Mastery of life: mobility, interaction and connectivity among Iranians in Istanbul

This thesis examines the lives of Iranian people unfolded on the transnational terrain between Iran and Turkey. Migration and diaspora, while providing useful tools for understanding the movement of people, are often disembedded from the historical and social relations with others in the surrounding world. Iranians in particular, are often conceptualised in an association with a normative narrative of diaspora from Iran to Western countries. Building on an investigation into historical accounts as well as a 12-month ethnographic field research, this thesis explores into the ways in which transnational mobility is conceived, configured and practiced within the crisscrossed space between Iran and Turkey. Through the conceptual lenses such as ethics and aesthetics, convivial sociality and everyday interactions among the Iranians both living in Turkey and travelling between the two countries, the thesis zooms into the social, spatial and material connections and interactions that give shape to the transnational garment trade linking communities of Iranian people in Istanbul and Tehran. In doing so, I aim at translating abstract terms such as mobility and sociality into ethnographically informed understandings of the variegated population of Iranians in Turkey and display the disparate yet entwined migratory worlds that are often absent from much of works in migration and diaspora studies. By taking the historically saturated connections and vernacular interactions of migratory experiences into consideration, I propose a connected approach to migration and transnational mobility which instead of focusing on migrants and diasporic communities, reconceptualises such “mobile societies” in relation to the various forms of their embedded connections.