Post-Revolutionary Iran

In this essay I explore the place of autoethnography in recent Iranian films and videos. Anthropologists who have in past decades insisted on personal voices as ethnography, have coined the word 'autoethnography' as a category that engenders writing on self and society. This genre refers to a range of writing strategies from autobiography to self-reflexive stories. Authors often situate the self within society through self-narrative in socio-political contexts. Authors of autoethnography often conduct their practice across multiple social and cultural identities, exploring their different identities creatively through experimentation with technology, and through playing with different mediation styles. In what ways do these autoethnographic explorations offer a new opening for selfexpression and cultural critique? To what extent do they act as forms of either mediation or representation and to what extent is it a form of 'reality' staging?

This publication unveils the ideas of two philosophers, who contribute greatly to the intellectual debates for modernity in Iran in the 80s and 90s of the XX century.
Reza Davari relies on the idea of the Absolute, through which he defines the authentic human existence in opposition to the technological man, influenced by the West. In the thinker’s view, the subject of the Iranian modernity needs to renew his covenant with God and to merge again with the Truth, from which he has departed in the times of his occidentosis (or otherwise said “westernization”).
As opposed to Davari, Abdulkarim Soroush does not need an Absolute, in order to define the human condition. This author believes that the absolute moral categories are a territory preserved for Gods, but they are not a realm of humans. The idea of Soroush is that no understanding for the nature, God or the providence is perfect and that is why none should be used to define totalities like an unchangeable power, truth or ethics.