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Intergroup Social Relations and Architecture: Vernacular Architecture and Issues of Status, Power, and Conflict

School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine.

Shampa Mazumdar

University of California, Irvine.

This study examines the relationship between religion, majority-minority intergroup relations, and vernacular domestic architecture. Specifically, it looks at three facets of intergroup relations, power, status, and conflict, and their interrelationships with architecture. Through an ethnographic study focusing on the Zoroastrians, a religious minority in predominantly Muslim Iran, and their domestic architecture, we indicate how the design of the home and of the neighborhood expresses religion-related hegemonic social relations, power differentials, status distinctions, and conflict. We show that architectural features such as location, designs of houses, heights, and presence or absence of special devices, such as badgirs and "sacrificial spaces," play a part in the enaction of power, status, and conflict while forming a record of them. Architectural features can aid in the survival and preservation of a group's cultural identity, and be symbolic of resistance. We indicate how for the Zoroastrians, architecture became a means of resistance-a survival strategy-and how the home design began to incorporate fortress-like qualities to protect and preserve their unique religious identity and cultural traditions. We recommend the adoption of a socioarchitectural approach that involves simultaneous examination of both the social world and the material world, as examination of either produces an incomplete and partial picture.

Environment and Behavior, Vol. 29, No. 3, 374-421 (1997)
DOI: 10.1177/001391659702900304


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