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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines changes in farmers' livelihoods in Kayrabad, southern Iran, by re-studying human geographic materials of the late Morio Ono.

Paper long abstract

Professor Morio Ono (1925-2001) was an influential Japanese scholar, particularly in the field of rural studies in Iran. Under his leadership, generations of Japanese social scientists doing fieldwork in far-flung rural areas were trained in humanist epistemology and interactionist methodology (Ferdowsi 2011).

He worked mainly in Kayrabad, a village in southern Iran, from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, collecting field data of rural sociological and human geographical interest. His main publication is the book "Twenty-Five Year Drama of Iranian Farmers" (1990, translated into Persian as Ḵayrābād-nāma, Tehran University Press, 1996).

His first-hand datasets, including field notes, maps, documents, and photographs, are documented in the Catalogue of Human Geography Materials in the Morio Ono Collection (Hara, Nanri & Nishiaki 2017; Hara & Nanri 2017, 2018). We also re-studied his field data and extended field sites to oases in southern Iran and revealed economic, social, and cultural changes among farmers, pastoralists, and urban dwellers (Hara 2016; Goto, Hara & Nanri 2015; Hara ed. 2009).

In this presentation, we discuss the academic value of long-term fixed-point observation with the results of follow-up studies in arid land oases in Iran.