The Face Game: Moral Capital in Contemporary Iran

Studies of marginalized youth in Iran have focused almost exclusively on how structural constraints operate to thwart these young people’s transition to adulthood. They become stuck in what scholars have termed “waithood”, a period in time during which young people wait with uncertainty for productive employment, housing and marriage – socioeconomic benchmarks that have traditionally defined adult status in the Middle East. Nevertheless, there has been little work that has examined how these youth actually cope with such precarious structural conditions. Scholars who have analyzed the cultural practices of marginalized youth have focused their analysis on youth in the upper and upper-middle classes of Iranian society. The emphasis here has largely been on the various oppositional subcultures that have arisen among these youth that undergird their exclusion from formalized institutions of power. Given the attention that scholars have placed on understanding the factors that give rise to youth exclusion in Iran and the ways in which this exclusion is reaffirmed by the practices of privileged youth in the country, there are practically no qualitative studies that address the experiences of lower income youth groups in Iran. The pursuit of face by lower-class youth in Iran speaks to this gap in existing studies. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among low-income youth in Iran, this study finds that through their engagement in this face system, some young people in Iran create an alternative basis of social differentiation to improve their lives. By following four moral criteria governing face behavior– self-sufficiency, hard work, purity, and appearance – these youth are able to save face and to distinguish themselves from each other. Members of their communities subsequently provide those youth who abide by these criteria or “face rules” with certain social and economic opportunities that youth can use to incrementally improve their lot in life. Subjective measures of worth – as judged by these rules – thus enables young face-savers to acquire moral capital, which they can subsequently exchange for social and economic opportunities. Through their pursuit of socially acceptable moral standards, face-savers reveal how structural conditions of marginalization do not always result in passivity or resistance to dominant social norms, but to increased effort to embrace them, a finding that has important implications for research on youth mobility in Iran.