210 Between Private and Public
personal differentiation permit and require secrecy in a high degree; and,
conversely the secret embodies and intensifies such differentiation. In a
small and narrow circle, the formation and preservation of secrets is made
difficult on technical grounds: everybody is too close to everybody else
and his circumstances, and frequency and intimacy of contact involve too
much temptation of revelation.”^18 Simmel goes on to argue that as groups
become larger and when the money economy dominates, individuals
withdraw from social circles resulting in secrecy and individualization.
Manoukian, Ayubi, and Simmel’s insights are helpful in that, first, they
relate publicness to openness and reveal the nature of relations and inter-
actions between individuals; and second, they contemplate how such
interpersonal relations can take on the more closed, opaque, or hidden
qualities associated with secrecy.
e purpose of this chapter, therefore, is not to ask if the bazaar Th
is or is not a public sphere, but rather to gauge the various vectors that
constitute and engender degrees of publicness or secrecy. Publicness is
contingent upon historically specific political and spatial conditions that I
decompose in terms of place and networks. I now turn to a discussion of
the Tehran bazaar to illustrate how and why publicness must be spatial-
ized and temporalized.
Publicness in the shadow of the Pahlavi state
As one of Tehran’s five quarters in the nineteenth century, the bazaar
enjoys a historic position in its urban makeup. Differentiated from three
ostensibly residential quarters and situated next to the governmen-
tal quarter of the Arg [citadel], in the early twentieth century the partly
covered commercial “pulse of the city” expanded in importance as the
capital outpaced historically larger and politically and economically more
central cities such as Tabriz, Isfahan, or Shiraz. With the Constitutional
Revolution and Reza Shah’s centralization and state-building initiatives,
the Tehran bazaar quickly became the locale of national trade and increas-
ingly the primary conduit for international trade. At around the same
time, the modernist Pahlavi monarchy in the 1930s reshaped Tehran’s
morphology by expanding the city borders and introducing a grid system