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The essays in this volume reflect on the nature of subjectivity in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors explore everyday modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programs in China and the Republic of Congo, psychiatrists and the mentally ill in Morocco and Ireland, and persons who have suffered trauma or been displaced by violence in the Middle East and in South and Southea

Social hierarchy in Iran, as in other modernizing nations, has undergone major changes in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, contemporary patterns of social hierarchy are rooted in the traditions of inequality that prevailed during the Qajar era. In provincial Iran, these traditions of hierarchy and inequality were structured in part by the form of political authority. In the nineteenth century, many provincial regions were ruled by local notables who maintained varying degrees of independence from the royal court. Along with leading landowning families, merchants, and clergy, they formed the elite of provincial society. The culture of social hierarchy was also shaped by traditional Islamic and Persian views of society and by the meaning attributed to the distribution of wealth, power, and prestige in Iran.