Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry [Paperback]

Michael M. J. Fischer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 6, 2004

Over the past decade Iranian films have received enormous international attention, garnering both critical praise and popular success. Combining his extensive ethnographic experience in Iran and his broad command of critical theory, Michael M. J. Fischer argues that the widespread appeal of Iranian cinema is based in a poetics that speaks not only to Iran’s domestic cultural politics but also to the more general ethical dilemmas of a world simultaneously torn apart and pushed together. Approaching film as a tool for anthropological analysis, he illuminates how Iranian filmmakers have incorporated and remade the rich traditions of oral, literary, and visual media in Persian culture.

Fischer reveals how the distinctive expressive idiom emerging in contemporary Iranian film reworks Persian imagery that has itself been in dialogue with other cultures since the time of Zoroaster and ancient Greece. He examines a range of narrative influences on this expressive idiom and imagery, including Zoroastrian ritual as it is practiced in Iran, North America, and India; the mythic stories, moral lessons, and historical figures written about in Iran’s national epic, the Shahnameh; the dreamlike allegorical world of Persian surrealism exemplified in Sadeq Hedayat’s 1939 novella The Blind Owl; and the politically charged films of the 1960s and 1970s. Fischer contends that by combining Persian traditions with cosmopolitan influences, contemporary Iranian filmmakers—many of whom studied in Europe and America—provide audiences around the world with new modes of accessing ethical and political experiences.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“No one reading this book can doubt that when one is face-to-face with Iran, one is face-to-face with one of the great world civilizations of all human history.”—William O. Beeman, author of Double Demons: Cultural Impediments to U.S.-Iranian Understanding

“Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges is unique, enjoyable, and insightful, and it brings with it a deep understanding, appreciation, and love of Iranian and Persian cultural contexts, oral epics, religious traditions, ethnography, and films.”—Hamid Naficy, author of An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking

About the Author

Michael M. J. Fischer is Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (published by Duke University Press) and Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution. He is coauthor of Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition and Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences.

Product Details

• Paperback: 488 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (September 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822332981
• ISBN-13: 978-0822332985
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,302,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable book on the subject it covers, July 26, 2011

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This review is from: Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Paperback)

A remarkable book by a renown anthropologist on study of evolution of Persian literature from its earliest days to early twenty first century. Each chapter is densely packed with information deserving to be a book on its own. I found the first three chapters (Yasna, Shahnameh, and Illumination) to be the most interesting writings on the subject to date. Kudos to professor Fischer.