A Comparative Analysis of the Iranian Land Tenure Systems in pre 1962 Land Reform; Kurdistan Tenure System versus Boneh

Generally speaking, this article offers a critical analysis of the land tenure systems in Iran with an emphasis on land tenure system in Kurdistan and prior to the land reform in 1962. The objective of this article is to address the contradictory narratives that have taken shape regarding the geographical boundaries of Boneh in Iran. This is an attempt to offer a new and fundamental analytical alternative compared the existing literature, about the pre-capitalist land tenure systems in Iran. The article then attempts to provide a more comprehensive insight regarding the nature of the Bonehs, their variants and their characteristics exactly as they represented collective land tenure system. This system was the dominant land tenure system prior to the land reform of 1962 more known as Muzare-eh or sharecropping system. The Kurdistan's land tenure system is also compared with Bonehs which is known as a collective tenure system in Iran sometimes known as Muzare-eh. The authors claim here that Kurdistan's Muzare-eh system used to be different from Bonehs or its variants; nevertheless the plausibility of this claim require them to answer the question of how it could have been neglected by the existing literature that claim it was also a variant of Boneh. The authors think that answering such a question generates an epistemological gap between what they know about Iran and what they assume knowing about Kurdistan, while they collected ample evidence that indicate we dont know much about Kurdistan's land tenure system. The bigger issue is revealed where The authors came to learn about many literatures on rural development that have been produced based on the assumption that Kurdistan's sharecropping is also a variant of Boneh. Lambton, for example, studied land tenure system in Hasanabad village near Sanandaj (Kurdistan Prouince) in which she discussed the mode of division of crop among landlords and peasants. The authors launched an explorative study that helped them to her its findings for establishing a new argument on rural Kurdistan. This preliminary study motivated the second round of their study on other parts of Kurdistan. Parts of this study are presented in this paper.