206 Between Private and Public
shared (although not uniform) experiences in the bazaar’s retail stores,
commercial offices, passages, and caravansaries. Hence, a second aspect
of place is that it produces a “sense of place” or place-defined and acquired
identity.
ally, the notion of being in the “shadow of” another object Fin
reminds us that places are “located,” or situated in relation to other locales
and according to relationships with other hierarchies and processes, such
as the division of labor, global systems of production and distribution,
and capitalist competition.^5 In this case, since the Golestan Palace was
the historic seat of government, the quote is suggestive of the relation-
ship between the marketplace and the state. To the student of Iranian his-
tory specifically, it recalls the politics that emerged in the alleyways and
caravansaries of Iran’s bazaars and in the shadow of the public authority.
The Tehran bazaar was a site for political rumor and organization, dem-
onstrations and pamphleteering, and financing strikes and coordinating
dissent; and bazaaris (always in consort with other social groups, be they
clerics, students, or liberal nationalist elites) were famously and repeatedly
involved in the social movements that have punctuated modern Iranian
history—the movement opposing the tobacco concessions in 1890, sup-
port for the Constitutional Revolution in 1905–11, support and loyalty
to the Mosaddeq government in 1951–53, its contribution to the 1963
Khomeini-inspired protest against the Shah’s White Revolution, and the
active participation in the events of the Islamic Revolution in 1977–79.^6
The bazaar in Tehran and other cities became a venue to organize and
stage dissent—to make it public; I will return to this point shortly.
ow was it that a physical space primarily intended for private H
endeavors (i.e., exchange of goods and services between individuals)
and associated with instrumental logic (i.e., maximizing profit) was
simultaneously a place that allowed for communication among friends,
acquaintances, and strangers alike; access to public life; and participation
in politics? By presenting material from field research and reinterpreting
existing literature, this chapter argues that in order to understand how the
various dimensions of place are generated and transformed it is critical to
study the intersection of place and networks. To develop this argument
I conceptualize bazaars as bounded spaces containing a series of ongoing
and socially embedded networks that are the mechanism for the exchange