Evaluation of some concepts and theories explaining the cultural and social atmosphere of contemporary Iran; An effort to present new concepts

Master's Thesis

Abstract

           Thinking about the surrounding social phenomena begins when a question occupies the thinking mind. Philosophers of science believe that science begins with a problem and the problem will be extracted from the heart of the theory. In this research, while agreeing with the first part of this statement, the writer refuses to accept the monopoly of theory as the only source of problem extraction and introduces another method, which is called gazing here, as the source of creating an original question, that is, a question that is directly asked about reality itself. The loss of the possibility of creating questions about one's surrounding environment has challenged the scope of validity of sociological theories and shows that the more theories move towards the use of social concepts, i.e. the common social experiences of the people of a society, which are compressed in the form of a concept or phrase, the scope of its function will be more limited, while it is explained here that with this new perspective, the possibility of understanding social issues among thinkers will still remain. In the third step, the researcher described It deals with a question that was born from an amazing experience, and after the formation of the question, by examining two examples, it shows how the original question confronts the flow of existing knowledge. In these encounters, it will be clear that the existing knowledge may not be able to answer the original question. Here, there is no other choice but to turn to theorizing about his original question by relying on systematic imagination. After the formation of this theoretical model, its power will be put to the test in the face of some existing theories and also in an effort to explain social realities. At the end of this research, suggestions are also presented in the context of completing and applying this theoretical model.

Key words: gaze, social concept, Iran's fortune, social languagelessness, the focal area of ??intersubjective space, lived experience, between social mentality. "Why is it like this here? Why is the situation like this? Why doesn't anything change?" Of course, these questions do not always remain at this level, but in some cases, these questions become such questions in the minds of those who feel more social responsibility; "What is the right situation? What should be done to improve things? What should be changed?" Fortunately, some of these questioners find answers to their questions and set a goal for themselves and start trying to reach their goals, and they take small and big steps along the way. But in the end, as far as we have seen, most of these efforts end up in one point through different ways, and that point can be expressed in one sentence; Nothing changes!

          On the other hand, we have observed those who, by referring to various documents of Iranian history and categorizing Iran's social events over the decades and centuries, and presenting statistics of removals and installations, coups, wars, displacements, and revolutions that have occurred in this society, as well as comparing it with other societies and especially using sociological theories, will convince their audience in scientific formats that nothing is stable in this country. Mande [1]!

The first category uses theories like this to justify their unsuccessful efforts and others; Iranian society has been formed in such a way that it denies the permission of long-term work from activists, and therefore programs are diverted or stopped halfway, and this has destroyed the possibility of long-term planning to create wide-ranging social changes.[2]

In contrast to the second category. To show the causes of instability in Iran, they can claim that:

Iranian society was formed in such a way that people throughout history did not recognize governments as their own and therefore did not defend the government against the invasion of foreigners. This has caused the governments and consequently the social systems that are usually dependent on the governments to not remain stable in Iran.

           But behind these apparently convincing answers, a fundamental problem still bothers the mind, and that is, what is this Iranian society that has been able to control the fate of a nation throughout history with its mighty fingers? What is its quality? What kind of watering hole does it live on? What is the way to penetrate it? Has this powerful social institution left the possibility of reform? If it is correctable, where is the way and method to correct it, and if it is not correctable, where should an Iranian run to escape from its grip?

          It must be admitted that no matter how exciting these questions are raised in today's scientific society of Iran, they do not create much enthusiasm for starting a serious research and may even seem a little boring. One of the reasons for this situation is that, in a dominant view, the key to the answer to such questions should be sought in culture and cultural matters, but the high volume of discussions and articles as well as numerous institutions in charge of culture and cultural matters have saturated the space in this field. [3]

          The fact is that because we have grown up in the same cultural and social environment, we can consider what is written at the top of this introduction as our own hadith and lived experience, and because of the same ineffectiveness of practice that in It was mentioned first and the mentioned process of conducting cultural research, which every fair observer admits, we are highly suspicious of what is called cultural research and cultural work. Although we will try to frame this internal concern in the form of scientific and research literature, but before entering such topics and at the end of this introduction, let us once again discuss our internal thoughts about this; Despite the claims of some researchers who pretend that by trying to understand culture and discover its nuances and by providing cultural solutions for society's problems, they have covered the culture with a velvet dome, but there is still a child sitting on a tree branch and shouting in our ears that this king is naked! have been pointed out in order to better show the problematic aspect of the main question. As mentioned before, we have sought to find a way to gain an authentic understanding of the social atmosphere of contemporary Iran, so that we can understand the reality of what we have felt in our lived experience as a kind of social disorder and cultural disharmony, but in this way, major challenges will be faced by every researcher; The first problem is to overcome the long-standing conflict between theory and observation. This issue becomes relevant for us because we want to know if the only way to understand the surrounding environment as some philosophers of science have claimed is to extract questions from theories and then try to answer these questions using existing theories, or if there are other ways to face reality directly and without the mediation of theories? We find that sociological theories do not have a universal scope due to relying on social concepts. The combination of these two theorems means the assumption that the question originates from the heart of the theory on the one hand and also the lack of universality of sociological theories on the other hand means that since most of the existing social theories have not been established according to our surrounding conditions, they do not provide the possibility of raising questions about these realities of Iranian society and starting to think about them. Now the question is how to remove this blockage in the way of thought?

The only way to get out of this deadlock seems to be to find a way to reach the question that does not need to go through the twists and turns of theory, and this is the first problem we are facing. After that, in order to answer the question that has arisen from this new method and has questioned a reality of the contemporary Iranian society, we will first refer to the existing theories about this. If these theories are able to answer the desired problem, we have achieved our goal at this point, and otherwise, there is no other way except to face the most basic problem of sociology, i.e. theorizing about the desired society [4].