224 Between Private and Public
heads of ministries, and merchants in Dubai are often secretive, taking
place in private spaces rather than in public. In the process commercial
exchanges have become both less face-to-face and less embedded in the
diverse social and spatial registers of the Tehran bazaar. Bazaaris who
used to nourish strong and weak ties, ensuring identification of trust-
worthy traders and social deviants,^58 now find it difficult to distinguish
between the trustworthy and the dishonest. Currently bazaaris fear that
the trustworthy remain private knowledge and the dishonest are hidden
by secrecy.
oreover, many of the social spaces that brought M bazaaris together
to exchange information and opinions have been abandoned. The num-
ber of coffeehouses and restaurants in and around the bazaar, institutions
known as areas of discussion, gossip, and evaluation of rumor, has plum-
meted: while in early 1979 there were 3500 coffee houses in Tehran, by
1990 there were as few as 900.^59 Another social shift is in the area of reli-
gion. It is difficult to assess if Iranians are less religious than thirty years
ago, but evidence suggests that prayer in mosques and participation in
public religious gatherings has declined.^60 This dynamic seems to be in
effect even for bazaaris, who typically are assumed to be more observant
than other Iranians. Some merchants and their families explained to me
that they now tend to participate in neighborhood, rather than bazaar and
guild-based, religious events and organizations. Others, sensitive to the
political manipulation of the pulpit, choose to pray in the privacy of their
shops and homes and avoid participation in events organized by Islamic
associations in the bazaar. Consequently, one more public space for social
interaction and developing and maintaining relations has become obso-
lete in the Islamic Republic. The trend away from openness and availabil-
ity to spatial closeness and unavailability is reflected in the greater use of
doors and display cases in stores and offices. When I began my research
on the bazaar in 1999, I noticed that many areas of the bazaar tended
to have open and inviting storefronts, but in recent years an increasing
number of stores have installed doors, glass cases and other barriers that
impede passersby from talking to shopkeepers and looking into stores. By
adopting this practice, bazaaris have closed off their shop spaces from the
more public passageways and broken up the bazaar’s open plan. The result
of this decline in social and casual intermixing has been that bazaaris’