Studies of marginalized youth in the Islamic Republic of Iran have focused almost exclusively on how structural constraints operate to thwart these young people’s transition to adulthood. There has been comparatively little work that has examined how youth in the lower crests of Iranian society actually cope with these precarious structural conditions. The result has been unbalanced hypotheses that argue that youth become stuck in long stretches of time during which they wait with uncertainty for an autonomous life, all the while neglecting the productive micro quests that youth engage in to resolve this uncertainty. The pursuit of face by low-income youth in Iran speaks to this very issue. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two cities in Iran, I find that through their engagement in this face system, young people create an alternative basis of social differentiation. By following the four moral criteria governing face behavior – autonomy, appearance, work and purity – youth are able to win gains in the social and economic spheres that enable them to incrementally improve their lot in life. These findings reveal how these young people’s daily struggles for maintaining dignity can serve as a powerful basis for moving them ahead in life, a finding that has important consequences for research on youth mobility in the Middle East.

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cairo with former homeless children and youth involved in a transnational NGO program. Drawing on the life histories of two young people from this program, I raise several key questions on the ethics and logics of NGO interventions that target the “homeless child” in Egypt as an object of humanitarian aid, such as compassionate care, education and uplift. I examine closely and seriously the complex intimate lives of children and youth using the life history interview method, and show how ethnographers can better understand the large-scale processes that produce and sustain poverty in Cairo by focusing on young populations. The research approaches young people as political subjects who simultaneously negotiate extreme conditions of structural and state violence and challenge the global, middle-class model of “the child” promoted by NGOs and international children’s rights advocates.

A small literature at the intersection of anthropology, sociology and demography has examined how individuals draw on conflicting cultural models, or schemas, in making sense of key socio-demographic junctures in the life course (see, e.g., Quinn 1996; Blair-Loy 2003; Johnson-Hanks 2006). In this paper, I draw on qualitative interviews with 24 mother-daughter pairs in popular neighborhoods of Cairo to extend this perspective to an analysis of how women make sense of rapid social change, and how they position their own life choices within that understanding of change. Among the interviewed families, rural to urban migration and dramatic increases in education across the two generations led to very different perceptions of the potential life outcomes for mothers and their daughters. Despite their low socioeconomic status by contemporary Cairo standards, respondents saw the factors of urbanization and education as sources of social mobility among women. Education in particular was seen by both generations as having completely altered the life outlook of younger women. Schemas surrounding women’s education articulated education as an investment in becoming a good wife, a better mother, and a more modern person. Closely related was the schema that young women today work in order to “realize themselves” by developing independent lives and personalities, whereas women of the older generation worked out of material necessity. Despite the fact that a number of the mothers worked, respondents associated the traditional schema of a ‘sit al bayt’ (housewife) with the older generation, and contrasted this with the greater freedom and progress of the younger generation. I argue that tensions between the different schemas that respondents evoked to explain change in their societies, and between those schemas and the courses of their own lives, highlight the adaptation of conflicting cultural trends to aspirational identities of the younger generation that did not always match with the material realities of their lives.

In the backdrop of recently heightened political and economic crises and the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Lebanon, college-educated middle class youth speeded up their efforts for immigration abroad. While they are in a constant search for high-scale job opportunities in a range of places from Gulf countries, Iraq and Africa to Europe and North America after graduation, they consider salaries in Lebanon extremely low and their positions insecure, affectively portraying their lives in Lebanon in terms of their ‘deprivations’, if not ‘poverty’. Most express that they have to maintain very high standards of living in Beirut because of social pressure, i.e. to spend a good deal of money on fancy clothing, personal care and up-to-date technology in order maintain their professional appeal. Exploring this paradox of ‘having little to spend much’ (as precisely framed by the Lebanese youth as the main reason behind their impetus to migrate), this paper problematizes ‘poverty’ as a public affect of ‘deprivation’ in relation to culturally framed ideas about a decent life. For lots of Syrian, Bangladeshi and African workers flooding Beirut, who hardly earn a third of middle class salaries, Beirut is a land of economic opportunities to save money for their future. Middle class Lebanese youth, however, typically portray Beirut as a hardly survivable place ‘without future’. In constant references to ‘corrupt politicians’, failing infrastructures and inflation of the housing market, the educated Lebanese youth constantly frame their lives as ‘having the best education in the Middle East and yet being deprived of a decent life after graduation’. In referring to constant sceneries and portrayals of life at ‘more developed’ parts of the world, they commonly complain that they deserve better. In order to elucidate novel local constructions of ‘lack’, ‘superiority, ’inferiority’ and ‘deprivation’, this paper traces the life trajectories of educated middle class youth in relation to connections with ‘outside Lebanon’, and unpacks imagined perceptions about a ‘decent life’. Exploring and analyzing a variety of dimensions in Lebanese youth's everyday life (i.e. connections with family members and friends abroad, Western friends in Beirut, personal travel experiences, stalking of ‘better lives’ at social media), I will suggest everyday feelings and embodied practices of ‘deprivation’ need to be investigated more to better theorize poverty, globalization and middle class in the Middle East.