216 Between Private and Public
of wage labor; trade policies that encouraged consumption and imports;
and the bazaar’s ability to continue to dominate wholesaling and private
credit markets, the Tehran bazaar translated its historical location in the
economy to become the commercial fulcrum of an unevenly growing oil
economy.^34 In the 1960s and 1970s, thus, bazaaris continued to be shaped
as private citizens through their self-governing system of networks.
ontrary to the assumption of democratic theory, a public may C
emerge in isolation of and even in contradistinction to the public author-
ity, or state. While in liberal democracies it has been assumed that the
public sphere is protected, structured, and nurtured by legal protections,
this finding resonates with more recent critiques of this liberal histori-
cal narrative of Europe that suggest that the emergence of public spheres
is full of exclusions based on gender, class, and race.^35 In this case, the
bazaar experience of exclusion was based on modernist principles that
defined it as traditional, to be left behind in the dustbin of history.
Mobilization of bazaaris
As Fraser points out, there are “a variety of ways of accessing public life
and a multiplicity of public arenas.”^36 Under authoritarian systems, which
place restrictions on expressions of political disagreement and aspira-
tion, contentious politics are an important path for entering public life.
Given these parameters, how should we think about the bazaar’s political
power and ability to shape public opinion? I have argued elsewhere that
the capacity of bazaaris to mobilize against the state has declined in recent
decades as a consequence of the restructuring of the bazaar’s networks.^37
Here I want to discuss how various aspects of space, networks, and pub-
licness intersected and enabled collective action during the Pahlavi era
by providing a site for repertoires of social mobilization, and by facilitat-
ing engagement with other publics through various means of copresence
(the ability of people to interact through shared space), trust building, and
sanctioning.^38
s a centrally located public space, the Tehran bazaar has been an A
important site from which to publicize dissent and challenge the state
during much of the twentieth century. During the tobacco movement,