فصلنامه علوم اجتماعی
سال بیستم شماره 4 (پیاپی 63، زمستان 1392)

Ethnobotany is a young and extradisciplinary branch of anthropology specifically in the field of traditional knowledge and technology. The field of traditional knowledge and technology is a product of thousands years of human experience in relation to himself, others (society), and the nature in the context of history and local, regional, and global culture. A small part of this experience has been written in the age of writing, but the main part, due to various reasons, has remained unwritten and confined to the sphere of oral history. Indeed, the tacit knowledge of this experience has been an unconscious and inapprehensible one. Ethnobotany describes the relationship between humans and plants. Plant ethology is an emerging sub-branch of ethnobotany that is the intersection of different scientific fields, especially social sciences. As an interdisciplinary field, it also interacts with other areas of human knowledge such as philosophy and art. Plant ethology is not only concerned with the behaviors of plants, but also with how plants arerepresented and reflected in the rhetorical space of poets, writings of humans, folklore, and cultural space.Jo Ghassem is a wonderful plant that grows in a few certain parts of Iran, including Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Ilam, Central Province, and some areas of Isfahan. It has saved the lives of many residents of these regions as well as some parts of Iraq and Turkey being at risk of drought and famine. The present research is an ethnographical study on Jo Ghassem, and the author aims to share the results of his comprehensive studies on wildflowers in Iran as well as his cognitive perceptions of this small but humble plant.

According to Hall, the media‘s narrative of events is not an objective one, but is constructed within discursive and ideological frameworks. The present study was an attempt to analyze the ways in which two media (IRIB TV1 and BBC Persian) with different discursive frameworks represent one of the most important events in the Middle East, i.e. the Syrian conflict. The research used an eclectic method, combining the approaches of Critical Discourse Analysis and Semiotics. Three news packages broadcastin BBC Persian‘s ―60 Minutes‖ and IRIB TV 1‘s ―News 21‖—from June 29, 2014 toJuly 30, 2014—were selected. The results indicated that BBC Persian used components, such as human rights, defense, political transition, the relationship between Islamism andwar, the key roles of international players, condemnation of religious extremists, and rule of law, to represent the events of Syria. On the opposite, IRIB TV1 used components, such as security, support of resistance front, victory over terrorism, independence from foreigners, and denial of the West‘s intervention, to construct the events of Syria in the media.

Both Western and Muslim scholars have performed numerous studies on the types of religiosity in Islam.However, most of the Western scholars have based their typology on the common right/left factions.This study was a review of the ideas of three Western scholars, namely John Sposito, Clinton Bennett, and WilliamShepard. Using a comparative method, the authors made an attempt to compare and explain the Western typologies ofreligiosity based on the right/left fractions, and to compare those typologies with the ideas of two Muslim scholars, namelyAbdullah Saeedand Tariq Ramadan, as the authors believe that the ideas of these two scholars is free from the above-mentioned flaws. Moreover, the flaws and wrong generalizations of the typologies were identified through comparing them and presenting examples and evidences. The results show thatSaeed and Ramadan had better performances than the three scholars, specifically inareas that the latter had poor performances in their typologies.

Among the past decade‘s developments gradually affectingthe academic culture in the fields of Human and Social Sciences has been the increasing interest ofthe students with non-relevant backgrounds in studying these disciplines. This phenomenon not only demonstrates a change in the functionality of university students, but also is indicative of the transformation of their social space. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, asample of MA and PhD students of Humanities and Social Sciences studying at Tehranpublic universities was selected. The study aims to identify the Non- Humanities students‘ motives, expectations, and assessment of their decision to change their field of study. The results showed that the decision should be considered as a rational act through which the students could fulfill their needs and be consistent with the changed identity values in the new academic culture of Iran. The three mainreasonsof changing the field of study were rational and purposeful reasons, rational and normative ones, and the desire for new experiences. It is noteworthy that in addition to the effect of this change of major on the academic culture, this phenomenon creates some opportunities aswell as limitations for the questioned students due to the shocks and distanciation they experience.

After the Russo-Persian Wars and Iran‘s encounter with European countries, the elites realized the inefficiency of the ruling political system. The Persian Constitutional Revolution gained victory as a result of the gradual transfer of this awareness to society, improvement of people‘s level of knowledge, and consequently, public movement against the ruling power. After the end of the first term of the Parliament, during which pre-constitutional associations were active, the Iranian parties formally started their activities in the second term. However, the traditional socioeconomic structures remained the same. Half of the Iranian population was nomadic tribes. Rural and urban populations constituted 30% and 20% of the Iranian society respectively. Iran‘s economy was an agricultural oneenjoying the characteristics of semicolonial economies, andwas controlled by companies of colonizing countries. The urban population was not in majority in Iran, the middle class was not developed, and the socioeconomic arrangements were totally based on traditional grounds of the past. In other words, the traces of modern era were hardly visible. Under the mentioned circumstances, the parties failed to continue their dynamic and effective existence in the first era of partisanship (1908-1925), since a dynamic trend required fulfillment of the needs of society and development of appropriate infrastructures. As the needs were not defined yet, and the socioeconomic arrangements had not been changed consistent with those of partisan societies, it is no wonder that parties could not survive. The present paper aims to study the socioeconomic conditions needed for the parties to survive and compare them to those of the first era of partisanship.

The present paper is a meta-analysis of social sciences during the last decades in Iran. Although reaching such goal requires more comprehensive studies, researchers have always embarked on working on an area of social sciences in consistence with their possibilities and knowledge. The Journal of Social Sciences, as the second Iranian quarterly of social sciences, is a miniaturized version of the situation of social sciences in Iran. The present research aims to perform a meta-analysis of the text of the Journal andreview the content of its 58 issues published during the last 22 years. Using census sampling method, 332 papers published in the 58 issues of the Journal were selected. The validity of the categorization of the papers and their contents was approved by the experts, and the reliability thereof was confirmed using test-retest method. The results showed that the main approaches taken in the majority of papers were experimental, quantitative, and positivistic ones. Also, conceptual, abstract, and critical approached were applied less. The majority of the papers focused on the domestic issues; however, theorizing, as asignificant sign of domestication of social sciences, was almost absent in the papers, and most of them were a kind of theory-testing.

The present paper aims to study the modernist and neotraditionalist musical discourses in the contemporary Iran (1906-2006). To this end, the main factors involved in formation and evolution of the mentioned discourses were discussed to perform a historical genealogy, introduce the discursive characteristics of this period, and reinterpret the discourses. This is a cultural studies research thatshows how political, social, and culturalgrounds directly or indirectly affected the mentioned discourses.The study took ahistorical discourse analysis approach. The results were obtained using a qualitative method as well as discourse analysis and historical genealogy techniques. The findings indicated that during the intended period, the discourses were affected by political, social, and cultural conditions of the contemporary Iran. Moreover, the major turning points in formation of the main themes of modernist and neotraditionalist discourses in this period included emergence of military music, the Constitutional Revolution, RezaShah‘s renovation project, the intellectuals‘ travel to the West, transnational factors, renovation plan of the Iranian old music, the administration plan of the country‘s music section, establishment of radio stations, foundation of music schools, disposal of Minbashian and appointment of Vaziri, establishment of the Center for Preservation and Advancement of Iranian Music, and development of academic musical circles. It was found out that power has graduallyaffected the music in Iran.