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National conditions and local‐level political structures: patronage in prerevolutionary Iran
Author(s) -
BRADBURD DANIEL A.
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1983.10.1.02a00020
Subject(s) - politics , power (physics) , revenue , context (archaeology) , state (computer science) , political geography , population , political science , political economy , geography , economy , sociology , economics , archaeology , law , demography , physics , accounting , algorithm , quantum mechanics , computer science
Recent theoretical examinations of patron‐client relationships suggest that local conditions alone cannot account for their variant forms. Rather, it is argued that local‐level relationships can only be explained if seen within a larger political‐economic context. This paper employs a model of supralocal determination to account for the nature of patron‐client relationships among a tribal population in Kerman Province in south‐central Iran. The paper shows that in prerevolutionary Iran patrons derived material benefits from their clients while political clientism was absent. I argue that these local conditions arose through the overlay of Mohammad Reza Shah's oil‐based centralization of political power upon the already present, general pattern of an upward flow of wealth that characterized 19th‐ and 20th‐century Iran/Persia. [political anthropology, Middle East, patron‐client relations, state power and revenue, Iran]