Precarious Lives

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In Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran, Shahram Khosravi explores the paradoxes of everyday life in Iran during the early 21st century. Iranians face multiple precarity factors leading to hopelessness, a sense of a futureless existence, and increased individualism alongside incivility. Yet, amidst this, hope, daydreaming, civility, and solidarity manifest in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements. Young Iranians express feelings of purposelessness and endure endless waiting, grappling with perceptions of being unproductive and burdensome to society. Despite their aspirations, they experience social and spatial immobility, confronting uncertainty in the present and a bleak outlook for the future. Khosravi intricately portrays contemporary Iranian life, weaving individual narratives, government reports, statistics, and cultural analyses of art and literature to illustrate responses to precarity and the glimmers of hope. His extensive ethnographic work with youth in Tehran and Isfahan, as well as migrant workers in rural areas, reveals the complexities and contradictions of daily existence in Iran. This vital work of contemporary anthropology highlights the shared struggles and resilience of the Iranian people.