ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development of concerns, debates, and policies over video in Iran in relation to the politico-cultural climate that influenced these concerns and subsequent policy-making. The private use of video and the operation of video clubs were initially considered by certain authorities to be a danger and a threat to the moral fabric of society. Such episodes of collective attitudes, fears, and actions framed as competing moral values have been differently theorized in different settings. In the United States, cultural sociologists have accounted for such public moral debates with the notion of “culture wars.” In Britain, such moral debates have been framed as episodes of “moral panics” within the context of deviance and criminology (Cohen, 1972). The analysis undertaken here of the reactions by Iranian elites and the public to video adopts a certain version of the theoretical models developed to examine episodes of moral panics. In the first section, this chapter consults the literature on theories of moral panic. In the second section, it explores a history of video in Iran in three episodes: the years of suspension (1979-1983); years of the ban (1983-1993); and the Islamization period (1993 onward). In the third section, I discuss the rhetoric of the official debate in order to assess the video controversy as an episode of moral panic. In the fourth section, I offer some explanations about the specificity of this case of “moral panic” in Iran. In examining the history of this communication medium in Iran, and the social-cultural contexts of its reception, I hope to offer a perspective on Iran that sheds light on its contemporary socio-political transformations.2
