Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

22 Introduction


between private and public, or personal and political, would preclude a
full understanding of Iranian politics and of the bazaaris’ political power.”
uilding on the connections between public spheres and networks, B
Keshavarzian investigates the interpersonal relationships and generalized
trust that long helped make the bazaar a place of “openness” and public-
ness. His investigation of the relationship between place, networks and
power, and the changes wrought by state policies and globalization of the
economy, leads to the conclusion that in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the
bazaar is no longer a locus of publicness and political efficacy—a public
sphere, and indeed the public associated with it, is no more. This study
shows that, paradoxically, the very proximity of the market and the state
that was pointed to by earlier scholars as proof of the lack of publicness
and public mobilization in Muslim societies, in fact was an essential part
of enabling the constitution of a public and a public sphere in and around
the bazaar. Now that the relationship between the merchants and the state
is shrouded in secrecy, and commercial exchange takes place in transna-
tional spaces such as Dubai, this has diminished the place of the Tehran
bazaar and of bazaaris in democratizing the public sphere.
s mentioned above, the Middle East and North Africa region has A
long been seen as characterized by “private politics” rather than public
participation, as well as by a strict separation of the private domains of
family and neighborhood from public spaces and the state. These chap-
ters, focused on different places and different times, raise a series of ques-
tions concerning the ways in which connections between state and soci-
ety provide means of achieving collective identity, social mobilization and
public consensus. This leads to another set of questions around the rela-
tionships between public opinion, public debate and public action, which
are taken up in the third section of the volume, Mediated Publics.
ndoubtedly, the media plays an essential role in the constitution of U
modern public spheres. As Ku notes, the media “are situated at the inter-
face between publicity and secrecy, which thereby allows for struggles
over the boundary of state openness/secrecy in the public sphere.”^7 It is
important to question, however, whether (and if so, how) new informa-
tion technologies and forms of media are creating new arenas of discus-
sion that are empowering and in what ways they may be disempower-
ing or neutralizing public action and public debate. What kinds of media

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