A Study of Cultural Resistance Strategies of Subordinate Social Groups Against Pahlavi Government's Authoritarian Cultural Policies: With Emphasis To The Concept Of Moral Panic

The Pahlavi government as the first modern state of Iran, used cultural policies to meddle in the culture life. Using a set of ideologies to form a new notion of Iranian nation, these policies disordered the historical cultural balance in Iran. The main issue of this paper is to explain the failure of Pahlavi government's cultural policies which gave rise to a new revolutionary cultural discourse by the non-dominant social groups and finally led to the 1979 revolution.
The conceptual framework designed to evaluate these policies consists of John Berry's 'multi-cultural societie's theory and the idea of 'moral panic' in Ben-Yehuda and good's work. The qualitative content analysis and historical research showed that the dominant group tried to merge all cultural diversities into one cultural ideology. Although non-dominant groups have accepted this unification from time to time, they mostly rejected it by using the strategy of making moral panic, artistic and speculative resistance or by choosing the marginalization and isolation. In the end some of the non-dominant groups gathered to marginalize the dominant culture and take its place by creating ‘west panic’ and ‘government panic’ and the revival of native culture.