Who is knowledgeable is strong : science, class, and the formation of modern Iranian society, 1900-1950 / / Cyrus Schayegh

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910808139603321
• Autore: Schayegh Cyrus
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berkeley, : Univerity of California Press, c2009
• ISBN: 0-520-94354-6
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (353 p.)
• Disciplina: 955.05
• Soggetti: Science and civilization; Iran Intellectual life 20th century; Iran Social conditions 20th century
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: "The Fletcher Jones Foundation humanities imprint"--Prelim. p.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 295-319) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1. Science and the Formation of the Iranian Modern Middle Class, 1900-1950 -- Part 2. Medicalizing Modernity Interactions between the Biomedical Sciences and Modernity in Iran, 1900-1950 -- Conclusion -- Appendix First-Time Advertisements by Physicians in the Tehran Daily Ettelā'āt, 1927-1939 -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: In Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong, Cyrus Schayegh tells two intertwined stories: how, in early twentieth-century Iran, an emerging middle class used modern scientific knowledge as its cultural and economic capital, and how, along with the state, it employed biomedical sciences to tackle presumably modern problems like the increasing stress of everyday life, people's defective willpower, and demographic stagnation. The book examines the ways by which scientific knowledge allowed the Iranian modernists to socially differentiate themselves from society at large and, at the very same time, to intervene in it. In so doing, it argues that both class formation and social reform emerged at the interstices of local Iranian and Western-dominated global contexts and concerns.