Political Existence of Things in the Iran during the 1980s

With the occurrence of the Islamic Revolution and then its consolidation and uniformity, new cultural policies were implemented that directly targeted everyday life. To do this, power relations had to change rapidly, and all social beings, whether human or artifacts and objects, had to be redefined ontologically. Thus, the first obvious manifestation of this change was in everyday social beings, especially objects. Accordingly, the present study focuses on discovering the relationship between power relations and the political life of objects that is one of the most important elements of daily life, which has not been the focus of political, social and cultural studies in Iran. To examine this issue, the main question is as follow: what effect did the change in power relations after the victory of the Islamic Revolution have on the material culture of society and the life of objects in the 1980s? To examine this question, which did not require a hypothesis due to its exploratory nature, we have used the method of historiography from bottom, or the historiography of everyday life, and a conceptual discussion of power relations and material culture that also covers overlooked aspects of contemporary Iranian political history. The most important findings of the study are related to the changes that showed the expansion of the modern way of life through goods, under anti-modernism government, along with the expansion of government influence in the lives of the people, compared to the pre-revolutionary regime.