IRANIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Year:2003 | Volume:1 | Issue:2|Papers Count:15

The traditional studies of the deaf were largely concentrated on the physical, psychological and educational aspects. Becoming aware of the connection between the physical and psychological facets with the cultural aspects in the life of the deaf, in the last decades the researchers have attempted to study the culture of these groups in order to have a deeper and more precise understanding of them.Deprived of one of the most important cognitive and communicative ways, the deaf have adopted a different way of communication, which in turn has caused a difference in the typical relation between language and culture. This means that language has had certain effects on the culture as a whole, in a way that it can be regarded as one of the most important factors in the formation of the deaf culture.This article studies the culture of the deaf with an anthropological and linguistic approach through material and non-material culture, the organized part of the culture and the effects of special language and way of communication on these elements.

Writing began with the Sumerian civilization, which created the first script in the late fourth millennium BC. The paper discusses how the invention of writing was not a sudden or spontaneous development but the outgrowth of several thousand years' worth of symbol manipulation experience. The origin of writing will be traced to a system of clay tokens used for keeping track of commodities starting about 7500 BC.

Despite extensive socio-economic studies on the Iranian villages and rural areas before the Revolution, the subject of the changes in rural societies, in the years after the Revolution has not enjoyed the same consideration. Meanwhile the significant growth of the infrastructure and the expansion of urban-rural relations have utterly altered the form and the content of the inner relation of these societies. This article is adopted from a field research on Afzâd, an Iranian village located in Kuhbân (Kuhbonân) region in central desert of Iran, Southwest of the city of Kerman. The changes are scrutinized through an anthropological study that reveals the preservation of internal integration and specific unique identity of this village through employing various complicated mechanisms of internal cooperation, avoiding isolation from the surrounding environment.

The specification of communication through computers and cyberspace, together with the increasing number of the internet users are all the sign of an emergence of a new formation of social interactions. Cyberspace has certain functions, some of which seem to overlap with those of urban space, namely providing the possibility for people to get in touch with each other.This article intends to investigate into the cultural and social motivations, and the life experience of the internet users in the city of Tehran to see how they realize and define this new means of communication, what qualities have they attributed to this new space that makes them choose it as their preferable setting for initiating social interactions.Based on research findings it is concluded that cyberspace is a preferable alternative for urban space in the view of those Internet users who use this medium for social communication in the city of Tehran.

This article tries to analyze part of the assimilation and integration process in the totality of Iranian culture. This totality is a coalesced and integrated unit of diverse cultures and ethnic groups brought together in a single domain. The Iranian culture has been largely impressed both in a positive and negative ways by these ethnic groups, and therefore to perceive this culture, it is essential to recognize these influential factors.From the 5th century AH to the beginning of the Pahlavi dynasty the Turks had persistently had political and military domination on Iranian socio-cultural domain and thus had been influential on the changes and developments. The arrival of the Arabs to Iranian cultural domain coincided with the expansion of a new religion that had a deep impression on the conducts and mentalities, and even more importantly on the language (lexicons, concepts and script), which have been the significant and persisting components of the Iranian culture.

Music and festivals are similar to one another, both of which are performed based on a general pattern that allows them to improvise on a pre-designated framework. They both have their zeniths and nadirs, tensions and serenities, and their occurrence is time- related. Meanwhile, a festival, as a location for performing and presenting music, is also regarded as a conservatoire. With the help of music, a festival can mobilize the public and by allotting time to sociality, emphasizes on the social division and differentiation at the kernel of this sociality. Music and festivals in the Iranian culture, whether within the formal borders of the country or beyond its borders in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan or Azerbaijan reveals the above characteristics and trends in many cases.

Written legacies and manuscripts related to the water civilization domain have scatteredly emerged since before the Islamic era in Greece and eastern countries. In the era of Islamic civilization, there was an increasing growth in the cultural legacies and written works on the water civilization. From the 2nd century AH with Abozeyd Ansari's ketab-olmatar and ketab-olmiyâ until the 4th and 5th centuries AH with Abobakr Karaji's ketab nabât-olmiyâ alxafiye this convention continued. Although alqani val anhdr was composed in Kavian era about the codes of subterranean water conduits, which indicates the existence of such conventions and practices among Iranians, Karajis book is the most Prominent work about Iranian water civilization. From the 5th to 10th centuries AH, among other subjects books were written on water, irrigation, hydrology and agriculture such as afrâh fi babe-l alvâh, âsâre-l ehyâ mâhil sabhâniin fi rafa'elmâ', resâleye âbbaxi˝ harât, davâzdah bâb dar 'elme felâhat, ketâbe natihedole, se resâlae or Heravi's two prominent works, namely erâd-ol zerâe' and resâlae tariqe qesmate âbe qalb. From 10th century AH onwards more books wee written and composed on irrigation and agriculture, and during the time of Qajar dynasty several books on agriculture ('elme felâhat) were written and translated into Farsi.This article tends to recognize and present books on water civilization in a chronological order in order to assist researchers in this field.