To Have an Ethos Transplant, as It Were: Iranian Organizations in Washington DC in Early 21st Century

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork from 2004 to 2006 among a range of Iranian organizations in Washington, D.C., this article argues that the studied organizations were engaged, without being always necessarily aware of it or formulating it as such, in what we may call an “ethos transplant:” a transformation of “Iranian character” and political culture to make it more susceptible to “democracy;”a subject-making project in the Foucauldian sense. We trace this medicalized discourse about “national traits” and “political culture” to the 19th century and review several outbursts of this approach in the Iranian and international scene thenceforth. Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, is discussed at length as the epitome of this kind of approach