Research Follow Ali Mozaffari.
Dr. Ali Mozaffari.

Educated in Iran and Australia, he is interested in understanding the politics of heritage in contemporary Iran, exploring themes that include heritage movements and heritage and liminality. He is the founding co-editor of Berghahn’s series “Explorations in Heritage Studies”. His publications include Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place (IB Tauris 2014) and World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae (edited, Routledge 2016).

Abstract

“Bound by Heritage? Re-Imagining the Domain of Iranian Culture Since the 1990s”

The growing body of scholarship in critical heritage – that has been concerned with heritage constructions and contestations in relation to identity, domination and power as well as its making through both human and non-human factors – suggests a relationship between heritage and boundary setting while heritage itself remains malleable and ambiguous. I suggest that heritage is determined through the boundaries of a three-way relationship between time, place, and culture. in a given social setting, this three-way relationship (thus heritage) is constantly changing because of forces from both inside and outside. I illustrate this by discussing transformations in scope and meaning of heritage especially in the past two decades in Iran. These transformations, which are partly the result of heritage movements inside Iran, suggest a potential within heritage to counter aggressive or exclusionary ideologies, and to envision a larger cultural sphere across the geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state.