Ordibehesht Book Has Arrived
The Culture and Publishing Service of the Iran Book News Agency (IBNA) announced that the book “Ordibehesht Book; Ethnography of the Tehran International Book Fair,” authored by Mehdi Kamous, has been published by the Iran Book and Literature House and Shanl Publications. This book is an ethnographic study of the 33rd Tehran International Book Fair, held in May 2022.
In this book, the author attempts to present a narrative different from official and governmental accounts or those arising from the demands of the private sector, large publishers, and distributors. This qualitative research focuses on the behavioral quality of participants at the Tehran Book Fair. Perhaps the important function of this book will be to narrate how different meanings of books, the publishing industry, government cultural policies, and stakeholders become hegemonic in confronting the Tehran International Book Fair.
In a section of this book, we read: “The ethnography of the Tehran International Book Fair in this text has paid attention to the urban components of the book fair and has tried to understand the interactive relationships between the physical and non-physical elements of the book fair and people.” The three pillars considered in this book are physical, non-physical, and human. The author has considered Lynch’s 7 elements for understanding the good form of the exhibition. These elements include surveillance and authority, access, fit or compatibility, meaning or sense, vitality, efficiency, and justice.
Moreover, by emphasizing “Henri Lefebvre’s” theory and the theory of “social reproduction,” it attempts to conceptualize the space that the book fair establishes in relation to its audience. This concept emerges from the ideas of “perceived space,” “lived space,” and “imagined space.”
He considers visiting the book fair as “symbolic cultural capital” and, based on the views of “Pierre Bourdieu,” explains three states: “embodied,” “objectified,” and “institutionalized” in connection with the book fair. The author considers the book fair a “habitus” and the fair itself a field that can lead to cultural capital and symbolic cultural capital.
Furthermore, it addresses the topic of public space and the book fair. Based on Jürgen Habermas’s viewpoint and his three spheres – public, private, and state – the author believes the book fair is a public sphere at the micro-level, but its dimensions are observable at the meso- and macro-levels. The presence of private publishers and people together is seen as a space for the formation of criticism of official policies.
The central question of the ethnographic research on the book fair is based on identifying, describing, and explaining the behavioral patterns of participants in interaction with the exhibition venue and exhibition space. The author believes that the participants at the book fair were not “others” and that he saw himself among them. For this reason, he has outlined the data presentation method as a combination of auto-ethnography, “confessional,” and ultimately “storytelling.”
Kamous considers the book fair as a text that he has read and written about. The aim of this reading was to discover the language of the participating people, or the “book fair-goers,” not to discover the grammar of the book fair. Therefore, this book offers a different approach, not merely content with presenting quantitative statistics and information, but also providing an anthropological and sometimes sociological perspective on its research subject, going beyond mere factual presentation.
“Ordibehesht Book” might be considered a unique experience in viewing book fair audiences. This perspective can be generalized to research areas in the cultural sphere, leading to effective planning and interaction with the audience of cultural events through these ethnographic observations.
