Sociology
Siavash Gholipour
Abstract
The book Ethnicity and Ethnocentrism: Myth and Reality is a narrative about the conflicts of ethnic groups in Iran after the First World War until the last decades of the 14th century. According to the author, ethnicity and ethnic groups are modern categories and have no history in Iran. The three factors ...
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The book Ethnicity and Ethnocentrism: Myth and Reality is a narrative about the conflicts of ethnic groups in Iran after the First World War until the last decades of the 14th century. According to the author, ethnicity and ethnic groups are modern categories and have no history in Iran. The three factors of the centralist and authoritarian state, the utilitarianism of the elites and the international forces played a role in the emergence of these conflicts and the formation of ethnicity. The book examines ethnicity and ethnocentrism in the context of internal and external political and social relations; It also shows the constructiveness of ethnic nationalism based on abundant historical data. In line with the book's themes, the author introduces inclusive government, highlighting cultural commonalities, and de-escalation policies as appropriate strategies for dealing with Iran's multicultural situation. There are criticisms of this work that can be mentioned as follows: the book has used different approaches without combining them and lacks paradigm coherence; Like positivists, it seeks a criterion for determining the boundaries of ethnicity, but there is no such criterion; All the arguments of the book in the direction of the construction of ethnicity are also applicable to national identity, but the author is silent about this and falls into a kind of national essentialism; It downplays the role of economic policies and development plans in ethnic conflicts; Finally, it neglects the impact of modern social change and the inevitable presence of the "other" in the formation of ethnicity.
Sociology
siavash gholipour; homayoun moradkhani
Abstract
The book “Consumer Society and the Postmodern City”, is the narrative of the formation of the consumer society and its contradictions, in the midst of recent developments. This work seeks through the viewpoint of philosophers such as Bowman and Baudrillard to show that the attempt of modernity ...
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The book “Consumer Society and the Postmodern City”, is the narrative of the formation of the consumer society and its contradictions, in the midst of recent developments. This work seeks through the viewpoint of philosophers such as Bowman and Baudrillard to show that the attempt of modernity has failed in the preservation of scarcity, certainty, and alien phobia. In the postmodernity, these cases in the form of costly, uncertainty, and roaming returned to the life cycle of the whole society as a consumer, a society whose obvious characteristic is seduction, and although people think that they have the power of choice and freedom, they pursue a self-directed physical exercise that aims to fit their body with the product promises. In parallel with the changes in the consumer society, in the global-localized world, replacement of the nation-state with the cities is observed as the main actors. In these cities, some people, groups, and organizations have a global initiative and they seized space, but others are subdued by places and endured in discarded spaces such as heterotopia. The postmodern city is still a differentiated city, in spite of its consumer spaces and the domination of the ethics of consumption. Excessive attention to the consumer society, the low weight of the post-modern city content and the lack of attention to urban morphing from the consumer society are among them.
