Forced branding, tattooing, and bodily inscriptions were linked to a complex intersection of meanings and uses in nineteenth-century Iran. Drawing on insights from studies of bodily inscriptions in other world historical contexts, this paper discusses branding as a marker of ownership, both of human slaves and of animals; Islamic attitudes toward bodily inscription and its symbolic significance in the afterlife; and associations between branding and human or divine love in Persian poetry. From this semiotic foundation, it turns to judicial uses of branding in nineteenth-century Iran: as torture for the extraction of incriminating admissions, and as punishment intended to shame (symbolically casting the criminal from society, stigmatizing their crime) and identify (tracking convicted criminals). Throughout the paper, branding’s legal place is understood in relation to silence and speaking, writing and reading, pain, humiliation, and the inversion of branding’s meaning by its victims, in Iran and a number of other societies.

This paper traces the emergence of folklore studies and ethnography in interwar Iran. It argues that these disciplines were part of larger nationalist projects of representing and speaking for the “masses.” The first part of the paper explores how and why a number of Iranian intellectuals engaged in folklore studies after a period of prolonged political activism in the first few decades of the 20th century. The second part of the paper examines cultural institutions established by the state, mainly in the late 1930s, in an attempt to appropriate and institutionalize folklore studies and ethnography for the purposes of nation building. These efforts were fraught with ambivalences because the “masses” were simultaneously praised as repositories of “authenticity” and looked down upon as a potential source of “backwardness.”