The Poor and the State

Abstract This article explores the relationship between the poor and the state, emphasizing how the state's politics of citizenship are overshadowed by the politics of community. Focusing on the postrevolutionary era in Iran, particularly during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), it examines how nonelite Iranians’ quiet acts of citizenship interacted with the state's efforts to reconfigure them as maktabi citizens—religiously pious and ideologically committed to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Contrary to the notion that the poor were swayed by the regime's propaganda, which idolized the male martyr, it reveals that the poor, particularly women, engaged in collective efforts to assert an ethics of care, addressing the community's needs and values. The article contends that the urban poor, rather than being passive victims, foot soldiers, or mere recipients of patronage, interacted strategically and pragmatically with the Iranian state's expectations of them as model citizens. Drawing from original ethnography in a marginalized neighborhood in the city of Qom, it analyzes the acts of citizenship by these men and women and their family members, who contested, negotiated, repaired, and complied with the state's subject-molding projects while emphasizing the maintenance of community and family values during the 1980–88 period.