The protests in Iran have foregrounded the opposition between the individual and the state. Both on the street and in the media, the figure of the individual—specifically a young woman as a lone protestor—has been a defining image of Iran in 2022. Kinship has not received much reflection. In this essay, I consider unresolved questions posed by the protests to kinship, both in relation to the individual and the state, to offer a different perspective on the current situation.

In Iran the order of things is as much a matter of state as of household, from the regulation of sexuality to the distribution of benefits. Kinship often troubles the distinction between private and public; it constitutes a pervasive relational network across Iranian society. Kinship highlights how violence in the protests marks both a sharp distinction separating “us” from “them” and simultaneously a close bond tying these conflicting sides together. Kinship creates alliances but also generates conflict, to the extent that affection and violence appear as inseparable. Seen from this viewpoint, the relationship between desire and law becomes impossible to disentangle.

Families of the victims of state repression figure prominently in oppositional news outlets, offering alternative accounts of what happened to their dear ones, and denouncing how authorities handled the bodies of the deceased—especially in the difficulties and delays of returning the deceased to their families. While state authorities want these victims to be buried with minimal funerary rites, families advertise these funerals which become occasion for further protests and document them on social media, grieving in a way that raises solidarity, at least abroad. Family opposition to the state has a long history in Iran and became even more relevant after the 1979 Revolution. Families who have been interpellated into violent histories of the Revolution have denounced torture against opponents of the Islamic Republic and memorialized family members whom the state aimed to erase (see for example Makaremi 2011 or Talebi 2011).

At the same time, the family has also been a central concern for the emerging modern nation state since the early twentieth century, especially in the domains of health, education, and law, to the extent that state and family can be seen as mutually constitutive. Since 1979, the revolutionary state has invested in the family even further, retooling what the monarchy had done while expanding its reach and drawing on the vocabulary of family ties to provide an alternative description of the relationship between the state and its citizens than that of secularism. Many families identify with the state as provider of material and symbolic means (see for example Wellman 2021). Ultimately these ideas find their sometimes-ambivalent referent in Shi'i traditions of the family of the Prophet and their descendants, given the resistance to political authority these genealogies entail. In turn, such traditions have been inflected by European and American notions of the family to the extent that, despite efforts to the contrary, the ideal family in contemporary Iran might appear as a variant of the nuclear consumer family presented in advertising the world over.

These oppositional and symbiotic relations between state and family complicate the picture of the lone protester. Whether for the state or against it, the family is intrinsically intertwined with politics. These interrelations show how the opposition between “us” and “them” is lived through kinship: political affiliation might be an individual choice but finds its meaning in a network of familial relations that determine belonging and draw lines of partition between who is with us and who is not.

However, this partition between us and them still does not account for how kinship relations are themselves at once the site of the most affectionate companionships and of the gravest political conflicts. Over the years, I have heard accounts of family members informing on relatives and of numerous families divided along political lines, with one brother a refugee and the other a high-ranking state functionary. Political and familiar relations intertwine in complex ways, revealing a transversal world in which attachments and separations are entangled: kinship ties separate as much as they unite. In the past few months, deep rifts within several top elite families made the news. Members of the family of the Supreme Leader and of the Director-General of the state-controlled media (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) publicly condemned state repression, taking distance from their high-ranking relatives. Their open letters made news because of their family affiliations, breaching at once the order of the state and that of the family.

The nuclear family in contemporary Iran dominates advertising and state propaganda. Many couples live together unmarried. That said, kinship here as always involves a broader set of relations. The Persian terms khanevadeh and famil are used to indicate the residential and economic unit of two parents (or one) and their children. But these terms continue to refer to a larger kin group comprised of two distinct lineages, paternal and maternal, each of which plays a crucial role in the socialization of children, the economy of the household and the life of its members. People spend a lot of time and effort relating to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins on both sides. Social life is khanevadeh life.

This larger, bifurcated kin group is the site of intimacy and reciprocity but also of endless confrontation and rivalry. Competitive struggles among kin members have often been described to me in the idiom of war: they are part of the everyday. Conflicts among kin are as much about taking the side of some members against others, as they are about defining oneself in relation to one’s family, and therefore also to one’s own self and society. Kin groups strive to contain and normalize whatever is perceived as queer and “inappropriate” (namanaseb), going as far as shunning (qahr) those members who do not conform, though they are far from operating on stable norms or fixed alliances to the extent that reconciliation (ashti) is often an option in the long run (Behzadi 1994). The relative and contingent positionality of kin members defines what counts as appropriate at a specific moment, in a constant state of tense alert that is about competition and money as it is about filial piety and recognition.

Gender relations are intrinsic to these intimate conflicts that they participate in defining. Patriarchy is a question of kinship. While men are often recognized as de facto masters of the household, women run separate economies of money and affect: they build alliances and wage “battles” to maintain and enhance their status among the two lineages. And while often wife and husband work together to secure their hegemony on either linage, their disagreements quickly redraw alliances along lineage lines, pitting the wife’s and husband’s relatives against one another. Brothers and sisters who meet affectionately on a regular base might be at the same time be engaged in long-term wars on questions of inheritance or recognition. Conversely, they might form close knit support groups. Love and hate are inextricably linked and equally constitutive of family relations.

All of this can be seen in the diverse positions of women interviewed about the current practice of unveiling in a Radio Marz podcast (for which I thank Maryam Roosta), depending on age and class. Women interviewed saw themselves at the center of a set of concentric relations: husband) parents) kin group) society) young men on the street) police/state). Each of these concentric circles correlates with latent but pervasive oscillation in each woman’s relationship with herself. Whether or not they unveil, the women interviewed had the support and understanding of their husbands. Each woman depicted her father as deeply invested in what relatives might think if their daughter unveiled.

Alternating between their own wishes and those of their relatives, several of the women interviewed explained that their veiling practices are contextual. They found it easier to go out unveiled on anonymous streets or in cities other than where they are from. They expressed apprehension for the words and gaze of their kin group. Fear and trepidation but also filial feelings accompany their accounts. One mother interviewed on the podcast admitted that she has controlled her daughters’ wardrobe out of concern for the ways in which they will be perceived and treated; she highlighted questions of respect, propriety, and the importance of staying out of potential trouble with the police or with young men. Religion matters in these testimonies but, at least for the women interviewed, religious norms intersect with kinship in a way difficult to disentangle: the women discuss the degree of piety of their father’s and mother’s sides of the family as part of the complex relationality they entertain with both their parents and the broader kin group.

Mindful of the relationship that binds their fathers and mothers and, to a lesser extent, if they are married their husbands to the kin group, women interviewed in the podcast hesitated to put their close relatives in an awkward position. Some see unveiling in front of kin as the ultimate act of defiance and self-assertion, a deeper rift than walking unveiled down a street full of strangers (the neighborhood constitutes in this regard an intermediate space between kin and public space). Society and state function as a looser configuration of the family gaze, whose normativity extends beyond the veil itself to matters of self-presentation in public. One of the interviewees explained how, unveiled on the street, she was approached by a woman in her mid-sixties who, while complimenting her, said: “however, next time why don’t you comb your hair dear?”

Kinship relations question the simple opposition between an individual’s freedom and her oppression that most accounts of the 2022 protests rely on. They suggest instead acknowledging the intrinsic ambivalence of relationships. While kinship might appear as a space of comfort and a line of demarcation between who is with us and who is against us, it is also the site of the articulation of the deepest strife among “us.” From this perspective the unleashing of relentless violence appears to be more the mark of an unbearable closeness than the sign of radical difference. Violence is not solely the work of external others from which one can differentiate oneself, but is a modality so interwoven with one own’s becoming in the world, that it is an intrinsic part of how one is made to relate to self and others. Conflict is relation. Violence disrupts as much as it constitutes, revealing how intimacy and enmity are uncannily related. Such is the play of law and desire. Rather than see them as opposite, considering how law and desire are mutually constitutive does not only trouble the difference between good and evil, but forces reworking the meaning of politics in Iran and elsewhere, and rereading anthropological theories we had taken for granted.