Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900-1950 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520254473)

In Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong, Cyrus Schayegh tells two intertwined stories: how, in early twentieth-century Iran, an emerging middle class used modern scientific knowledge as its cultural and economic capital, and how, along with the state, it employed biomedical sciences to tackle presumably modern problems like the increasing stress of everyday life, people's defective willpower, and demographic stagnation. The book examines the ways by which scientific knowledge allowed the Iranian modernists to socially differentiate themselves from society at large and, at the very same time, to intervene in it. In so doing, it argues that both class formation and social reform emerged at the interstices of local Iranian and Western-dominated global contexts and concerns.

Author: Cyrus Schayegh
ISBN-10: 0520254473
ISBN-13: 9780520254473
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 03/31/2009
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 05/29/2009 pg. 18