Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Iran – History'

The Roman-Sasanian War of the seventh century CE was the last conflict of late antiquity. Šahanšah Xusrō II nearly conquered the Roman Empire. James Howard-Johnston has studied the war extensively. Walter Kaegi has produced a biography of Xusrō II's opponent, Heraclius, while Geoffrey Greatrex and Touraj Daryaee have written articles focusing on Xusrō II. Scholars, however, have not attempted a major study of him. This dissertation seeks not only to understand how different authors depicted Xusrō II but to understand the man's personality.

Roman authors who witnessed the war sought to highlight only the negative aspects of Xusrō II. He was, according to the Romans, an enemy of God. Fear of Xusrō II was the basis for these depictions. Pseudo-Sebēos, an Armenian historian, depicted Xusrō II as an arrogant, blasphemous ruler. Pseudo-Sebēos, however, did not write anything positive about the Romans, either, because both the Romans and Sasanians wanted to control Armenia.

Christians living under Xusrō II's rulership also seemed to despise him. They portray Xusrō II as wicked because, in an attempt to punish them, he did not let allow them to elect a ruler. A careful reading of these sources, however, suggests these authors were aware of how Xusrō II took care of Christians in his realm. Finally, Arab and Persian sources differ in their portrayals of Xusrō II because both groups, although both Muslim, were competing for legitimacy in the post-Islamic conquest of Iran, due to ethnic tensions. Arab authors emphasized Xusrō II's faults. Persian authors, on the other hand, presented his good qualities.

Ultimately, all of these different depictions of Xusrō II demonstrate that he possessed a fierce will and embraced a vision of how to rule. Xusrō II wanted to conquer the Romans and extend his domain and be remembered forever. Xusrō II's drive might have made him seem arrogant to the authors studied in this dissertation, and they depicted him accordingly. We should not, however, lose sight of the man he truly was: a man who dared to dream.

This dissertation investigates the coterminous emergence of imperial documentary operations and modernization programs in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. It argues that the period saw a governing investment in documentary format and documentary "value," and that this was a response to the containment strategy of cultural diplomacy at the onset of the Cold War. It's focus is a mixed group of governmental and non-governmental entities. The project makes evident how a group of events and practices involved in foreign diplomacy campaigns of knowledge/intelligence and large scale overseas modernization programs give rise to a discourse of documentary diplomacy. The output of these projects was varied: locally-made rural training films; newsmagazine newsreel; travelogues, and the exported nontheatrical American documentaries. As the dissertation demonstrates, they were influenced by a weaponized ethnographic documentary experience, first formulated in Asia by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the late 1930s. The subsequent rise of governing investment in culture for imperial planning during the 1940s, large scale government experiment with training films during World War II, and governing investment in grassroots audiovisual movement of educational film in the United States all bear the marks of these knowledge/intelligence campaigns. The path to freedom, accordingly, became a bifurcating atomized process that ultimately reconceptualized geopolitically sensitive nation-states as people, as audiences, and eventually as individuals available to be freed from their own "hostile" and "uncooperative" governments on their way toward building bottom-up democratic movements.

Containment campaigns of defending American capitalism against Soviet communism in postcolonial nation-states led to a proliferation of instructional films throughout the world. These missions invested in local filmmaking and established pockets of documentary infrastructure that inevitably played some roles in the making and transformation of national cinemas. As a case study of the emerging discourse of documentary diplomacy, this dissertation also investigates American documentary operations in Iran during the 1940s and 1950s and demonstrates how US-Iranian media projects institutionalized documentary, audiovisual modernization, and media governance in Iran. The Syracuse documentary mission to Iran emerged as among the most important sites of such campaigns. For instance, the first generation of localizing newsmagazine series were made in Iran for Iranians by Iranian crew, using American planning, infrastructure and capital. With this convenient "usage," however, also came subscribing to an ideological package. Media producers and advisors from thirty-five American universities, under Syracuse University's binational contract with American and Iranian governments, participated in this work by 1959.

As this research project demonstrates, documentary diplomacy in this era brings into contact and coherence film and legal discourse, diplomatic policymaking, film practice, and applied social scientific research and intelligence production. In this respect, documentary diplomacy encompasses a set of events that include making documentary, mobile screening, expert viewing, national character research, applied anthropology intelligence work, survey trips, public opinion projects, courses of audiovisual and documentary training, and nation-building projects of central documentary infrastructure and media governance.

This dissertation argues that localized missions of overseas audiovisual training and documentary filmmaking and infrastructure during the 1950s operate through a propaganda facade of apolitical modernization by building on the governing strategy of welfare imperialism via invitation. In some cases, this went to extent of sponsoring anti-leftist localized newsreel campaigns of crushing local journalism and a wide range of objectifying practices. The village how-to films enforced a rapid modernization campaign while audiovisual training facilitated central education and governing. The dissertation also argues that the apolitical facade of the imperial documentary campaign in Iran is an expression of claiming fakery and manipulation in the name of the real.

The project draws from a wealth of declassified archival sources in the United States National Archives at College Park, the Library of Congress, the Archives of Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and other sources including individual memoirs and interviews. The archival sources include memoranda of film scripts, film receipts, correspondence, embassy notes, university and government contract, cultural manuals, immigrant interviews and a documentary bible of administrative film theory and production.

Following the case study of Iran, the dissertation extrapolates that researching the genealogical course of postwar imperial campaigns of documentary diplomacy in the Middle East and Asia can contribute to understanding of the transformation of modernization programs of central education, media cultures and media governance.

Cette recherche a été intitulée "les femmes iraniennes héritières des nappes d'offrande". L'objectif de cette recherche est la mise en évidence des bases des nappes d'offrande votive féminines de la préhistoire à nos jours en tant qu‘explication, analyse et interprétation des nappes ;pour cette recherche, nous avons choisi la société actuelle de Téhéran constituée d'ethnies iraniennes variées, notamment les Zoroastriennes et les Shi‘ites. Le fil conducteur de cette recherche est le cadre théorique combiné basé sur la transmission culturelle, l'interprétation religieuse symbolique de Geertz, la réaction symbolique de Parsons et la théorie d'échange de Peter Blau, interprétant les différents aspects des signes et des symboles des nappes avec la présence, la participation des femmes, la réalisation de leurs désirs et la mise en place des nappes. Les théories d'Henri Corbin ont permis de répondre à certaines questions sur la transmission culturelle religieuse et les changements et transformations du monde symbolique iranien, mazdéen zoroastrien aux nouveaux symboles de l'Iran musulman shi‘ite ;nous avons également fait appel aux rapports de Sadegh Hedayat, Henri Massé, Shakouri, Faghiri ,K. et F. Mazdapour. Le commentaire et l'interprétation d'autres sujets des nappes tels que les récits, la lamentation et l'allégresse, les Adjil-é Moshkel Gosha étaient des mystères non élucidés jusqu'alors par les chercheurs ;ils l'ont été dans cette thèse. Il a été essayé de répondre aux questions posées par des réponses basées sur l'anthropologie religieuse symbolique. L'enquête statistique de la recherche porte sur des étudiantes, mariées ou non, de l'Université Azad, Unité Centre de Téhéran. Les questions principales intéressent la féminité des nappes d'offrande et le recours aux saints religieux iraniens shi‘ites. Les souhaits sont relatifs à la vie quotidienne, comme l'obtention d'un travail, la guérison d'un malade, l'achat d'un appartement, la résolution de problèmes financiers, le mariage, l'accouchement, etc. les résultats ont été rassemblés dans les tableaux de l'enquête statistique. Cependant, certaines questions sont restées sans réponses ;elles seront élucidées par de futurs chercheurs.

Mots-clés :nappes d'offrande votive, les femmes gardiennes, la transmission culturelle, Adjil, Moshkel Gosha
Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of oil income and the gold price fluctuation on the stock market of Iran, and to examine whether consideration of the oil and the gold markets followed by other investment markets, such as the real estate market and the foreign exchange market have any significant impact on the stock market behavior. This study examines the impact of the oil income and gold price fluctuation, as well as other macroeconomic indicators such as housing construction, deposit interest rate, foreign exchange rate, consumer price index, and gross domestic products on the Iranian stock market, as measured by the quarterly data from January 1990 to December 2012. First, regression analysis was applied for oil revenue, housing activities, deposit interest rate, foreign exchange rate, CPI, and GDP to examine the stock market reaction to each market activity. After this, ceteris paribus, oil revenue was replaced with gold price to examine whether the price of gold without consideration of the oil revenue had any impact on the stock market activity. Finally, the model was run to examine the impact of all variables, including oil revenue and gold price, upon stock market activity. In a separate model, this paper also examines the relationship between all of the above-mentioned variables and stock market volatility. In the next phase, the impulse response function based on the vector auto-regression model was generated to examine the behavior of the stock market followed by a shock to each independent variable. Because Iran is an oil-exporting country—not an oil-importing country—economic forces, market structure as well as the investment culture and investing policies are different in Iran than in Western nations or other oil-importing countries, it may not be wise or productive to analyze investment in the Iranian stock market from the same perspective or with the same methods used when analyzing investment in Western countries. Because gold, foreign currencies, and the real estate market are the most popular and common investment markets in Iran for domestic investors, this paper aims to determine whether there is any relationship between those markets and the stock market in general from an investment point of view.