Paper Short Abstract:

To minimize intellectual colonialism and credit research partners from an Iranian village, I have worked to translate, type, organize, and edit the narrations of friends over 46 years about their lives, in historical, social, cultural, religious, political and economic context, for publication.

Paper Abstract:

Over her forty-six years of field research in an Iranian (former) village, conference papers, and publications, the proposing author has become aware of how research partners have lacked visibility. Only in the last few years have I signed off on papers and articles with joint authorship. I have begun taking down life-histories/memoirs of my long- time friends and collaborators from “Aliabad.” Since May 2018, lacking access to an Iranian visa and stays in Iran, my research has been limited to phone calls, internet communication with whatsapp and meet, and visits with one or a few people from Aliabad who came to Turkey, promoting long interviews/ narrations with individuals instead of community-based participant observation. One friend, a rural, early widow, whose village lacked schools when she was young, spent a month with me in Istanbul during summer 2023, telling me the story of her life in Persian as I typed in English. We have since spoken many times as questions arise. Two other chapter-length manuscripts have resulted from working with other villagers about their lives. A planned book length memoir and two volumes of chapter-length memoirs will have village narrators as first author (using pseudonyms) and myself as second author.

Although authors are stated only in pseudonyms, they know they publish narrations about their lives and times. Acknowledging local people as authors examining their lives within the social history of their environment is a step toward minimizing intellectual colonialism and crediting local people for their indispensable contributions to the anthropological enterprise.