نشریه جامعه شناسی هنر و ادبیات
سال سیزدهم شماره 2 (پاییز و زمستان 1400)

Iranian hand-woven carpet as a domestic and national art and cultural text of society is facing many problems and challenges today. Explaining the reasons of these problems or some of them has been less studied from sociological point of view despite the presence of this cultural product in social life. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of action is one of the most important theories in the field of sociology of art, which has made it possible to analyze different areas of art. The analysis and attempt to formulate the field of carpets according to this theory is the subject of this research. Since hand-woven carpets encompass numerous fields, this study examines three market fields (large manufacturers and exporters), designers and weavers, which are closer than other fields within the framework of this theory and Bourdieu’s system. In this way, the art of carpet weaving and hand-woven carpets are studied and analyzed according to the principles of action theory. Some of the research findings are as follows: Among the carpet fields, the bazaar field has a wider scope and is closer to Bourdieu’s vision of the field and the actors and the pursuit of power and capital. The actors of this field belong to the wealthy class and have all kinds of capital, but they try and compete with each other and exercise symbolic power and violence to gain more capital and resources. Designers and weavers belong to the middle and lower classes and have no capital and other resources. In the field of designers and weavers, although the actors try to make profit, there is no competition and symbolic power. Hence, the type of class, the type of profession, and the position of these actors, and finally the amount of capital and income they earn, do not matter and do not correspond to the market class. Even if one recognizes the need to study the impact of other fields on carpets, it has been shown that the field of Iranian hand-woven carpets, depending on its size, is restless and opaque and does not have the necessary independence, the power to use force and conflict to distribute or balance the capital in all its own fields.

In the field of conservation (recognition, restoration, display, maintenance, preservation and bringing values), Canvas-Marouflaged Murals have not been given special attention and these artworks have not been studied separately as a historical artwork with unique characteristics, and the information about these works has been neglected. This negligence has led to wrong decisions and different approaches in the conservation of canvas-marouflaged wall paintings, which consequently resulted in the destruction of some latent values. Due to the existing problems in the conservation of canvas- marouflaged wall paintings, this paper deals with the replication of canvas- marouflaged wall paintings, the way of creation, identification and recognition of canvas- marouflaged wall paintings. This research is applied and in terms of method, it is qualitative. The data is collected through field and library studies and interview, which is used as a comparative-analytical method in the following. As a result of the studies, the criteria for identifying and recognizing the canvas-marouflage murals in terms of construction and method of implementation, the factors that promoted the use of this method in the past were presented. In order to complete the theoretical part of this research, the number of canvas marouflaged wall paintings created for the first time in Iran was identified and presented based on the the research results.

Every year, natural disasters affect the lives of millions of people around the world and cause significant damage. In many crises, the social dimensions of the disaster are far more tragic than the economic dimensions and can cause major problems for society for a long time. For this reason, one of the most important goals of crisis management is to rebuild the crisis-stricken areas not only physically, but also socially and culturally. Art is one of the most effective means to reduce the social damage to the victims and to rebuild the society.This descriptive-analytical study was conducted using library resources with the aim of investigating the critical function of art and the social responsibility of the artist in the face of natural crises, and answering the question of the role of art and artists in critiquing crisis management. As a case study, the artworks after Hurricane Katrina in the United States were analyzed.The results of this study indicate that social concepts such as sustainability, the spirit of collective reconstruction, hope for the future, etc., manifested in the deepening of the artworks, can restore the meaning and collective identity of society and lead to a new direction of social action. In addition, “artists” as a group of elites can use artistic media to critically question social issues such as social justice, class inequality, racial discrimination, etc., and raise knowledge and awareness in society.

Baluch (1972) is the story of a man from the countryside who takes revenge on two men from the city who smuggled antiques. The story is a description of the ups and downs that the Baluch go through in this way. Throughout the film, the character of Amir (one of the two smugglers) gains his power from the possibility of being invisible and seeing without being seen. Initially, he makes the Baluch, who is out for revenge, his visible subject and in this way brings him under his control. However, Amir’s surveilling gaze, as a disciplining power, has the ability to influence and can transform the Baluch into a docile and disciplined body by impressing his principles upon him. At the end of the film, however, there is a fundamental shift in the direction of the gaze. With the overthrow of the panopticon, Baluch also gains the power of the gaze and the safe and invisible position of Amir disappears. In the present study, conducted through the descriptive-analytical method and using library sources, drawing on Michel Foucault’s views on the regulatory mechanism of disciplinary power, an attempt is made to examine Amir’s surveillance gaze on the Baluch and the role of this gaze in transforming the Baluch into a compliant body. From this perspective, Amir’s “surveillance gaze” can be seen as an allegory for the surveillance gaze of the Pahlavi period government, and the Baluchi body can also be seen as an allegory for the social body of Iran during this period. This research argues that Amir’s efforts to subjugate and modernize the Baluch body can be examined in the context of the Pahlavi government’s disciplinary approach and its efforts to shape a cohesive social body. A homogenizing view that aims to shape a docile and homogeneous social body by denying and eliminating differences.

This paper explores the issue of semiotic analysis of music from the perspective of Roland Barthes. The semiotic analysis of music turns out to be difficult because music is not a symbolic system. Signification, which is the main subject of semiotics, is not present in music. Barthes’s semiotic study of music has important achievements for music and semiotics because, first, this approach leads to an innovative analysis of music, and second, it expands the possibilities of semiotics in the study of artistic productions. We have drawn on various branches of the humanities, such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences, to explore this topic. Moreover, this paper has been written using bibliographic sources with a descriptive-analytical approach. Roland Barthes focuses his musical analysis on the works of Schumann and Schubert. Barthes uses the two concepts of dilettantism and the untimely to examine the music described in this article. Through these studies, this study attempts to rethink the issue of the separation between modern art and society. By highlighting the issue of the body through the analysis of music, Barthes finds a way out of this separation that is neither a return to the past nor an insistence on modern logic. By separating music from the world of pure ideas and connecting it to the body, we can achieve a kind of “physical logic of art” that we find Barthes uses as a force to break away from modern elitist art without falling into the trap of repeating stereotypes and collective beliefs.

The consumption of rap music among youth is a prevalent phenomenon. It is a main component of their leisure time and an important part of their subcultural lifestyle. This study attempts to investigate the way of subcultural consumption of rap music among high school students in Hamedan in a qualitative way. Subjects were selected using purposive sampling and were interviewed through in-depth semi-structured interviews. The thematic analysis shows that the subcultural consumption of rap music can be attributed to six main themes: Expression of emotions and excitement, communication, self-expression, entertainment, daydreaming and avoidance of limitations, and resistance to the Big Other. The first three themes imply that students consume this genre to find some kind of positive redemption and to try to create meanings and possibilities in their private and public lives. The second three themes, however, signify a kind of negative emancipation, that is, an emancipation from the restrictions and constraints that existing symbolic spaces impose on students’ everyday lives. Music consumption here is a means of avoiding rigid rituals and resisting restrictions. It can be concluded that the consumption of rap music is an everyday practice that results from a kind of gap between the ideal and the real lifeworld of students.

This research aims to explore and analyze how national identity is reflected in packaging design in Iran, focusing on Persian calligraphy as an important component of Iranian national identity. The study primarily seeks to specify the approach of the designers of the selected food packaging in the Iranian graphic design biennial “Silver Cypress” to use Persian texts and adhere to the norms and standards of Persian calligraphy and penmanship in their work. The research method employed in this paper is a descriptive-analytical method. The data collection method is a combination of the method of taking notes and reading pictures, and on-site observations conducted through open-ended questionnaires and interviews. The results were analyzed qualitatively. The research results show that in successful cases, packaging typographies represent the important component of Iranian cultural identity, i.e. Persian calligraphy, and its esthetic norms and characteristics, while reflecting brand identity. However, there are challenges in conveying concepts and meanings that distort the relationship between Persian typography and calligraphy and Iranian audiences in the following ways: 1. Lack and/or weakness in using Persian calligraphy and penmanship in design and preference for Latin text; 2. The use of shorthand with visual features influenced by the geometry, proportions and spirit of Arabic calligraphy and penmanship; 3. The similarity of the packages and their typographies to other cases and the lack of an independent identity.

This paper attempts to investigate the evolution of the concept of photography in Iran in light of changing political discourses. Focusing on the role of ideas and organizations, the study uses discursive institutionalism as a methodological approach. Photography as a modern phenomenon associated with the rise of the middle class can hardly be detached from socio-political circumstances. Photography, which arrived in Iran only 3 years after its invention in France, has always played an important role in major historical moments such as the Constitutive and Islamic Revolutions. During the Qajar dynasty, Shah Nasser-al-din’s obsession with art and photography led to the establishment of the first royal photography studio. During the Pahlavi era, with its modernization agenda, photography found its way into magazines and newspapers as the best means of advertising. However, it was hardly considered an artistic form. In the 1960s, one could see photo exhibitions by photographers such as Ahmad Aali, Ebrahim Hashemi, and Maryam Zandi, who considered photography a form of self-expression or an art form. However, in the mid-1970s, political and social upheavals changed the concept of photography from art to a revealing document and a political weapon. One could refer to the photographs of Kaveh Golestan showing working class and sex workers in the whore houses in the south of Tehran.

Travel to the west can be considered as most frequent theme of Arabic post-colonial novels. Story material of this novels follows uniform narration line and homogeneous cognitive narrative functions which almost repeat in all of them. In this category of novels, main character experience Vicissitudinous travel to the west countries (almost France, England and USA). This travel starts from Infatuation to west civilization and imitation of values agreed by the majority, and after confrontation with this values and resistance to them (by two Freudian mechanisms of “displacement” and “regression”), it finally either leads to introversion or self-migration or leads to self-actualization and maturity of an individual thorough wisdom realizing of “self” position among majority. This research while explain behavioral process of these Characteristics and to explain and investigate this process based on five step racial-cultural identity development model of Derald Wing Sue and David Sue. Results of this research proof that this theory is consistent to behavioral patterns of Arabic stories characteristics in travel to the west. However, some differences and conflictions derived from unique circumstances of Arabic communities, violent experience of west colonial in Arabic world and Arabic-Islamic valuable and great history and tradition, are found during this five steps model.

This article discusses the relationship between Iranian independent popular music and dominant culture. It discusses how Amir Hossein Maqsoudloo, nicknamed Tataloo, as a famous Iranian artist in 2010s, describes subjectivities in his works and whether this description reflects a neoliberalist subjectivity or not. Since there are controversies among sociologists about whether neoliberal policies are detectable in Iranian socio-economic structures, we analyze the themes of Tataloo’s 10 most listened tracks, which reveal two distinct themes, one compromising the dominant culture and the other contradicting it. Results show that Tataloo himself and the subjectivities he represents are both turbulent and condemned and rebuked by society, the government, and its critics.

In recent decades, the creative industries have become an important component of the global economy. The creative industries, especially the music industry, can be considered as a commercial exploitation of artistic knowledge. The music industry, as a part of the creative industries, is a clear example of the current socio-economic transformation that is taking place from manufacturing industries to knowledge-based and creative enterprises. The main objective of this study is to analyze the components of creativity in the creative industries with a focus on the Kamkar Band. For this purpose, research data were collected using a combination of documentary study methods and thematic analysis. The results of the present study confirm ten main components in the activities of the Kamkars to promote creative economy, namely: establishing a mutual relationship between Kurdish and Iranian music, promoting local and Iranian instruments, using Kurdish and Persian languages in songs, selection method coverage in performances, membership of women in the band, cohesion of band membership and individual creativity, collaboration with other bands and singers, music teaching, organizing concerts in different areas, and promoting the social aspect of the band through charity work. The results of the present study confirm that there is a constant interaction between the general and the particular in the activities of the Kamkars. The general issue here is Iranian national music and the minor issue is Kurdish folk music. By combining these two musical styles, the Kamkars have succeeded in creating a new style that contains the components of both musical styles.