Geographies of capital and capital of geographies: Reckoning the embodied city of Tehran through cosmetic surgeries

• Autores: Marzieh Kaivanara
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 5, 2020, págs. 603-621
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • As people in Tehran seek cosmetic surgeries, they are understood to reveal the seemingly irrelevant (moral) geographies of the city. The interplay of social positioning within the urban city of Tehran and the sociospatial modalities of bodies have turned cosmetic surgeries into a tool through which the geographic and symbolic orders are negotiated and reproduced. This paper, through an ethnography of cosmetic surgeries in Tehran, explores the nuanced spatial-geographical dynamics that inform boundary making and embodied practices. Overviewing the geographies and sociospatial expansion of the city, I suggest how geographic mapping in the capital city of Tehran evolved into a complex relation between bodies and spatiality and informed the materiality of bodies. The complex relationships between geographies, power, and bodies within city spaces lead us to conceptualize geography as a capital in its own right and to revisit the scholarship on the urban geography of beauty and cosmetic surgeries. I propose the concept of “geographic capital” to analyze the relationality of social and physical spaces and to explore the subtle means through which power runs through geographies in the context in which the geographies are intertwined with what organizes bodily choices and sociospatial positioning.