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Culture and Cultural Politics under Reza Shah: The Pahlavi State, New Bourgeoisie and the Creation of a Modern Society in Iran, edited by Bianca Devos and Christoph Werner. London: Routledge, 2014. 338 pages. $145.
Reviewed by Rudi Matthee
Culture and Cultural Politics under Reza Shah is a most welcome addition to the slowly growing English-language scholarship on the Reza Shah period, the time when Iran took an irreversible turn toward the creation of a modern nation-cum-society. Conscious of the customary one-dimensional portrayal of the many changes that took place between 1921 and 1941 as the outcome of a one-man show, the editors are at pains to chart a new course - one that avoids an exclusively state-centered, top-down approach. They ahn to infuse non-state agency into these two decades, focusing on "private" initiative, on "reform-minded individuals as masterminds of modernization," and on the "symbiosis between the state and individual reformers and the coimnon people's contribution to appropriating modern culture." They also propose to look at the middle class as a crucial agent in the reform process (p. 2). Most fundamentally, they pose the question whether and to what extent the Pahlavi state of the 1920s and 1930s, led by a semiliterate ruler, evinced a distinct and deliberate cultural policy - beyond the desire to instruct its people in the virtues of royalism and nationalism. With that, they acknowledge the nearly impossible task one faced in trying to circumvent the shah as the single engine behind the period's comprehensive reform program.
The contributions that follow largely meet the...