Abstract
This paper examines how participation in smuggling restructures existing commercial regulatory systems and subjectivities. It does so through an analysis of the illicit commercial practices that mushroomed in postrevolutionary Iran and the ambivalent participation of established merchants (bazaaris) in the import and export of commodities through these circuits during the 1979–2005 era. Following two independent research projects on the Tehran and Qum bazaars, we adopt a multidisciplinary and relational approach to bazaars and smuggling to decipher the multiple logics. This process is assembled through networks of established bazaaris, new commercial actors, far-flung transnational buyers and diverse state officials, who both regulate trade and facilitate exchanges that are at times interpreted as smuggling by the participants themselves. Building on the growing literature on smuggling in cultural anthropology and political economy, our account demonstrates how commodities travel through channels that ultimately transgress categories such as licit and illicit, state and society, and ‘honorable bazaari’ and ‘smuggler’. The postrevolutionary Iranian regime is a case that challenges us to examine this quasi-formal economy in the context of an institutionalized and centralized state that has adopted both state-led and neoliberal economic policies. It also forces us to situate the phenomenon of smuggling within the context of existing commercial networks and moral orders. We further reveal how bazaaris have been subjects of and subjected to the hybrid commercial order, which has both displaced the social networks that underpin bazaaris' communal obligations and norms and cast doubt on the merchants' claim to ethical standing in the eyes of one another, and left them vulnerable to criticism by leaders of the Islamic Republic.
Introduction
Before the 1978–1979 Iranian revolution, Ali Ra'isi was a small-time carpet producer in the city of Qum. Despite being a wholesaler in Tehran, his involvement in the networks of relations of the Qum bazaar was limited to indirect and sporadic engagements. Not regularly participating in the long-term, multi-faceted interpersonal relations that constitute the commercial practices and normative expectations of marketplaces known as bazaars meant that he was not a full member of the bazaar community, nor was he recognized as a ‘bazaari’ by his fellow carpet merchants. In 1981, soon after the revolution that was strongly supported by bazaaris and brought to power a regime that valorized bazaars as ‘Islamic’, ‘native’ and revolutionary institutions, Ra'isi tapped into his pool of contacts among the politicized ulama (religious scholars). These clerics had placed agents in key posts in the Ministry of Commerce, and he was thereby able to acquire a much-coveted export license. Notably, his entrée into the ministry was a cleric and not a merchant from the bazaar. He exported a limited number of carpets through legal channels, in part to promote his credentials and social standing as an exporter. However, the majority of his carpet exporting took place through ‘smuggling rings’ that linked Qum's production centers to a diverse set of agents within and beyond Iran's borders, especially in the burgeoning commercial hub of Dubai with its free-trade zone and lax trade and financial regulations. This was in response to a combined effect of the emergence of a new geography of neoliberal entrepôts in the UAE and the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988) leading the Islamic Republic to forge a war economy to direct resources to the front, direct hard-currency earnings into the treasury and limit capital flight by exporting valuable carpets.
In 1986, during an argument with customs officials who were charged with inspecting his latest shipment, Ra'isi challenged a government agent's valuation of the carpets and duties owed, possibly because he assumed that his contacts within the regime would protect him. He refused to send his shipment, and told the government agent that he was planning to export the carpets in ‘another way’. Later that night, however, he was stopped by police and taken in for questioning. He soon revealed to the police where they would find merchants who were hiding carpets and also provided the times and locations of their future transactions. In a display of state power, the agents responded quickly, setting up roadblocks at various locations around Qum and Tehran. Ra'isi was released in return for providing information that led to over twenty arrests. A few weeks after the 1986 ‘Qum carpet raids’, when merchants in Qum discovered that it was Ra'isi who had betrayed them, the bazaaris mobilized to ban him from conducting business in Qum. He was told not to travel to Qum, even to visit his elderly mother. For five years Ra'isi was exiled from Qum and the bazaar in Tehran. He was shunned by other businessmen and headed to the Caspian Sea region in Northern Iran. He remained there until the members of the newly formed carpet merchant professional association (ittihadiyyih) allowed him to return to Qum in 1995 (Erami, Citation2009). Despite the fact that by 1991 Ra'isi had established an office in the Tehran bazaar, as late as 2006, right before his untimely death, Ra'isi was prohibited from conducting business in Qum.Footnote1
This evocative ethnographic account introduces the complex operations of commerce in postrevolutionary Iran, most notably the expansion and regularization of what is defined and described as smuggling. It suggests how this trade operates through the interactions of old established merchants in bazaars, new commercial actors, far-flung transnational agents and a diverse set of state officials who regulate trade and facilitate ‘smuggling’ by allying themselves with particular mercantile interests. It demonstrates that commodities travel through official and illicit channels while depending on liminal spaces and a mixture of regulatory practices. Ra'isi's desire to be recognized as a bazaari also reflects the initial postrevolutionary moment in which the rhetoric of Khomeini, other regime elites, and the wider media lauded the revolutionary credentials and pious ethics of ‘the bazaar’. Meanwhile, the plight of Ali Ra'isi, one borne out of ever-evolving and overlapping regulatory practices, also depicts the challenges and palpable unease that bazaaris experienced in this new commercial terrain. In this case, the Qum bazaaris felt the need to take radical and collective action to distance themselves from someone who had dishonored the bazaari community despite being important for individual commercial gain. In short, despite the attempt to keep them as distinct moral categories, neither the bazaari nor the smuggler nor the state agent can be examined in isolation from one another. The relationship between these divergent forces was not a direct confrontation, but an ambivalent and unstable encounter (Roitman, Citation2004).
In order to parse out the social as well as ethical processes that led bazaaris to categorize one of their own as ‘unacceptable’, we ask what smuggling does to the individuals directly involved as well as the collective category of the bazaar community. How do the processes of smuggling and the status of extra-legal activity influence economic relationships in a changing Iran, including how bazaaris experience and imagine the regime and the bazaar? Finally, if smuggling is illicit and a challenge to the state, what does smuggling do to and for the state and state–bazaar relations, which were born out of a revolution that was profoundly supported by the mercantile community (Parsa, Citation1989, Citation2000)? How do bazaaris justify their actions and interpret the conditions that have led them to smuggle? While acknowledging that smuggling has a wide range of political-economic features and consequences, this paper ponders the effect of illicit trade on the structure of the bazaar, understood in relational terms rather than as a reified structure, and bazaari subjectivity and political subjectification of individual merchants.
This paper argues that the practice of smuggling affects the nature of interpersonal relations among bazaaris as well as the spatial and institutional location of exchange and regulation of commercial activities in Iran. Consequently, the self-understandings of bazaaris and the sense of obligation owed to one another are redefined, or displaced. Drawing on two separate but complementary research projects on the postrevolutionary Qum and Tehran bazaars, we demonstrate how and why the widespread and persistent nature of extra-legal forms of commerce physically relocated commercial networks, while making them more arms-length and less socially embedded spatially. At once the bazaars’ communal form of commercial regulation was disrupted, while the subjectivities of bazaaris were unhinged. More specifically, the particular processual nature of smuggling disrupted and threatened the bazaars’ practices, structure of networks and forms of sociability – namely, their regulatory systems. The persistence of smuggling and the role of individual bazaaris and state agents produced distrust within the bazaar and between bazaaris and the Iranian state. A protean zone was created where neither the official regulatory system of the state nor the bazaars’ interpersonal relations were able or willing to confront smugglers and their allies. This paper reveals how and why this often contested and beleaguered territory was expressed and experienced at the level of the individual and collective category of the bazaar. The Iranian revolution ushered in an ostensibly new pro-bazaari regime described in the scholarship (Adelkhah, Citation2000; Moaddel, Citation1993). Yet this apparently bazaari-inclined new regime did not fashion an economy solely constructed out of the pre-existing commercial networks.
A multidisciplinary engagement with pluralistic regulatory systems
Not only do we present new material on Iran's commercial sector, but we do so in order to contribute to the theoretical debates within the literature on smuggling and informal economies by illustrating the benefits of both interdisciplinary and collaborative work in the complex realm of ‘criminality’, which resonates in multiple social registers – legal, political, economic and ethical. In particular, this paper is the product of the synthesis of two independent research projects by an anthropologist and a political scientist. Narges Erami, an anthropologist, conducted extensive field research on carpet producers in Qum in 2001–2003. In the process of analyzing the production of knowledge and the specialization of a vocation (carpet production), interviews and participant observations led Erami to discover the centrality of smuggling in the carpet trade and the profound moral anxieties and social tensions that ensued. Meanwhile, in the process of examining the political economy and mobilization capacity of the Tehran bazaar under the Pahlavi monarchy and Islamic Republic, Arang Keshavarzian also discovered the importance of smuggling and informality in the postrevolutionary era. During a series of research visits from 1999–2005, Keshavarzian, a political scientist by training, conducted interviews, engaged in participant observation and analysed newspaper archives to examine the dynamics of smuggling. Thus, this paper marries independent yet compatible findings from multiple sites in order to marshal greater and more diverse evidence,Footnote2 consider variations due to differences in location and commodity, and integrate scales and forms of analysis associated with distinct fields in the social sciences. This collaboration was productive and essential in the same manner that the commercial partnerships elaborated here have been, even in that they have been disorienting to us and are not without moments of prickly exchange. Our joint enterprise has resulted in a narrative that is not wholly ethnographic, yet marshals long-term and intimate knowledge of commerce in Iran in order to dialogue with a broad readership and set of questions that would have been less feasible if the paper was not co-authored. The blending of methodologies and the synthesis of field research hopefully engender greater confidence in our findings and arguments about an intrinsically opaque topic that crosses the material and moral dichotomy. To do so we first had to devise a relational approach to bazaars and smuggling that speaks to multiple disciplines.
Conceptualizing the bazaar
The research projects on the two bazaars were united by an emphasis on their dynamic nature, the central role played by social space and morphology, and the heterogeneity of roles and hierarchies rather than the apparent structural cohesion of the bazaaris as a class, mentality or traditional form. We adopt a conceptualization of the bazaar that taps into approaches to markets within economic sociology, and posit embedded networks, rather than atomized exchange partners or generalized cultures, as the building block of economies (Granovetter, Citation1985). Bazaars are bounded spaces containing a series of socially embedded networks that are the mechanism for the exchange of specific commodities. By focusing on the ongoing intersections between importers, wholesalers and retailers as the unit of analysis, the bazaars’ organization and norms are treated as the product of interpersonal relations, rather than being conceived of as essential attributes of a cultural identity (e.g. traditional), universal logic (e.g. profit maximization) or class position (e.g. petty bourgeois). Economic action has non-economic motives (e.g. quest for approval, status, sociability and power), and economic institutions are constructed and maintained within a history, set of power relations and configuration of institutions. Moreover, informal practices and institutions, which are neither codified nor administered by third parties (e.g. state bureaucracies), are understood in terms of patterns of relations that under certain conditions enable and limit exchange with some and not others. As participants in a community, bazaaris have obligations to others within this order (Keshavarzian, Citation2007; Zubaida, Citation1993).
The pattern of socio-economic relations, meanwhile, may take different formations – that is, not all bazaars are organized in the same manner at all times, and not all sectors within bazaars are constituted by the same form of networks. The basic sets of characteristics that differentiate the bazaars’ networks are: the extents to which relations are long-term or short-term, relations are multi-faceted or single-faceted, and relations are cross-cutting (or involving horizontal as well as vertical relations) or purely hierarchical. Firstly, members of the bazaar may interact over time and with the expectation that credit and commercial relations will be long-standing, or exchanges may be more sporadic and take place without expectations and commitments for future dealings. Multi-faceted relations refer to ties between buyers and sellers that are not purely economic, but where exchange partners are also kin, neighbours or members of the same social organizations. Conversely, single-faceted (or socially shallow) relations are those that enjoy exclusively one type of relationship, such as purely economic interaction (e.g. exchange or credit). Finally, we must differentiate between groups whose networks are bridged by various horizontal relations and those that have fewer such interactions. In the latter case, hierarchies of relations are parallel to one another, with the bazaar or the sector constituted out of distinct and isolated clusters. Given this conceptualization of Iranian marketplaces we will argue that the participation of bazaaris in smuggling transformed the networks of the bazaar from being ones marked by long-term, multi-faceted and cross-cutting dynamics to interpersonal relations becoming more short-term and single-faceted interactions with fewer horizontal relations bridging the various commercial networks.
The Tehran and Qum bazaars of the late Pahlavi era (1921–1979) were very much the quintessential embedded economy. Social, spatial, religious and familial forces were inseparable from the economic sphere, and relations tended to be long-term and even multigenerational. The disparate social, kinship and economic dynamics during this period helped make a whole out of the heterogeneous and large collection of traders and transactions that constituted the bazaar. Moreover, economic practices, such as the use of promissory notes and brokers, not only helped facilitate exchange but resulted in complex, prolonged sets of expectations with a large number of merchants across guilds (Rotblat, Citation1975; Thompson & Huies, Citation1968). What cemented co-operation, trust and reciprocity among bazaaris were the social networks that underwrote many of the economic transactions by evaluating reputation, ensuring future interactions, broadening the realms of deal-making and bringing collective pressure to bear (Fischer, Citation1980; Thaiss, Citation1971, Citation1972). Family and neighbourhood contacts as well as religious and guild meetings brought together clusters of bazaaris ostensibly for private and religious matters, but they also served as fora to collect funds for merchants in financial trouble, support the building of mosques or hospitals, organize weddings and festivals, and sanction bazaaris who broke ‘the rules’.
The distinctive sociability of the bazaar is predicated on its physical space and embedded mixed-use character. Professions and sectors are contained in specific alleys or wings of the bazaar. Narrow alleys specializing in particular goods and open storefronts and offices allow passers-by, either customers or colleagues, to stop by easily to exchange news and gossip or to compare goods and prices. Within and surrounding Iranian bazaars there are also public baths, restaurants, coffee and teashops, gymnasiums (‘houses of strength’), mosques and shrines enabling bazaaris to eat lunch together, gather in coffee houses, have meetings in their warehouses and caravansaries and pray together on a regular basis and often across sectors and other cleavages. The physical proximity of bazaaris and participation in various professional fora and modes of social intercourse generated a series of assets (e.g. information, conventions, reputations), which were spatially specific (Keshavarzian, Citation2009; Storper, Citation1997).Footnote3
Network structures have created multilayered bonds which have enabled bazaaris to play a leading organizational role in social movements and converted bazaars across Iran into a political space during episodes of unrest. Bazaaris in Tehran, Qum and other cities helped organize demonstrations and mass strikes, fund political initiatives and distribute information during the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911), the oil nationalization movement (1951–1953), the anti-White Revolution movement (June 1963) and the Islamic Revolution (1977–1979). Their oppositional stance during the 1979 revolution as well as the close alliance between some members of the bazaar and Khomeini ensured that the founder of the regime and many state officials in the Islamic Republic valorized the bazaaris and held them out as models for society (Vali & Zubaida, Citation1985).
Hence, almost three decades ago bazaaris in the relatively small Qum carpet bazaar were able to mobilize via their networks against Ra'isi and physically deny him access to the bazaar. Many assume that the bazaars’ structure and regulatory power have remained largely unchanged over the last decades. Our research, however, has uncovered an important restructuring of the bazaar that has transformed it from a highly interconnected set of networks into a set of more fragmented and transitory relations. Specifically, relations in the bazaar have become more short-term, less multi-faceted and cross-cutting, with communal commitments and responsibilities becoming more fraught. We expect that cases like Ra'isi's are less possible under these conditions.
A multidisciplinary approach to the study of smuggling
While analyzing bazaaris’ relations within and beyond the bazaar were the main impetus for our individual research agendas, we were unable to ignore both the practice and discourse of smuggling that permeated our interviews and archival research. Tea brokers, wholesalers and even packagers in Tehran were some of the first interviewees to interrupt the questioning or redirect queries by rhetorically asking how and why tea from South Asia, which has been heavily restricted, is readily available in all shops. These interlocutors wanted us to contemplate who and what made this possible, and as we did this we were motivated to decipher smuggling effects as well as causes.
More crucially, making sense of this phenomenon and its sociological and ethical dimensions required us to move beyond our disciplinary literatures and tendencies. This multidisciplinary synthesis allows us to bring the increasingly diverging disciplines of political science and anthropology together and in dialogue with both analytical traditions.Footnote4 In particular, there are prominent traditions in both political science and anthropology that analyse smuggling as failure and the symptom of something lacking. In the study of comparative politics, the realm of smuggling, corruption and the informal economy have often been viewed as reflecting ‘state weakness’ and low levels of bureaucratic capacity. These states are examples of realities distant from the Weberian ideal of the state as a coherent unitary apparatus with monopoly over the means of coercion (Evans, Citation1995; Migdal, Citation1988). In political economic readings, the presence of informality is also viewed as pathology. In Marxist scholarship the informal economy is a vestige of petty bourgeois and pre-capitalist forms of capital accumulation that must be overcome to develop class interests and relations fully. Neoclassical analysts and policy-makers meanwhile understand corruption and ‘rent-seeking’ as a rational response to ‘too much state regulation’, leading to economically inefficient outcomes and dampening entrepreneurial spirit (De Soto, Citation1990; Waterbury, Citation1972). Neoliberal policy prescriptions, which emerge from this line of analysis and have been adopted to some extent or another around the world since the 1980s, are a call for the dismantling of regulation to liberate markets. Critics, however, demonstrate that neoliberal globalization has produced the socio-economic conditions (e.g. unemployment, displaced jobs, roll-back of welfare provisions) that fuel informality as a mode of subordination and exploitation (Fernández-Kelly & Shefner, Citation2006; Portes et al., Citation1989). These initial approaches to smuggling as a consequence of failing states and economic policies have given way to readings that have departed from the concept of the state as a unitary actor that is mutually exclusive from an equally reified ‘society’. These more recent efforts disaggregate the state and view informality as a strategic set of practices for everyday survival and even resistance (Bayat, Citation1997; Scott, Citation1987; Singerman, Citation1996). Neither is informality viewed as a consequence of a state lacking despotic or infrastructural power. William Reno, a political scientist working on war economies in Africa, for instance, warns that ‘social action, even when evading or condemning state power, does not signal the emergence of civil society or collapse of predatory state power’ (Reno, Citation1997, p. 494). From this tradition we will borrow the understanding of informal economies as concrete alliances between state agents and citizens that can both entrench and eviscerate state power. Additionally, the Iranian case illustrates that this is true even in an era of war and postrevolutionary consolidation, in which it is difficult to describe the state as ‘weak’, as in the case in some sub-Saharan postcolonial and civil-war contexts, or define the political economy as singularly ‘neoliberal’.
Anthropologists have arrived at somewhat similar conclusions via different paths, methods and epistemologies (Hart, Citation1988). They have argued that informal economies in some ways respond to the state or circumvent its regulatory institutions and agents, thus producing ‘shadows’ (Ferguson, Citation2006; Nordstrom, Citation2007). The literature on the anthropology of the state has also investigated the interactions between local state officials and citizens as well as the public discussion of such matters as corruption to illustrate how ‘the state’ is constituted discursively and through praxis (Ferguson, Citation1990; Gupta, Citation1995). From this vantage point, the presence of smuggling is not a symptom of a dysfunctional state, but rather a mechanism for metaphysically fashioning the state, where engagements with official and unofficial agents involved in regulating markets destabilize authority (Das & Poole, Citation2004; Elyachar, Citation2005). Thus the process of smuggling is to emphasize the ‘illegal but licit nature’ of certain activities rather than regarding all unregulated transactions as corrupt or illegal (Roitman, Citation2004).
We engage and bridge these contemporary and parallel developments in political economy and anthropology in our analysis of smuggling in contemporary Iran. However, we do so with two important caveats. While we accept the emerging consensus that smuggling illustrates the blurring of boundaries of state and society by identifying the alliances and moral struggles that necessarily render these entities mutually constitutive, we focus on bazaars as a means to move the discussion of smuggling beyond the implicit dualisms of state and smuggler, state and citizen, and material and moral. If states must be disaggregated and treated as fields of power, so must commerce. Commercial exchange takes place within its own hierarchies, inequalities and ethical struggles that will be exposed once ‘the bazaari’ and ‘the smuggler’ engage one another economically, discursively and morally. What is more, bazaars are not only a social space, but, as discussed above, they represent a regulatory system of their own, one that is built on multi-faceted relations and mechanisms (Elyachar, Citation2005; Taglicozzo, Citation2008). Thus, we start with the assumption that regulation is always plural and rests on social networks as much as state bureaucracies. The expansion of smuggling practices that include state officials, established bazaaris and emergent commercial interests does not just pluralize regulation, but, as we will demonstrate, dislocates existing methods by altering social relations. Finally, bazaars are critical for both the smugglers and the Islamic Republic because they are both a source of revenue (i.e. taxes for the state and capital for smugglers) and a source of legitimacy. Given the pronounced role of bazaaris in the revolution and close ties with the clergy, at least initially they were crucial members of the new regime in its ongoing pursuit of hegemony in the postrevolutionary context. Meanwhile, for smugglers, bazaaris represented a means of making licit their illicit wealth and buttressing their financial assets with social status.
Our second contribution to the literature on smuggling is that participants in smuggling should not be viewed as ‘rational’ subjects struggling to legitimate their citizenship or to hone their acts as political or righteous. This is not a form of resistance against an oppressive state or neoliberal economic order; rather we illustrate that our interlocutors never fully resolve the ethical dilemma of engaging in acts and associating with individuals who are viewed by the state as illegal, yet critical for accumulating capital. This process culminates in a profound ambivalence that extends beyond the specifics of smuggling practice and implicates the entire bazaar and postrevolutionary social compact. Given that the very category of ‘smuggling’ is a legal–moral construct, the rise of the practice and discourse of smuggling unsettles the porous boundaries between the state and bazaar. We examine the mechanisms that create a sense of mistrust among traders, not just with the state but within the bazaar itself. The paper's final ethnographic section will demonstrate how the breaking of codes of ethics creates an environment where doubts have to be mollified and never fully exposed, and where simple misunderstandings give way to a new political and social order. The result is humiliation and defeat for both sides, but is most clearly expressed in the fractured identity of the dishonored bazaari.
The smuggling process and the state's place within it
As in many countries, industrialized and industrializing alike, smuggling plays a major role in Iran. Iranian consumers may not always be aware that the imported goods they are purchasing enter the country in ways that are not entirely legal, but businessmen are quite conscious of the prevalence of smuggling. 75 per cent of respondents to a survey of importers and exporters said that smuggling existed in their sector.Footnote5 Without exception, all our interviewees, whether they were merchants inside or outside the bazaar, government officials or researchers, quickly raised the issue of informal, illegal and unregulated economic activities in our discussions about commercial and economic affairs. Not surprisingly, very few of our interlocutors – and only after repeated meetings – volunteered information about their own involvement. Instead, it was common for our interviewees to avoid discussing their own activities by adopting the passive voice – ‘goods are smuggled’ – or the past tense – ‘smuggling was common’.
Informal cross-border trade and smuggling existed prior to the Islamic Revolution, but the scope and routinization has been far greater during the last quarter century. As a consequence, public discussion and anxiety in Iran about the prevalence of parallel markets have increased.Footnote6 The front pages as well as the business sections of state-owned and private newspapers have been inundated with headlines such as ‘Contraband imports have destabilized the market for stereo and television equipment’ (Dowran-e Emrooz, 3 December 2000), ‘The smuggling of commodities is the main impediment to development’ (Aftab-e Yazd, 4 September 2002), or ‘The Minister of Commerce: Despite chief officials stress on combating smuggling, no progress has been made’ (Iran, 15 July 2002). In the summer of 2004, President Mohammad Khatami even described financial and economic corruption, including smuggling, as systemic (Sharq, 24 June 2004). In subsequent years, the combination of US and international sanctions on finance, commerce and insurance, as well as political conflict within Iran's political establishment, led to even more frequent public discussion and media coverage of corruption, smuggling and economic mismanagement.
The postrevolutionary expansion of and angst about illicit and informal economic activities are also reflected in speech. There is a diverse set of terms to describe these sectors and activities, including ‘the underground economy’ (iqtisad-i zir zamini), the ‘unofficial economy’ (iqtisad-i ghayr-i rasmi), ‘the shadow market’ (bazaar-e sayih), ‘parachuting’ (chatrbazi), ‘peddling’ (pilihvari), ‘legal smuggling’ (qachaq-i qanuni), ‘suitcase trade’ (tijarat-i chamidani) and even the ‘free market’ (bazaar-i azad), which is implicitly juxtaposed to the regulated official market.
This inflation in neologisms and media coverage is indicative of a flourishing informal commercial economy that even by government figures is substantial.Footnote7 By definition it is difficult to calculate the volume of smuggled goods; nevertheless estimates of smuggling show that the informal economy and illegal trade are considerable. At the low end of the estimates, the head of Iran's Customs Office claimed that $1.5 to $2 billion of goods were smuggled into the country annually at the turn of the millennium. The magazine published by the Institute for the Study and Analysis of Commerce, a research centre affiliated with the Ministry of Commerce, set the total volume of smuggling at between $2 and $4 billion (Akhbar-e Eqtesadi, 27 January 2000). In 2002, Bonyan, a pro-reform newspaper, estimated that $3.5 billion worth of goods were imported illegally (14 February 2002). Finally, Eqtesad-e Iran, Iran's version of The Economist, claims that $4 billion worth of goods are smuggled or ‘legally smuggled’ into Iran annually (January–February 2002, p. 11). Moreover, smuggled goods are as varied as they are voluminous. Contraband imports range from agricultural goods, such as sugar, wheat and olive oil, to industrial machinery and appliances. Tea, cigarettes and cloth are some of the key consumer goods that have been smuggled into Iran (Fath, 19 April 2000). Trafficking has included exports of gasoline, flour and other goods that are heavily subsidized by the Iranian government. These commodities are commonly shipped across the Gulf or to Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq and the Central Asian republics (Adelkhah, Citation2002). Exporters of carpets, caviar and dried fruits and nuts have also frequently chosen to skirt export restrictions, duties and bureaucracies by smuggling their merchandise out of Iran. It has even been estimated that $40 million of saffron is smuggled out of Iran every year (Akhbar-e Eqtesadi, 4 October 2000).
How do all these commodities bypass customs as they enter and exit Iran? The process ranges from the most piecemeal and underground forms to large-scale and highly organized operations. The least systematized form of smuggling in the postrevolutionary era has its roots in the revolution itself, when industrial and commercial units were paralyzed by strikes, financial disruptions and political uncertainty (Journal de Teheran, 29 October 1978). During the initial revolutionary era, lucrative cross-border operations that reaped short-term shortfalls were operated in part by two groups: Iranians from the southern provinces (Baluchestan, Hormozgan and Fars) who had ethnic, kinship and business ties to UAE, Oman, Kuwait and Pakistan, and Iranians living in the northwest (particularly Kurds and Azeris) with established ties to traders in Iraq and Turkey. A more recent instance of this form of ‘suitcase trade’ is related to the overthrow of Saddam Hussain. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, pious Iranian men and women resumed their pilgrimage to the various revered Shi'i shrines in Iraq that had been denied to them for decades. Qum's merchant families relayed to us how this passage to holy sites reopened historical routes of smuggling to and from the sacred cities. These activities are generally small-scale in terms of capital and organizational complexity, staged on a local scale (i.e., the networks do not extend beyond the border region or direct consumption) and are not necessarily predicated on long-term commercial partnerships and dealings. Since bazaaris have not always been involved in or dependent on this movement of goods, few interviewees discussed this scale of activity, other than to reference it as part of the generalized problem of smuggling.
At the other end of the spectrum, large-scale import operations exist when politically powerful figures and organizations (e.g. economic foundations [bunyads], the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, trade units in ministries and religious trusts) provide political protection (Saeidi, Citation2004). The state-affiliated actors, often described by members of the bazaar and media as ‘the commercial mafia’, use their political influence and instructional privileges to bypass the trade regime that encumbers the private sector (Hambastegi, 12 February 2001). All such organizations work closely with the multiple loci of power that constitute the Iranian state. They are simultaneously involved in profiting from this trade, keeping it invisible and directing public attention towards other types of illegality that the state punishes by everything from fines, to indiscriminate shootings at borders, to execution. While it is difficult for political critics (Bonyan, 14 February 2002), as well as researchers, to investigate the breadth and means by which corrupt and competing government officials are participating and encouraging supra-legal commercial activities, our interlocutors regularly described state institutions as actual actors in smuggling networks. These large-scale forms of extra-legal commerce also were raised in interviews as a not-so-subtle means to legitimate their own involvements, which are necessarily ‘far more limited in comparison’, as one tea wholesaler explained.
In between these two extremes of petty smugglers and large-scale state importing lie the regularized and highly elaborated smuggling networks that have developed since the Islamic Revolution and through zones of partial and gradated sovereignty (Ong, Citation2006; Sassen, Citation1996; Tsing, Citation2005). These operations, which are this paper's focus, are quasi-legal in that they operate in the shadow of official structures and take advantage of loopholes in order to overcome commercial restrictions. While the result of their activity violates the intent of policies and bypasses customs, the process is ‘formal’ in that at various key stages it functions with legal immunity. The majority of this trade is based on the emerging trade nexus in the southern Persian Gulf with socio-economic pillars in Dubai, Iran's free-trade zones (Kish, Qeshm and Chahbahar) and major ports and transportation systems extending north to Central Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan (Rubin, Citation2000). By the turn of the century, this diverse Dubai-based Iranian community, as well as Iranians living in Iran, had established 3,000 firms in the UAE, 132 of which are in the Jebal Ali free port in Dubai (Seda-ye ‘Edalat, 20 June 2001; Zibakalam, Citation2008). Thus, Dubai has been functioning as the initial, legal and infrastructural stepping-stone for much of Iran's smuggling operations. In other words, Dubai is to Iran as Hong Kong has been to East Asia, Paraguay to southern South America, and Netherlands Antilles and Panama to Central America and Venezuela.
Smuggling has blossomed in Iran due to a convergence of factors and despite shifting policies.Footnote8 First, Iran's location and porous borders make it relatively easy to transport goods in and out of the country. Iran's maritime and mountainous borders have never been easy to monitor, and in the last two decades war in bordering nations (Afghanistan, IraqFootnote9 and eastern Turkey) and the flourishing free-trade zones in the Persian Gulf, especially in the UAE, have ensured the borders function more like frontiers. Moreover, the massive expansion of and improvement in rural roads by the Islamic Republic in the 1980s and 1990s were essential for transporting people and goods.
Second, smuggling is a response to the particular form of postrevolutionary state regulation, economic intervention and modes of trade liberalization (Amid & Hadjikhani, Citation2005). In the 1980s the Iranian government established one of the most highly regulated economies in the world. State regulation of the overall economy and commerce was a product of the regime's programme to nationalize and Islamicize large sectors of the economy, mobilize funds for the war effort against Iraq and redistribute resources to address inequality and to cultivate a social base (Maljoo, Citation2012; Pesaran, Citation2012). The social justice aspirations and political contingencies often clashed, with the latter typically trumping or modifying the former (Bayat, Citation1997; Keshavarzian, Citation2007). Imports were subject to duties and commercial taxesFootnote10 that have driven up the costs of trade through the official system.Footnote11 But the primary method of reducing imports and protecting local manufacturers in the 1980s was the use of non-tariff barriers such as the banning of imports of select goods or through licensing requirements.Footnote12 The Ministry of Commerce listed the goods that could legally be imported and only then were importers permitted to apply for licenses from the responsible ministry, typically the Ministry of Industry, Ministry of Agriculture or Ministry of Mines.Footnote13 The licensing system both reduced the quantity of imports (on a per capita measure) and reduced the number of legal importers (Hakimian & Karshenas, Citation2000). As one would expect and bazaaris reiterated to us, this process has been rife with opportunities for corruption, nepotism and patronage, with the disparate constellation of state procurement boards, religious trusts and relatives of senior officials enjoying privileged positions. Businessmen without contacts in the government could not compete with state affiliates that were exempt from paying duties, received subsidized foreign exchange and bypassed the time-consuming bureaucratic hurdles. In 2001, one former tea importer calculated that his cost of importing is four times that of foundations or border co-operatives that acquired ‘special licenses’ (mojavez-i moredi) even when imports are banned. The issuing of special licenses has allowed state organs to both access these exemptions and distribute them as patronage. A member of the Parliament's Economic Committee reported that as many as 30 centres and entities issue these import licenses. The parliamentary representative bemoaned that the plurality of licensing authorities has undermined accountability and transparency in the process (Nowruz, 13 June 2002).
Meanwhile, policy-makers, especially during the Iran–Iraq war, sought to regulate exports (especially hand-woven rugs, antiques, precious metals and jewellery) in order to prevent capital flight. In the context of postrevolutionary capital flight, war and the US freezing of Iranian assets (Kayhan, 5 January 1981, 12 February 1981, 2 January 1982), the state had a mission to safeguard the nation's wealth (Payam-i Imam Khomeini, Citation1984; Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Article 43). Strict procedures and regulations were established against exporting goods out of Iran (Karnamah-i Ittihadiyyih -i Saderkunandigan-i Farsh-i Iran, Tehran, 1982–1992). These included valuations of goods by customs officials, requiring exporters to have a state-issued export license and time limits on the repatriation of hard currency. Violations of these laws were met with fines and confiscation of passports in order to prevent flight from the country. As illustrated by the case of Ali Ra'isi, traders resorted to unofficial channels to export their goods.
Since the end of the Iran–Iraq war, a significant segment of the Islamic Republic's policy-makers sought to strike a new social contract with a business and technocratic class aligned with and produced by the regime as well as the growing urban and educated population, who were socialized by the postrevolutionary order. Selective economic liberalization was central to the economic policies of the 1990s. Rather than disappearing, small-scale and historic movement of goods and people back and forth across Iran's borders has undergone a metamorphosis thanks to the creation of new commercial facilities and state-sanctioned enclaves of economic liberalism.Footnote14 On the one hand, many importers, wholesalers and retailers were driven to these grey and black markets in order to side-step import restrictions and fluctuating exchange and trade policies that required close relations with the bureaucracy. On the other hand, countless interviewees explained that the Islamic Republic's creation of border markets and free-trade zones in the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s enabled cross-border connections to the international economy that contravened commercial regulations aimed at limiting imports.Footnote15 Thus the trade liberalization that was adopted throughout the post-war era did not only fail to reduce smuggling, but helped facilitate new modes of it. Consequently, it was the interaction with state institutions along with the creation of networks to avoid the official regulatory system that led to the rise of smuggling, not the mere presence of a desire to skirt state administration.
This evasion of state taxes and regulations has had a negative impact on state coffers and state-owned industries and their employees. Yet, the Islamic Republic seems to have had a high level of tolerance for these sorts of activities. The smuggling of consumer goods does not damage the interests of many dominant sectors within society. First, some agents of the state directly profit from the corruption associated with large-scale smuggling enterprises. Both individual state employees, such as customs officials, and state-affiliated organizations benefit from their role as gatekeepers and exempted commercial entrepreneurs. Smuggling also provides goods that are consumed by the urban middle and upper classes. Assam tea, Japanese-made textiles, European cigarettes, Moulinex household appliances and many other imported consumer products that make their way through the commercial networks are demanded by wealthier urban Iranians who consume them as markers of status. The modern shopping arcades that have transformed the urban landscape are a testament to the implicit value the government places on consumption. Iranians speak of how the state permitted and permeated smuggled goods for the sake of appearances, emphasizing the cultural cache of stores being able to display variety and knowledge of global consumer commodities (Khosravi, Citation2008). While standard treatments of the Islamic Republic define the regime's social base as being restricted to the lower classes, this perspective elides the less direct ways in which consumerist patterns address the preferences of the expanding and expecting middle and upper-middle classes. Additionally, smuggling provides employment and income for working-class people in urban and rural areas in the geographic periphery, while simultaneously marginalizing them and limiting their competition with state-affiliated organized labour. Finally, the discourse of smuggling acts to empower and justify periodic state actions against this ‘crisis’ and ‘pathology’, for which the only solution is the coercive power of the state. Thus, not only does the informal economy work in conjunction with formal institutions and projects, but it meets certain interests of state actors, although not national developmental objectives or desires for equality. The state exercises power despite and because of the non-juridical nature of the activities (Reno, Citation2001).
Smuggling goods, displacing bazaari networks
Most policy-oriented analysts have discussed the largely perverse effects of smuggling on social welfare, government revenue, domestic production, monitoring of the quality of goods, employment and communities in the border region (Bhagwati & Hansen, Citation1973; Dominguez, Citation1975). Anthropologically oriented studies, on the other hand, examine smuggling as reflections of neoliberal governmentality, economic forms and subjectivities (Ong, Citation2006; Roitman, Citation2004). In this second section of the paper, we will discuss an effect of smuggling that remains unexplored from either perspective – the influence of smuggling on existing commercial sectors, specifically the organization of value chains in the bazaars (i.e., the network of distribution of goods from producers or importers to wholesalers and retailers).Footnote16
Our field research in Iran made clear to us that many of the imported goods sold in Iran's bazaars do not arrive directly or by purely legal means. One journalist estimated that two-thirds of all goods sold in the Tehran bazaar in the 1990s was imported via smuggling networks (The Wall Street Journal, 7 December 1998). This high estimate may or may not be accurate, but the processes through which bazaaris become participants engineer a new set of social relationships and network qualities. For instance, some bazaaris have turned to a shadow economy to access commercial cards (kart-i bazargani) or hard currency. The proliferation of parallel markets and multiple sources of hard currency and commodities have forced the bazaars’ networks to extend well beyond the social space of the bazaar and, thus, have introduced a larger and more diverse group of people into the commercial world. As some scholars of labour have pointed out, the growth of informal economies in the post-Fordist era has segmented labour markets and created conflicts of interest and ideology between those employed in the unionized, formal market and newcomers who are socialized in informal economies (Castells & Portes, Citation1989). Traders located on the capital-saturated shores of the Persian Gulf involved in long-distance trade of mass-produced consumer goods from all corners of the world and across the region presumably have a different cultural compass than bazaaris who used to be engaged in long-term and typically face-to-face exchange with transaction partners who were connected via cross-cutting social webs and systems of credit. Crucially, smuggling networks have particular qualities that affect the types of interpersonal relations forged and, consequently, the regulatory structure of the bazaar. The prevalence of smuggling networks and the bazaaris’ participation in them have unwittingly transformed the bazaars’ communal regulatory system.
The specific case of Ali Ra'isi and the carpet sector in Qum described at the outset of this paper concretely illustrates several of the issues at play in extra-legal commercial activities. This episode also exemplifies the many means by which state officials and regulations shape, infiltrate and spawn commercial networks. The role and interest of state agents in facilitating, collaborating and structuring commerce chronicled in Ali Ra'isi's story collapse and redraw the boundaries between state and bazaar. This episode illustrates how the bazaari networks can be mobilized to identify, isolate and ultimately remove a person who was trusted initially, but later violated the interests and principles of loyalty to the group. In accessing this communal strength and dynamic, it is important to remember that this rapid collective response was possible for a number of reasons in this case. First, these events took place shortly after the revolution, when the bazaars’ networks were far more robust than they are now. We would expect that this sort of banding together has become more difficult and less common over time. In fact, we were never told of a similar case taking place in more recent years. Also, unlike Tehran, Qum was a small city, with a population of approximately 200,000 at the time of the revolution and correspondingly a small commercial centre allowing for more effective co-ordination and shaming. It is also important to note that Ali Ra'isi was a relative newcomer to the bazaar and of lower standing than many in the merchant community and was thus a more vulnerable member of the ‘criminal network’. Finally, carpets have particular characteristics associated with the non-standardized nature of the commodity that produce particularly tight-knit relations between traders, even when they are competitors (Fanselow, Citation1990; Keshavarzian, Citation2007).
Ra'isi's tale, moreover, underscores changes in the nature of social relations that make up the bazaar. To begin with, smuggling networks are typically not expected to last for extended periods of time because actors are arrested, commodities may not reach their destination and laws frequently change.Footnote17 Newspaper accounts touted stories of ‘profiteering’, ‘hoarding’ and ‘usurious’ bazaaris engaging in ‘smuggling’ activities and cast doubt on their loyalties to the revolution and new regime. Regardless of the level of fidelity to the new order, bazaaris underscored how the instability of smuggling networks prevented them from making credible and prolonged commitments to one another. The providers of goods are in a precarious position since they cannot guarantee future shipments. Meanwhile, purchasers knowing the precarious supply situation are always prepared to switch to other products or importers with more certain importing channels. In this process, specialization in a commodity or profession has waned, with experience and expertise being replaced by political contacts and risk-taking by new and sometimes transient participants in the commercial world.
The postrevolutionary commercial regulations outlawed certain activities, with the nature of both the crimes and the criminals themselves changing.Footnote18 Criminal behaviour was always rooted in political language – crimes became an expression of violating the laws of the state as ‘crimes against the state’, which was in fact Islamic law as counterdistinctive to commercial law (Alam, Citation2004). The language used by the complainants marked the criminal merchants as ungodly, anti-Islamic and simple thieves.Footnote19 The Islamic state became clear in its strategy; there was no need to punish the merchants publicly in court, they had simply to point fingers at un-Islamic behavior and the bazaar would punish those individuals.Footnote20 The state counted on its moral and coercive authority to induce the bazaar community to shame these ‘criminals’ by making examples of them and mobilizing their networks to exclude these individuals from the community. This was not without consequences, however.
The norm of face-to-face and communally observed transactions of the embedded market has given way to the secrecy, if not complete anonymity,Footnote21 of ‘the black market’. As we will see below, the shame and embarrassment that bazaaris feel for engaging with ‘disreputable people’ and being criminalized also limits the extent to which they discuss their activities. This secretive nature hinders the development of cross-cutting ties among large groups of people that is critical for the exchange of information and monitoring, let alone a sense of solidarity and shared fate. By its very definition, smuggling fosters opaque relations that are invisible to those who are not directly involved in the exchanges, whether they are customs officials or members of the bazaar. While those participating in illegal activities may be avoiding authorities, they are inadvertently marring transparency among bazaaris since they refrain from exchanging information with and about trading partners.
Smuggling networks tend to foster ‘strong’ hierarchical ties among actors directly involved in the transactions, but since colleagues no longer share information with one another, smuggling does little to foster ‘weak’ and diffuse ties that are important bridging mechanisms for co-ordinating actions and accessing resources (Granovetter, Citation1973). These exclusionary commercial channels have fragmented the bazaar and impeded the elaboration of horizontal and more expansive networks. In many cases nodes in the smuggling network (e.g. exporters located abroad or large-scale importers located in Iran) may be unknown to those further down the supply chain. When we discussed smuggling with a tea wholesaler in the Tehran bazaar, he repeatedly expressed uneasiness that these quasi-legal transactions are conducted over the phone. He said he is never certain who the importers are and where they are located, if they held government positions, were in Dubai, or were members of the bazaar. He rhetorically asked, ‘How can you have any kind of a relationship with someone you haven't seen?’ His anxiety was not associated with telecommunications or physical distance, but instead the social void that prevented him from recognizing the exchange as a ‘relationship’.
Nonetheless place does matter, and smuggling has de- and re-territorialized commercial networks away from the bazaars (Hazbun, Citation2008). Now bazaari merchants explained that they must maintain associations with a wide variety of actors ranging from importers in the Gulf region to smugglers in Iran's periphery as exemplified by Ali Ra'isi's simultaneous relationships with carpet-producing bazaaris in Qum, the clergy and operatives in Iran's border region. Of course, many of these transactions are conducted via middlemen, but what is important for our discussion of the bazaars’ regulatory capacity is that these relations are now dispersed and no longer localized in a single place. On two different occasions, we were told that to understand commerce in postrevolutionary Iran it would be more useful to interview people in Dubai or ‘around Valiasr Square’, by which the glassware salesperson meant employees of ministries, rather than traders in the Tehran bazaar. Thus, this new commercial regime has diminished the face-to-face and regular interactions in a plurality of spheres that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s. Networks are resources that are spatially specific; they are produced and reproduced through regularized interactions in specific physical locations (e.g. shops, homes, neighbourhoods and mosques). While technology (e.g. cell phones, fax machines and e-mail) may help to produce new spheres, they seem to lack the multiplex, cross-cutting and long-term characteristics that come with geographic proximity and may cultivate forms of solidarity.
Finally, smuggling relations tend to be top-down and highly unequal. The few state agents who enjoy state protection or the off-shore monopolists that dominate the imports are buffered from direct contact with wholesalers and retailers by various levels of brokers designed to make and keep activities invisible, indistinct and constantly fluctuating. The coercive nature of smuggling networks is also evident in the threats of violence and physical coercion that exist at various levels of the contraband process. While the state's criminalization of certain forms of trade introduces institutionalized coercion, stories swirl around the bazaar about the smugglers who intimidate bazaaris.
Smuggling, therefore, is figuratively and discursively produced by state agents (e.g. customs agents and policy-makers) and institutions (e.g. commercial laws and ministerial policies), but its effects extend beyond the relationship between state and smuggler. These trans-local practices and forms of capital accumulation challenge bazaaris who are simultaneously willing participants, grudging partners and vengeful rivals. Following Talal Asad's argument adumbrated by David Scott, bazaaris have been conscripted into the postrevolutionary order and are thus neither volunteers nor victims. Rather they are ‘coercively reorganized by the material and epistemic violence of a modern regime of power and forcibly inserted into a global order in a state of subordination and dependence’ (Scott, Citation2004, p. 129). This circuitry ushers an alternative impression of the bazaar – one that implicates specific individuals as smugglers cum bazaaris. These everyday practices and perceptions cast a shadow over intra-bazaari relations, which has been the dynamic force necessary for collective identity formation and the regulatory apparatus.
The burdened subject of smuggling
Bazaars are moral economies as well as exchange relations, which implies that the displacing of the bazaars’ commercial structures disorients its moral compass. From its outset, the Islamic Republic, especially Khomeini, valorized bazaaris, not as economic agents, but as ‘honourable’ and ‘pious’ people and representing a quintessential ‘traditional’ space. In Khomeini's speeches and writing, he described the bazaar as an important and viable ‘Islamic’ economy and a bulwark against cultural imperialism and Western capitalism (Khomeini, Citation1981–Citation1982). Khomeini proclaimed, ‘The bazaaris, the middle class and the oppressed (mustaz'afin) carried the responsibility for the revolution. They were out in the streets demonstrating for this revolution, putting their lives in danger’.Footnote22 He continued by associating the bazaaris with the segment of society ‘oppressed’ under the Shah's rule: ‘Everyone in our country was oppressed (mustaz'afin), from the ‘ulama to the bazaaris and the agriculturalists. We were a country of mustaz'afin’ (Khomeini, Citation1981–Citation1982). Oppression hence became tied much more to one's sociopolitical position than to one's economic power and interests.
Therefore, for the regime there was no contradiction between fashioning an economy that allegedly met the needs of the downtrodden and being positioned as ‘pro-bazaar’. The regime could continue to valorize the bazaaris and develop a complex set of restrictions on trade aimed at directing resources for the eight-year war with Iraq as well as a set of policies which aimed at redistributing wealth to the disadvantaged and marshalling the economic resources to consolidate the regime. Yet, for bazaaris, who were largely supporters of the revolution and many of whom were allies of Khomeini, the policies threatened their interests and social standing. Bazaaris’ status within postrevolutionary Iran was based on prerevolutionary assumptions about their imagined religiosity even as their position in the rapidly changing revolutionary society was in flux.Footnote23 These assumptions were predicated on a historical narrative in which the mercantile community was a critical, even essential, component of twentieth-century political struggles that both offered the bazaars as sites for protest and their material and social resources as means for social mobilization (Parsa, Citation1989, Citation2000). Thus, bazaaris, as much as any social group in Iran, envisioned a postrevolutionary order that represented and empowered them.
Turning our attention back to the holy city of Qum, it was the head of the Union of Rug-Producers and Sellers and its Related Guilds of the Province of Qum, who, with exasperation and vitriol, summed up the fraught relationship between Qum's bazaaris and the Iranian regime. Dramatizing the status ascribed to bazaaris by the regime, the respected elder commented:
We were part of the revolution. We wanted the revolution, but we had no idea we had to change [our identity] into something different. There were all sorts of people who called themselves tujjar.Footnote24 They were not even in the rug business! One day they are hoeing earth, the next day they are telling us what to do with rugs.
This anxiety and shame was occasionally evident in the interviews that we conducted. It is useful to quote at length from an interview with someone we call Hajj Karimi, in which he discusses his involvement in what he recalled as the heyday of carpet smuggling:
[Indeed,] we were smugglers. Do you know how we discovered the route to smuggle? It was the same method that opium would leave Iran and went to Dubai. One night, Hajj Hamid came to me and said that his dealer thought they could get the carpets out on the same boats as the opium. First, I was shocked. Opium is the one thing I do not approve of. I mean to smoke it is one thing, to be in the presence of manqalFootnote25 is also acceptable, but to be part of the trade – this was equivalent to death. But once I saw where the opium was located on the boat [I was horrified]; you know it was important for the opium not to be touching the carpets. I said to Nakhoda [Captain] Ali, ‘Don't place the opium in the middle of the carpets. People pray on those carpets!’ Nakhoda Ali responded, ‘That would never happen’.
The common knowledge and reference to Nakhoda Ali's commitment to prayer and the public display of piety is significant in the method of revealing this ‘public secrecy’ which is smuggling (Taussig, Citation1999). After ascertaining our shared knowledge of Nakhoda Ali, Hajj Karimi comfortably and eloquently told the tale of smuggling routes, but always couched in the language of piety with sincerity:
I was younger and stronger then, so late into the night we would set up the ‘adl [bales of carpets] and then we would put them in vans. And an hour before morning prayers we would drive the trucks ourselves. I would ask God for his guidance, his strength to protect us the pious [maumin] people … But our actions would be considered unfaithful to the state. They [the clergy] would think we were not good Muslims because we broke the rules of Islam. We lied and we cheated in their eyes. But we are men of God just like them. What does Imam ‘Ali say about this: ‘A person who turns a big issue out of a minor incident will be evaluated based on the greater violation’.
We would drive the trucks sometimes to a house in Tehran. Several men whose job was to transport the goods would take the ‘adl from us and we would drive back. But there were times when I would actually drive to Bandar ‘Abbas [on the Persian Gulf] and load the carpets onto the boats going to the port in Dubai and Sharjah. Usually within two to three days we would hear from our contacts in Dubai that the carpets had reached them safely, and then we usually would receive payments after the fact. Receiving the cash was also tricky. I knew many men who did not receive any money for the carpets they transported. It was a risk but if you worked with the same group of men like we did, it was a successful and profitable business though every night I felt I was doing wrong.
Why would Hazrat-i Imam [Khomeini] allow this to happen?
I would even bring money back for other merchants in the bazaar and I would be paid for it. There was nothing wrong with that. I have a family and I would risk my life but also I wanted the members of the Society of Islamic Association of the Bazaar to also be part of the smuggling. So you know what I did? I would sometimes have them pack the ‘adl or help me put it in the van or come and pick up the money. This way they could never say I did it and they did not. The entire bazaar participated. This means the entire city knew about it; and this includes Ayatullah …Footnote27 I knew I was doing something wrong. But we were never given a choice [i.e., the regime never gave us a choice] … Everyone was participating; everyone was smuggling. And I helped many of them become rich and even become politically important. I can list the number of people I helped … they cannot now turn around and shame me; shame on them!
(Personal communication, 22 February 2002)
Hajj Karimi keenly describes the risks and anxieties involved in being simultaneously subjected to the world of smuggling and the attendant burden of the subjectivity ascribed to him by the regime. He explained the ways in which he tried to manage this risk by using ‘the same group’ and binding the hands of as many bazaaris as possible and even the Islamic association within the carpet sector. He explicitly implicates the religious and political establishment, who wielded power within the smuggling networks and through other hierarchies. Hajj Karimi's analysis goes further by arguing for the moral legitimacy of his and others’ illegal actions. He emphasizes how smuggling was the norm during the era in the 1980s when statist economic policies prevailed and ‘choice was limited’. This is the standard argument heard by private business actors: they claim that the state with its bad policies drove them to do this. ‘We had no choice’, is the refrain. To invoke Janet Roitman, the merchants in Iran viewed their actions as the ‘rationality of illegality’ (Roitman, Citation2004, p. 88). In her reading of trafficking in the Chad River Basin, this practice banded together the traffickers with the authorities in a kind of familial collusion. As in Iran, there is a kind of ‘permissibility’ of illegal behavior, which is protected not as an informal or alternative part of the economy, but very much as part of ‘the economy’.
Yet, Hajj Karimi is making a more radical argument that was rarely expressed by bazaaris and acknowledged by researchers. He declares: ‘We were smugglers’ and ‘The entire bazaar participated in it’. The bazaaris were not simply subjected to an economy of smuggling, but were its subjects. They were also the Islamic Republic's idealized and idolized pious citizens and were burdened with upholding the status quo – one that simultaneously anointed them and rendered their commercial activities as illicit. The regime was after all the architect of this new political endeavor which now subjugated its citizens as amoral and corrupt. Hajj Karimi's exposé implicated ‘the bazaar’ (as well as the clergy and the regime) and disassembled smuggling to reveal all of the actors, alliances and alibis. Divulging this was anathema to the bazaaris and infringed upon the norm of speaking about smuggling and immoral behavior as something that was pervasive, but only as something that ‘others do’. For bazaaris, Hajj Karimi's behaviour contravened the responsible participation in the everyday experiences of working and living in the bazaar, while keeping smuggling invisible and categorically different. Hajj Karimi's description of the thought process and knowing participation in the act of smuggling exposed the bazaaris to moral judgment. Not all merchants are leading guides of morality in the community, but, by revealing communal secrets, Hajj Karimi cast doubts on the legitimacy of the entire community – the entire bazaar.
Conclusions
We began with an account about bazaaris seeking to maintain the boundary between themselves and ‘a smuggler’ – an individual many of them had employed to export their carpets, but whom they saw as eviscerating their communal relationships, moral standing and their whole state of being. In the 1980s the carpet producers in Qum still had the social fabric to rally around to regulate their community by drawing and defending a clear boundary between ‘the bazaar’ and ‘earth-hoeing’ interlopers. But over time, and as engagements with ‘smuggling’ continued and became more elaborate, that boundary between bazaari and smuggler has become precarious and porous. The rise of the extra-legal trade, the broader political economy and social morphology that constituted the bazaar and gave meaning to the bazaari was dismantled. And with this their subjective identities were no longer grounded in social relations or moral certitude. Hajj Karimi's recollections reveal the very nature of ‘the honourable bazaari’ turning ‘dishonourable’ by the practices of smuggling promoted legal alterity. The members of the bazaari community found new ways to translate the law by deploying techniques that tarnished their most cherished commodity and their community's essential interstitial ally: their credibility.
Furthermore, our ethnographic and field research unearths the role of illicit, licit, informal and formal practices that govern the regulatory regimes of the bazaar and its relation to the state and the broader political economy. Bazaaris often argue that the Islamic Republic's commercial tactics spearheaded by Iran's war-time prime minister, Mir Hossein Musavi, were in contradistinction to what they assume to be the laissez-faire preferences of the spiritual founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatullah Khomeini. The actions taken by bazaaris as retold in this paper often justifies and even legitimizes what they understood as illicit, disruptive and irreparable. While this narrative is unsurprising in comparison to other contemporary cases, it also ignores how economic liberalism and free-trade policies of the 1990s not only did not stem the tide of illicit trade, but helped underwrite it.
Smuggling involves geographic, social, legal and moral transgression with each boundary crossing destabilizing categories and dyadic frameworks. If the so-called upstart Ali Ra'isi was trying to pass as a bazaari, the bazaaris were seeking to bypass the state's regulatory system with the help of his associates, some of whom were employed by the state. Despite initial windfalls, this process resulted in an ultimate tragic failure for both the would-be bazaari and the reluctant smuggler. At its core smuggling enables profiteering, but it also produces the sociological dislocation of the bazaar community and the moral displacement of the bazaari. It is with an eye to these various micropractices that are socially processual that we regard smuggling as an ethical struggle. Indeed it is precisely because smuggling effects are generative, have multiple contexts and operate across various scales that we advocate a collaborative, multi-sited and interdisciplinary approach to the study of informality and smuggling. The anthropological lens and ethnographic method lends itself to making visible and investigating the agentive and experiential processes at play. Meanwhile, the paper's more sociopolitical reading of state policies and media representations explains what is at stake for the disparate constituencies of the smuggling process.
Our paper builds on recent scholarship on informality and smuggling. We adopt the growing consensus among anthropologists, political scientists and sociologists that informality is not a self-contained category or a distinct economy. Rather, it should be viewed as a process and set of relationships involving disparate entities, including state officials and employing state institutions. However, unlike many popular and scholarly works, we do not read informality in opposition to ‘the state’ or ‘neoliberalism’, but as a series of social relations operating within a world made up of uneven commercial formations and regulatory systems. ‘Smugglers’ and trade alliances are not autonomous from commercial agents, credit streams and distribution channels, just as the meaning of smuggling and the bazaar are defined by historical formations and political discourses. Our examination of bazaars and interviews with bazaaris not only illustrated the joint enterprises at work between recognized mercantile personnel, but also exposed the limitations on transforming smugglers into bazaaris and maintaining the networks that constitute the bazaar. This implies that the smuggling process is in part a struggle over the reputations and contested identities of these commercial actors both before the law and within the ethical worlds that they inhabit.
One may expect that in this conflict over social status and identity the bazaaris could turn to the regime that has staked part of its legitimacy on its ability to create a just and moral Islamic order. Yet, three decades after the revolution, at least some members of the establishment no longer see the bazaaris as symbols of morality and Islamic virtue. In response to then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's plan to institute a new VAT tax system in October 2008, bazaaris, initially in Isfahan and then other cities, organized the first postrevolutionary multi-day political action (Rooz, 14 October 2008).Footnote28 Within days, Kayhan, the principal state-owned newspaper that is often believed to reflect the views of the Leader, chastised these bazaari protesters as ‘smugglers’ (Rooz, 13 October 2008).Footnote29 The regime that had lauded the bazaaris’ revolutionary role and represented them as part of the historically ‘oppressed’ now used its mouthpiece quite literally to transform bazaaris into smugglers.
Acknowledgements
Earlier drafts of this paper benefited from the comments of participants and audience members at Pomona College, Loyola University and Yale University. We would like to especially thank Karen Hébert, Erik Harms, Nate Roberts, Firat Bozcali and the two anonymous reviewers at Economy and Society for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. Greta Scharnweber and Brendan Killory offered valuable suggestions, fresh pairs of eyes and much more.
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Notes on contributors
Narges Erami
Narges Erami received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International and Area Studies at Yale University.
Arang Keshavarzian
Arang Keshavarzian earned a PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University and is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.
Notes
1 Personal interview with Ali Ra'isi and his family. Members of Qum's bazaar confirmed this information, as did members of the women's Qur'anic class, which Ra'isi's mother attended.
2 The diversity is not only due to the larger number of interviewees, interviews and time spent as participant observer, but also produced by the different identities, backgrounds and approaches of the two researchers.
3 On how ‘communal relations’, ‘close-knit’ and ‘enduring relations’ foster trust, reciprocity, enlightened self-interest or a ‘spirit of goodwill’, see Dore (Citation1983), Ellickson (Citation1991) and Taylor (Citation1982).
4 A noteworthy exception to this general trend is the work on anthropology of the state (Ferguson, Citation1990; Mitchell, Citation2002; Scott, Citation1998; Sharma & Gupta, Citation2006).
5 This survey was conducted by Eqtesad-e Iran, January–February 2002 (p. 21).
6 For a comparison of news coverage in Iran with other countries, see Gillespie and McBride (Citation1996, p. 49).
7 By the estimates of the National Accounting Organization, the circulation of money in the informal economy exceeded the formal economy by 2,000 billion rials. The same report concluded that the informal economy equaled 20 per cent of the total economy (Hayat-e No, 30 October 2000).
8 On postrevolutionary policies, smuggling and ‘legal smuggling’ see special issues on ‘Legal smuggling’ in Eqtesad-e Iran (January–February 2002) and Barresiha-ye Bazargani (October–November 1998).
9 A time for drunken horses, a neorealist film by Bahman Ghobadi (Citation2000), is set in the mountainous border area between Iran and Iraq. The director dramatically shows the precarious lives of Kurdish smugglers involved in the import and export trade. Tea, tires and stationery supplies are among the goods being smuggled in the movie.
10 Duties and commercial taxes in Iran have historically been relatively low (see Nowshirvani, Citation1993).
11 Since smuggled goods are not taxed or subject to various duties, they are therefore far cheaper than goods that legally enter the country or are domestically produced. To demonstrate the price differential, Eqtesad-e Iran illustrated that a television set that arrives via a free-trade zone would only cost 970,000 rials (roughly $125), which is 24 per cent cheaper than a domestically produced equivalent and 38 per cent less than a television that is legally imported. Percentages have been calculated by the author from the prices presented in Eqtesad-e Iran, January–February 2002 (p. 15). The Wall Street Journal (8 February 2001) quotes a Pyrex importer in the Tehran bazaar: ‘“If it costs me a dollar to get a dish to Dubai, it costs $1.50 by the time it gets here,” the resilient trader says. He laughs, partly because his competitors face the same hurdles. “I think we just love to make things complicated.”’
12 Iran's non-tariff barriers are much higher and more pervasive than those of most other developing countries. A World Bank study of 43 developing countries for the period 1995–98 found that restrictive licensing conditions applied to just 10 per cent of imports and prohibitions applied to another 2 per cent. In contrast, even after the October 2000 replacement of many non-tariff barriers by their tariff equivalents, Iran's trade regime placed licensing conditions on 45 per cent of goods. Of the 43 countries in the study, only India made greater use of licensing restrictions (World Bank, Citation2001).
13 Since 1998, the list of eligible goods has been significantly expanded from 29 categories to 77 by the end of 2000.
14 This is very much an international trend (see Gillespie & McBride, Citation1996, pp. 40–54).
15 On the origins of free-trade zones in the Persian Gulf and how they helped forge a new political economic base for the Islamic Republic, see Keshavarzian (Citation2010).
16 This section draws mostly, but not exclusively, on research on the Tehran bazaar.
17 Several reports appeared in national papers about bazaaris breaking the law and being brought forth in front of the Standing Committee on Export-Import Regulations, which consists of members from the Central Bank and the ministries of commerce, industry, finance and customs. Punishments reported in the papers were severe. They were brought forth on charges of corruption with heavy fines and property losses (see Ittili'aat, 9 February 1985; 14 February 1985; 23 February 1985; 22 December 1986; 3 January 1987; 21 June 1987). The ratification of the export-import regulations occurred in part with a letter from Ayatullah Khomeini to Prime Minister Musavi and his cabinet ministers. The letter dated 5 January 1988 (Risalat) was part of a series of public exchanges between Khomeini and then-president Ali Khamenei over the conflict between the Council of Guardians and the Majlis. Musavi felt shackled by the Council of Guardians and expressed his frustration about his government in an interview (Kayhan, 10 January 1988; see Mallat, Citation1993, pp. 102–111; Moin, Citation2000, pp. 257–267).
18 What we mean by the changing nature of crimes and those who commit them is broadly depicted by the large number of ‘arrests’ by the police and popular committees of those violating Islamic sartorial norms or engaging in ‘unpious’ activities such as owning backgammon boards, playing cards and popular-music cassettes.
19 ‘Unofficial’ cases were brought to the offices of the ittihadiyyih which were discreetly sent to the offices of hadith to ascertain the ethical improprieties of mercantile behaviour (personal communication at the Centre for Hadith Research, Qum, Iran).
20 Personal communication with Dādgustarī-i Ustān-i Qum (Prosecution's Office of the Province of Qum).
21 We do not want to suggest that anonymity only has negative social repercussions. As studies of the internet show, anonymity also allows people to explore new relationships and identities which are less restricted by social constraints and prejudices (see Turkle, Citation1996). However, given the structure of the bazaar and criminal nature of smuggling, the anonymity involved in smuggling arrangements makes it ill-suited for the reproduction of long-term and cross-cutting relations.
22 In his writings on the status of the bazaar, he proposed that the bazaari class represented people with the best intentions and the bazaar should be an independent space, with the government only overseeing the affairs but not interfering unless Islamic tenets were broken (see Imam va Iqtisad-i Islami, Citation2003). For an analysis of Imam Khomeini's populist message on unity (hamah ba ham) and hambastagi, see Behdad (Citation1994, pp. 806–8). For an analysis of Imam Khomeini's populist terminology, see Bayat (Citation1997, pp. 41–6).
23 For nuanced accounts of changes in society, specifically in terms of social rank and religiosity, see Adelkhah (Citation2000, pp. 68–78) and Manoukian (Citation2012).
24 The term tujjar is used interchangeably with bazaari in this quote. Members of the bazaar are aware of the negative connotation associated with the latter. Most importantly they want to reject the derogatory connotations associated with the latter. Thus, the term tujjar is how they describe themselves and evokes a professionalized, knowledgeable trader, a businessman and an entrepreneur.
25 A brazier which holds lit coals; in the vernacular this term simply means ‘opium smoking’.
26 Narges Erami had met and interviewed Nakhoda Ali.
27 Narges Erami turned the recorder off at this point and pointed out to the hajji that those ayatullahs were alive and politically and socially active. Any stories of collusion against the state would be problematic for him.
28 Retrieved from http://www.roozonline.com/archives/2008/10/post_9562.php.
29 Retrieved from http://fararu.com/prtgu79q.ak9n34prra.html; retrieved from http://www.roozonline.com/archives/2008/10/post_9547.php. Other news sources described the protesting bazaaris as ‘club-wielders’ and ‘troublemakers’.
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