in prison,20 she emphasises the limits of perspective, presenting her analysis as a gaze, a spotlight, one window among others. Her writings are often joyful even when their object is sad or serious. For example, it was through a description of an innocent scene of tobogganing that she discussed the question of the emancipation of women under the mullahs, and that contrary to the catastrophist discourses on Daesh or the hold of political Islam, that she takes a perverse pleasure in laughing at this Islam that in the Islamic Republic of Iran allows sexual liberation by simply resorting to a verse of the Koran,21 or the development of the stock exchange by a reversal of the taboo on money.22 To use the expression of my friend and writing partner, Mohamed Tozy, in Fariba’s writing “even the chador is colourful.”

This anthropology of the everyday, combined with an attention to difference as an expression of freedom has not always been well understood, in spite of Fariba’s ironic and joyful position – or perhaps because of it! The Iranian authorities have long eyed her work with suspicion, as can be seen in their previous long-term intimidation practices and now, dramatically, in her arrest. As for opponents to the Islamic Republic whether in Iran or overseas, they do not understand her perspective, and interpret it as a defence of the regime, or at the very least as a guilty indulgence to preserve her own peace or to guarantee herself access to fieldwork central to her research. This is a major error. Fariba has never shied away from commitment to causes she considered ethically necessary, for example (already) defending the specificity of research and its principles of freedom,23 or condemning political repression against demonstrators.24  Moreover she considers research to be a form of commitment, a life of commitment even, but a scientific commitment and not a political one. She is not an activist; she has never been political. She has always sought to render the complexity of society and focus her research on the facts of power rather than on a regime or political class. Her vocation (Beruf) is thus decisively research, and fieldwork as an expression of that. She has never confused “these two provinces of the mind”25 that are science and politics, and that is the reason that her support committee has always insisted she is a scientist, an “academic prisoner”.26

Her research has always taken place against the background of authoritarianism, but this situation was ultimately an opportunity for her because she saw in it a source of inventiveness, in terms of both the subjects and methods used. This is another illustration of the principle of fieldwork as indissociable from the empirical, from problematisation and from methodological reflection.

To move beyond these constraints, Fariba chose to operate at the “micro” level. This decision was undoubtedly driven by the limits on movement imposed by the Iranian regime, but also on more distant contacts, and generalisations based on increasing the number of observation sites. In these conditions, family necessarily becomes the legitimate and protected sphere, including in the face of politics, in which research can be conducted in relative “security” and which because it is not an external entity, allows for the exploration of social relations. Once again, this is one of the leitmotivs of the modalities of her research, familiarity and intimacy. The feasibility of fieldwork in contexts like those of Iran or Afghanistan is conditional on this proximity.

What interests Fariba above all is society. It was indeed for this that she was attacked by the regime authorities and their opponents. Neither one makes a distinction between state and society and in so doing, they reveal their contempt for the latter.

Béatrice Hibou is a CNRS research director (CERI, SciencesPo/CNRS). She works on the transformations of the state and forms of government from a Weberian perspective, as well as on scientific freedom. Among her recent publications are: The Political Anatomy of Domination, Palgrave McMillan, 2017; The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era, Palgrave McMillan, 2015.; and, with Mohamed Tozy,Tisser le temps politique au Maroc. Imaginaire de l’État à l’âge néolibéral (Paris, Karthala, 2020). beatrice.hibou@sciencespo.fr

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• Fariba Adelkhah's Bibliography (scroll down)
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• 1. Her close family in Iran, as well as Roland Marchal, Jean-François Bayart and myself, her three friends whose names were listed on her telephone card during her period in Evin
• 2. On the conditions of Fariba Adelkhah’s arrest and the evolution of her situation over time, see the website organised by her support committee, along with the book published from the conference held in January 2020, Pour Fariba Adelkhah et Roland Marchal. Chercheurs en périls, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2020 and the CERI website.
• 3. Echoing her call from her cell in January 2020, when she was on a hunger strike with her fellow detainee Kylie Moore-Gilbert: “Save research, save researchers, to save history.” This was clearly a reference to the work of Prasenjit Duara on rescuing history from the nation. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation. Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1995.
• 4. Irene Bono, Béatrice Hibou, “Peut-on rester libre à l’heure du risque? La liberté scientifique sur les terrains dits difficiles”, Sociétés politiques comparées, 52, 2020
• 5. On her career after her PhD and up until her arrest, see Jean-François Bayart, Fariba Adelkhah, anthropologue et prisonnière scientifique (Fariba Adelkhah, anthropologist and academic prisoner)
• 6. La Révolution sous le voile. Femmes islamiques d’Iran, Paris, Karthala, 1991; Thermidor en Iran, Bruxelles, Complexe, 1993 (with Jean-François Bayart and Olivier Roy); Être moderne en Iran, Paris, Karthala, 1998 (Being Modern in Iran, London, Hurst and Co, 1999); Les mille et une frontières de l’Iran. Quand les voyages forment la nation, Paris, Karthala, 2012 (The Thousand and One Borders of Iran: Travel and Identity, Milton Park, Routledge, 2019).
• 7. In addition to the two articles published in this issue see, under her supervision, “Guerre et terre en Afghanistan”, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 133, 2013, p. 15-240, as well as “Guerre, reconstruction de l’État et invention de la tradition en Afghanistan”, Les Études du CERI, 221, 2016
• 8. Among many others, and in addition to her current work on the regional aspect of clerics and religious education (“Les connexions chiites à l’échelle de l’Asie antérieure et du Moyen-Orient: les parcours de circulation de l’ayatollah Mohammad Hashem Salehi”, research project, Scientific Advisory Board, Department of the Vice President for Research, Sciences Po), see “Partir sans quitter, quitter sans partir”, Critique internationale, 19, 2003, p. 141-157; Bons baisers de Damas. Des femmes en pèlerinage, Paris, CERI/Sciences Po, film, 55 minutes, 2004; “Expatriation et notabilité: l’évergétisme dans la diaspora iranienne”, Politix, 65, 2004, p. 73-93; “Économie morale du pèlerinage et société civile en Iran: les voyages religieux, commerciaux et touristiques à Damas”, Politix, 77, 2007, p. 39-54; Voyages du développement: émigration, commerce, exil, Paris, Karthala, 2007 (directed and supervised by Fariba Adelkhah and Jean-François Bayart); “Moral Economics of Pilgrimage and Civil Society in Iran: Religious, Commercial and Tourist Trips to Damascus”, South African Historical Journal, 61(1), 2009, p. 38-54 ; “Les madrasas chiites afghanes à l’aune iranienne: anthropologie d’une dépendance religieuse” (in collaboration with Keiko Sakurai), Les Études du CERI, 173, 2011; The Thousand and One Borders of Iran: Travel and Identity, Milton Park, Routledge, 2019; “Deuil et gloire de l’imam Hossein. Le pèlerinage sur les lieux saints de l’Irak en images” (with Shahideh Noorolahian Mohajer), Sociétés politiques comparées, 42, 2017
• 9. Fariba spent most of her research time in the field, and despite difficult conditions such as the Iran-Iraq war during her thesis, the years of repression in Iran, or the continuous war in Afghanistan, she never abandoned what was central to her research. When she was arrested, she was on a two-year fieldwork project as part of her research on the trajectories of Afghan clerics in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan
• 10. See in particular the two articles published in this issue: “Guerre et (re)construction de l’État en Afghanistan: conflits de tradition ou conflits de développement?”, Revue internationale de politique de développement, 8, 2017, and “Guerre et terre en Afghanistan”, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 133, 2013, p. 19-41.
• 11. This is the fieldwork she was conducting when she was arrested on June 5, 2019. She was attending classes given by Ayatollah Soroush Mahallati, with a view to understanding the changes in the religious field “from the inside”. Mahallati is an Ayatollah who is high-ranking in the religious hierarchy and well known for his knowledge but also for his openness. Jean-François Bayart and I were able to observe this directly when we visited Fariba at Qom, a month before her arrest. Far from stigmatising the social sciences, he used them in his arguments and the fact that he accepted an anthropologist into his classes demonstrates a curiosity for this sphere that sets him apart from most religious figures. Moreover, he is known for taking a stance against the political authorities (in Morocco he would be described as following the tradition of the “breakaway Ulemas”. This courage is extraordinary because it is not widely shared among Iranian clerics, and he demonstrated it again recently by accepting to sign the letter asking Fariba to cease her hunger strike.
• 12. See the chapter re-published in this issue “L’imaginaire économique en République islamique d’Iran” (in Jean-François Bayart (ed.), La réinvention du capitalisme, Paris, Karthala, 1994, p. 117-144) or certain chapters of Being Modern in Iran, op. cit.
• 13. “The Iranian Afghans” (with Zuzanna Olszweska), Iranian Studies, 40 (2), 2007, p. 137-165; “Les Afghans iraniens” (with Zuzanna Olszweska), Les Études du CERI, 125, 2006.
• 14. Roland Marchal was released on March 20, 2020. The seminar sessions are available on the CERI website and on that of FASOPO.
• 15. Fariba did not attend the seminar “Groupe d’analyse des modes populaires d’action politique” set up at CERI in the 1980s, but participated later when it became the “Trajepo” (Political Trajectories) seminar in the 1990s. However, for her thesis she read the documents that came out of this earlier seminar
• 16. In this respect, Fariba’s approach is similar to my own, although I do not describe myself as an anthropologist but rather as a specialist of political economy and comparative and historical sociology of politics. Béatrice Hibou, “Le terrain comme site cognitif. Une perspective wébérienne de l’articulation empirie/théorie”, Sociologie, forthcoming, December 2021.
• 17. Fariba Adelkhah, “La logique sociale des pratiques quotidiennes des femmes islamiques dans l’Iran post révolutionnaire”, PhD thesis in anthropology, Paris, EHESS, 1989.
• 18. See the interview with her friend Rémy Hess, in Rémy Hess, Gérard Althabe. Une biographie entre ailleurs et ici, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005.
• 19. See “L’imaginaire économique en République islamique d’Iran”, Être moderne en Iran, op. cit., and The Thousand and One Borders of Iran: Travel and Identity, Milton Park, Routledge, 2019
• 20. Her collages are posted on the website of the support committee, as are her sometimes ironic comments, on herself as a misunderstood and makeshift artist. (https://faribaroland.hypotheses.org/9559)
• 21. Strictly speaking there are not verses that mention temporary marriage, but Shiites believe that verse 24 of the surah An-Nisa (women) confirms the possibility of contracting one. In this case, a normal marriage contract is read (firstly with the request of the woman, then of the man). If the temporary partners decide to record the act, the dowry must be paid on the spot by the man, and the duration of the marriage indicated. This record is not compulsory however, verbal consent of both parties who have faith in the said verse suffices. This practice, known as a “white marriage”, is very widespread at the moment, much to the displeasure of religious figures.
• 22. In recent years, the stock exchange has taken off following societal changes that mean even people with established religious beliefs have no qualms about making a profit from their money.
• 23. In 2007, Fariba had already defended her colleague Kian Tadjbakhsh, who was arrested in the street (and then again during the post-election crisis of 2009) and convicted as a spy and a threat to national security, in an article she published defending the freedom of research and exploring the distinction between “service” and “betrayal” (see, https://tinyurl.com/y3bsblm4). During the trial of Clotilde Reiss, a French PhD student arrested in Iran in 2009, she also wrote an open letter to President Ahmadinejad condemning the assimilation of research to spying (“Contre le régime de la peur. Lettre ouverte au président Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”, translated and published in Courrier international, 9 September, 2009).
• 24. See for example, the articles she dedicated to the Green movement and particularly to Neda, the young Tehrani student killed by law enforcement during protests against the official results of the 2009 presidential election: “Neda, ou l’annonce faite à la République d’Iran”, Esprit, August-September 2009, p. 236-241; “Le mouvement vert en République islamique d’Iran”, Savoir/Agir, 12 (2), 2010, p. 117-123; “Iran: entre République islamique et Mouvement vert, y a-t-il une société civile?”, in Anna Bozzo, Pierre-Jean Luizard (eds.), Les sociétés civiles dans le monde musulman, Paris, La Découverte, 2011, p. 163-185; “The Political Economy of the Green Movement: Contestation and Political Mobilization in Iran”, in Negin Nabavi (ed.), Iran: From Theocracy to the Green Movement, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 17-38.
• 25. Expression used by Max Weber in 1910, quoted by Jean-Pierre Grossein in Max Weber et l’intelligence du social, Paris, Gallimard, forthcoming.
• 26. See the various statements made by the support committee (particularly that of July 29 2019, as well as Jean-François Bayart, “Fariba Adelkhah, anthropologue et prisonnière scientifique”, Médiapart, 6 August 2019.