Towards a Somaesthetic Conception of Culture in Iran: Somaesthetic Performance as Cultural Praxis in Tehran

Abstract

In studies of Iranian culture, the crucial dimension which curiously remains underexplored is the body. The focal point of this article is the contemporary Iranian body in the Iranian urban space. It probes both the genealogy of the contemporary patterns of the perceptions of the body and of the relationship between mind and body in conjunction with the possibilities for somaesthetic practices in Iranian urban space in an attempt to move beyond the binary cultural paradigms prevailing in contemporary Iran: (1) Western-style consumerism and commodification of the body, and (2) the instrumentalization of the body as a space for ideological and religious purposes. This study is the first not only to undertake the exploration of the foregoing issues more generally, but also to conduct it premised on a cognitive-affective model - somaesthetics - which is at once symptomatological, praxiological and ameliorative. Focusing on Tehran, I shall seek to determine to what extent such an Iranian city as Tehran allows for somaesthetic interventions by the embodied citizen-subject. I shall then proceed to the crux of the essay: the somaesthetic practice-performance we conducted in Iran in 2015. The ultimate aim is to propose a pragmatic model, in relation to Iranian culture, for aesthetic-ethically informed cultural practices and affective-cognitive conception of (civic) selfhood as a process.