Zuzanna Olszewska

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford

2016 Winner

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviews among Afghan-Iranian communities in Mashhad, The Pearl of Dari details how the tradition of Persian poetry provides a cultural space in which Afghans wrestled with tensions of communal distinction, individual self-expression, class divisions, cross-border migration, and social assimilation in Iran.  Olszewska’s monographbreaks major ground in multiple arenas of Iranian studies.  To name just a few; the book provides new insights into state-society relations before and after the 1979 Iranian revolution, the history of literary production, the lifeworlds of cultural institutions, the development of Iranian identities, changes in gender dynamics, the social trajectories of minority communities, and the shifting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the contemporary Islamic Republic.  Where previous ethnographies tended to focus narrowly on upper-middle classes in urban Iran with an unquestioning and universalizing lens, Olszewska looks to the margins and the periphery to better understand both the center and the whole of the country.  Infused with anthropological imagination, written in clear prose, and crackling with the poetic voices of her interlocutors, The Pearl of Dari will bring new readers into Iranian Studies while expanding the purview of the field itself.

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