Fear and Modernization: Formation of Fear and Insecurity in Contemporary Iran

This paper is a cultural analysis of fear as a cultural problem in contemporary Iran. This research intends to de-familiarize the function and situation of fear in the processes of Iranian contemporary modernization and change. This paper examines the question of: how do modernizations processes consisting of urbanization, nationalization, bureaucratization, and technologization can impacted on the experience of fear in contemporary Iran. Here we diagnose three patterns of fear as structural fear in contemporary Iran including the historical, mythological and tribal fears as the residual pattern, and finally the urban, political and technological fears as the dominant pattern, and the cultural, mediatized and digital fears as the emergent pattern. This study has been done according to a cultural problemology approach that was developed by the writers of this paper; which is a combination of Foucault's genealogy and Raymond William's critical theory of mechanism of cultural change. The data used in this study are collected from the existing researches on insecurity in Iran. A secondary analysis method was implemented to analyze the data. To do so, first we gathered research texts and according to our theoretical and research aims we examined and analyzed them. This study shows fear is a pervasive social phenomenon in contemporary Iran. It differs from fear in pre-modern Iranian society. Here we deal with some modern types of fear such as gender related fears, urban fears, media fears, and global fears. Also, this study shows that there is a significant difference between Iranian real experiences of fear from their feeling of fear.