Feeding Iran: Shi`i Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic by Rose Wellman (review)

N weapons, contested treaties, and fraught international relations are at the forefront of what Western audiences hear about Iran these days. In Feeding Iran, Rose Wellman offers us something quite different: a rare window onto the quotidian lives, including the foodways, of those who support the current Iranian state, in contrast to the dissident voices within and outside of Iran. Wellman’s ethnographic fieldwork took place amongst the Iranian Basij, the paramilitary group that supports the principles behind the Iranian revolution of 1979. These Basiji Iranians are committed to the Islamic Republic, in contrast to those it describes as “Westernstruck.” Wellman’s primary field site for a year and a half is the provincial town of Fars-Abad, where she was not quite family, but also not quite a guest for the duration of her fieldwork, abiding by the standards of respectability of her host Basiji family, participating in their vibrant social life of hosting and visiting as well as in their everyday chores of cooking and preparing food. While the term “paramilitary” normally evokes political or religious extremists, that is not the view we get from Wellman’s book. Instead, we read of the very ordinariness and practicality of these Basiji families, as they attempt to live decent lives. The proper comportment of their bodies is envisioned as essential to their own souls, the moral and physical wellbeing of their families, and to the ongoing success of the Islamic Republic. Far from the state unilaterally imposing ways of being on their people, she shows how Basiji understand their everyday practices to uphold the state and its current interpretation of the Shi`i Islam. Religion is not cordoned off as a separate sphere; the words and traditions of the Prophet Mohammad and his martyred grandson, Imam Husayn, continue to inform