In the Shadow of Written History: An Exploration of the Tehran Bazaar as a Non-place

Abstract

To answer the simple question ‘what is the Tehran bazaar?’, one will fall into an architectural and socio-political labyrinth of historical classifications, definitions and descriptions based on travellers’ accounts, map productions, the monarchies’ role in shaping cities, revolutions, theories of city evolution, the Iranian versus Islamic city controversies, archaeological approaches to civilisation and even linguistic approaches to Persian roots of the word ‘bazaar’. The commonly accepted definition is that the Tehran bazaar is a linearly structured marketplace, and a united socio-cultural entity consisting of several public buildings of varying forms, functions, and historical values. This labyrinthine approach firstly ignores the transformative nature of the bazaar and presents it as a still, immobile and silent complex of static places; and secondly leaves little room to investigate the plurality of events and multiplicity of meanings taking place perpetually in this market place. This chapter utilises concepts of ‘anthropological place’ and ‘non-place’ by the French anthropologist, Marc Auge, in order to open new possibilities of looking at the multivalent context of the Tehran bazaar. It aims to go beyond the conventional understanding, to present an insight to a marketplace, problematising any enduring meaning.