Journal of Iranian Cultural Research
Year:2010 | Volume:3 | Issue:2 (10)|Papers Count:7

Culture is the principal element in forming houses and it also plays an important role in social sustainability. In this way, it will become so important to survey in vernacular culture in order to recognize behavioral patterns of divers religions and nations. Nevertheless, the impressive factors of culture in a human made environment such as the one in city of Kerman, which has diversity in cultures and residential districts belong to Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Jewish people, have been ignored partly. So, planners have been faced with problems in codifying and organizing guidelines for designing and renovation approaches in these districts. In this paper, the matter of privacy and hospitality in Islamic culture and impacts of that on the formation of houses will be discussed through the sacred text of Quran by using the combining research method, logical reasoning and ethnography. Furthermore, it refers to the Torah and Avesta and demonstrates that the first impressive layer on the architecture of Kerman houses initiates from Islamic culture, as a predominant one there, in some principals such as privacy, neighborhood rights, and hospitality. Moreover, it shows that the second impressive layer initiates from Zoroastrian and Jewish religious beliefs and traditions formed the architecture of their houses. Therefore, their trends for security, life, needs and regarding religious rites should be considered in the future guidelines in renovation of these residential districts. Meanwhile, further studies could search for approaches & methods of converting the theoretical results of this paper into the guidelines & design principles.

The search for identity type in the thought of Iranian intellectuals necessitated dealing with this question: what kinds of factors have affected the Iranian intellectuals’ opinions on identity? And is it possible to provide any explanation on the diversity of identity types? With the use of Weber’s sociology of knowledge and methodological inquiry of Thomas Springs, it was attempted to provide explanations on the evolution and diversity of identity and also to illustrate how various identity theories of Iranian intellectuals have been influenced by the present crisis of intellectuals. Four types of identity type created during various crises are as follows: 1. Ancient identity type resulted from the crisis of lagging behind.2. Islamic identity type rooted in the decadence crisis and the separation of knowledge from sacred ideas.3. Multiple identity types resulted from the crisis of ideologism and inflexible accounts of cultures and civilizations.4. Iranian type of identity born as a result of the crisis of forgetting the controversies between traditionalists and modernists and sunken in the struggle between tradition and modernism.

Communication technologies today are greatly developed to the extent that obtaining information from different parts of the world is no more only depended to real and physical traveling. People are now able to travel as far as they want and whenever they wish using cyberspace, while sitting at home. Tourism in this condition is no more dependent on time, place and financial planning.Two important questions raise here, first, can virtual tourism replace the real tourism and eliminate the need for it? Secondly, could cognition produced by the virtual tourism be the same as the cognition formed by the real tourism? To answer these questions, defining the characteristics of virtual and real tourism is needed. The main basis of this comparison is being in special place and an experimental sense of being in that place, in the real tourism, on one hand, and selectivity of places and receiving packaged information in the virtual tourism, on the other. This paper claims that although the virtual tourism could offer vast and complete information to the tourist, but in reality it lacks sense of being in place and lived experience. For these reasons, the obtained cognition is manipulated and unreal. Secondly, this type of tourism can be considered only as a complement to the real tourism. A tourism that begins with virtual space and leads to the real world could have positive and better consequences of both spaces on the process of cognition.

This paper addresses the representations of the Muslim world, especially Iran, in Western media. These representations are traced back in orientalist discourse, one through which ‘knowledge’ is produced about the East which empowers the West to justify and maintain its dominance over its Eastern Other. The writers first discuss the nature and functions of representation and proceed to examine some of the aspects and strategies of the Western media approach to the Muslim world in general and Iran in particular. The aim is to shed some light on the discursive functions and formations involved here. The need to address such pressing issues in order to create a more balanced and rational atmosphere necessary for a fruitful dialogue between nations and cultures is emphasized.

The process of globalization is both a disputable issue and an ambiguous one and it has been approached through various and sometimes contradictory views.One of the major topics related to the process of globalization is the subject of survival or persistence of local identities in the mainstream of global economy and culture. Different views have been presented in this respect. One of them claims that globalization has a negative influence on local identities, and eliminates the differences. Some others, however, state an opposite view. This paper has identified three fundamental but different approaches and examines them by the research’s data. This research which its subjects are Fars, Turk and Kurd students of Tabriz University, indicates that as the global identity among the students’ increases, their local identities decrease. In other words, with enhancement of globalization process, local identities starts to decrease and it means that second and third approach’s theories in the research is rejected and the first approach’s theories are confirmed.

Despite the fact that, some live creatures have more civilizational and cultural complex structure comparing to human beings, but humans are inclined toward mixed perfection of right -cerebral, left-cerebral (with strength and weakness in different societies), and their balanced growth and development. Therefore, human beings from the first step of creation have used their genetic power in any environment and society. The growth of that compilation depends on cultural feature and formed by culture according to right cerebral. The growth of compilation ends on established civilization and is created as a result of being left cerebral. In this sense, we can study, calculate, predict and plan the cultural and civilizational processes of different societies depended on right or left cerebrality. The question of this article is that, what kind of relationship is there between the right- cerebral left cerebral, civilization and culture? This paper is descriptive and data collection is based on library and documentary method with the index card and chart instrument.

Nowadays National identity (NI) is one of the important and outstanding issues in the world. The need for NI and sense of belonging, loyalty and the trend toward it is an undeniable necessity. By considering that the educational system, in all countries, has the biggest manpower, it can be considered as one of the best ways to consolidate and strengthen NI. Curriculum, as one of the key pillars of the educational system, plays a fundamental and central role in formation of NI. In this background, this research investigated the position of NI in Iranian educational system. For this purpose, the position of NI in the educational system was compared between Iran and other countries. After that, the causes of the weakness of NI in Iranian educational system were expressed. Then, with a scrutiny in the overall and educational goals of three levels of Iranian educational system, the amount of attention to issues of NI in the expression of the goals, were evaluated. The results showed in the affirmed goals of the Iranian educational system, NI does not have a suitable position.Considering the impact of NI in the other areas, related to the development of the country, it seems a revision and rethinking of the position of NI in the goals of Iranian educational system should be taken into account.