La estructura COMMPROP

The sun hasn’t yet risen above the mountains and, although the day will be hot, at this early hour there is a chill in the air. The Afghan men, milling by the road, shuffle in an effort to keep warm. A few smoke, puffing on a popular brand of Iranian cigarettes and one man pours glasses of strong, black tea from a flask and passes them around. Amongst the group there is a quiet hum of conversation. Here, the distinct tempo and meter of Dari—often modified by Afghans living in Iran in order to more closely resemble standard Iranian Persian—can be heard. Adham disparagingly describes the Afghan variant of Persian as ‘clumsy’ and ‘unsophisticated.’ One Iranian-born Afghan student describes to me an almost instinctive ability to switch dialects between the Dari of home and the Farsi that is required of her in order to partially disguise her Afghan Otherness when interacting with Iranians.

A blue utility truck pulls over, raising a choking dust and the men are suddenly alert, an edge of competitiveness entering the formerly companionable crowd. The driver leans out of his window and speaks briefly to the man with the tea flask. Moments later half a dozen Afghan men pile into the tray of the truck and it roars off. Over the course of the next hour or two almost all the men waiting here will find work—some heading back into Shiraz to bulk up construction crews with cheap labour, generally performing the heaviest and most dangerous work, others being driven out to the rich farmland on the fertile plains to the north of the city, where they will wrap damp cloths around their faces and spend the day walking between rows of crops, spraying a fine mist of pesticide from canisters strapped to their backs.

I am heading forty kilometres north of Shiraz to the city of Marvdasht to visit an NGO that runs classes—amongst other activities—for Afghan residents of the city. Many of

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the young Iranian men and women who work at the NGO travel daily from Shiraz. On this occasion, I have arranged a lift with two of the volunteers and caught a taxi out to the start of the highway in order to save them a trip across town in heavy morning traffic.

The early morning light casts a soft, forgiving glow as we drive through the outer suburbs of Shiraz. Once comprised of villages, this area has in recent decades been incorporated into the expanding city. Even the medium-scale industrial sites that cling to the very edge of Shiraz are rendered almost picturesque and soon enough give way to more conventionally pleasing landscapes—first vineyards rising on steep slopes and then vast fields of crops, in green and gold, unfurling towards distant mountains.

Marvdasht is a city of approximately 140 000 that lies in the shadow of Persepolis (Parseh or Takht-e Jamshid). Indeed, it could be said that the city is, metaphorically speaking, overshadowed by the Achaemenid ruins. In guidebooks and travelogues Shiraz is linked to Persepolis, and tour guides routinely group the two together, such that a tour package would generally include a whirlwind visit to the most significant sites in Shiraz followed by a day (or half a day) at Persepolis. Marvdasht, an industrial town and the centre of a thriving agricultural region, is as indistinct as any other large town in the Fars province. By way of contrast, the city of Shiraz lays particular claim to Iran’s Achaemenid history. Indeed, the city’s proximity to the Achaemenid ruins has lent weight to the claim that Shiraz is the quintessentially Persian city and, moreover, a centre of Persian culture.

In this chapter I explore how Iranians and Afghans in Shiraz and in Marvdasht interact with the Achaemenid ruins of Persepolis, how the site is experienced and how it comes to be incorporated into ideas about Iranian identity that are variously shaped as inclusive

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or exclusive. I ask how hospitality is foregrounded in popular constructions of Iran’s pre- Islamic history and consider what this means in terms of Persepolis being configured (or reconfigured) as a space of hospitality. I look to how the sofreh functions as a metaphor for Iranian hospitality and ask how this might extend our understanding of hospitality more broadly. Finally, drawing on conversations and interviews with Afghan refugees and Iranian citizens living in Marvdasht and Shiraz, I map the reach of hospitality in everyday life.

I began research in Marvdasht in April 2014 and continued until October 2014, making (at a minimum) weekly trips from Shiraz throughout that period. Two Afghan families contributed substantially to this chapter: the Hashemzadeh family and the Sharifi family. Their life stories and perspectives on hospitality point to the diversity of Afghan experience in Iran.

The hospitality of Bahram, an Iranian man living and working in Marvdasht opened doors to allow me to access ethnographic data that would otherwise have been unavailable. Bahram was born in Marvdasht in 1974 and has grown up with a constant awareness of Iran’s pre-Islamic history, as it is mediated through the government-managed site of Persepolis. He is acutely aware of the way in which such historical artefacts are drawn into and act to uphold particular narratives of national selfhood. Bahram made explicit the link between Iranian hospitality and the Achaemenid past, identifying hospitality as a characteristic of Iranian identity that could be traced back through millennia.

Bahram introduced me to the Afghan tenants working on his family’s property just outside Marvdasht. For many Iranians and Afghans, it is the landlord–tenant or employer–employee dynamic that structures the relationship between them.

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Furthermore, it is a relationship in which Afghans often find themselves exploited: having to accept sub-standard accommodation at a rent that my Iranian informant, Dordaneh, described in terms of an ‘Afghan tax’, essentially a unashamed price hike to offset the perceived disadvantages of renting to Afghans; or forced into unsafe work conditions, usually at a pay rate far lower than Iranian workers in similar roles, and without the protections of a contract, insurance or any official oversight of the workplace [citation].

Over the course of a single afternoon in August 2014 I sat on the carpeted floor of the Hashemzadeh home, consuming multiple cups of delicately brewed green tea and plates of fruit and biscuits, as they shared the story of their flight from Afghanistan more than three decades earlier and their experiences of history and hospitality in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Throughout this particular interview I was conscious of Bahram’s presence and the particular power dynamics within the room. I knew that the circumstances of the interview both inhibited the flow of information and placed subtle pressures on Agha- ye Hashemzadeh and his family to host me as guest and researcher. My initial feeling was that the data arising out of this encounter would have to be discarded. It was only after making contact with Ali Hashemzadeh on my return to Australia and entering into an ongoing conversation with him, that I felt sufficiently comfortable of retaining the account of our meeting. This remains an enlightening snippet of the field, precisely because of the interaction that occurs between the Hashemzadeh family and their Iranian landlord and employer.

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While interviews with the Hashemzadeh family were conducted with remarkable efficiency over just four or five hours (supplemented by later, long-distance conversations with the youngest son of the family), discussions with Shakufeh Sharifi, along with her siblings and parents, extended over six months from May to October 2014. All of the conversations occurred at the Sharifi residence on the outskirts of Shiraz and were transcribed into notebooks either at the time or immediately after. Recent traumatic events predisposed the family to reticence and the information that I gleaned about their lives was obtained over multiple visits and often by happenstance.

Finally, my sense of what constituted a historically oriented hospitality was scrutinised in discussion with Adham and Marjan. Over a period of months, we discussed the varied ways in which the past is made present in nationalist discourses of Iranian identity. In particular, we talked through the place of Persepolis as a site of national imaginary. Persepolis looms large in contemporary Iranian society, what I sought to understand was the degree to which a historical nationalism intersects with notions of Iranian hospitality and how that is experienced by Iranian citizens and Afghan refugees living in and around Shiraz.