Dr. Fariba Adelkhah Lecture UCLA - May 8-9, 2005

Fariba Adelkhah is an anthropologist, who has been living in France since 1977. She received her MA from Strasbourg University and her Ph. D from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her main research interests focus on the relationships and interplay between social changes and political transformations throughout the second half of 20th century.

Her dissertation was published in Paris, 1991, as The Revolution under the Veil: Islamic women in Iran, that provided an analysis of how the relationship to the sacred was changed at the dawn of the Islamic Revolution (which therefore is the outcome of this transformation rather than its beginning) and its impact on the everyday life, while many social scientists at that time were using a non-deconstructed notion of religious to analyse its impact on the social life.

Her second book in 1998 (that was also translated in English, Columbia university Press), Being Modern in Iran, challenged the idea of a continuity between past and present of the Islamic Revolution and intended to show how religion (as sacred and concrete practices) contributed to modernization in terms of increasing centralization of the State, individuation and political consciousness.