On the theoretical level, the notion of public – spheres of relations where cultural activities takes place – is identified as communicative sites emerging at points of contestation among social or cognitive networks. On the historical level, the widespread proliferation of public urban sites, tied to the two-stage construction of the imperial capital, Isfahan, in 1590 constituted the crystallization of associational spaces. Subversive practices produced fractured informal communicative domains that defied official state culture in the ongoing construction of the Safavid collectivity.
I argue that Isfahani urbanization as manifestation of state power, expanding in significance alongside extraordinarily rich repertoires of ceremonial spaces, led to the creation of a “theater state” under ‘Abbās I. Especially in the second stage of Isfahan’s construction, these urban spaces entailed textual and performative sites of carnivalesque resistance that defied the Safavid theater state in subtle yet public ways. In many ways, the growth of the carnivalesque spaces also reflected the escalation in the degree of participation among socio-professional groups, guilds, members of futuvvat, females and the poor that, correspondingly, led to the construction of more heteroglot spaces of interaction. By focusing on public arenas, such as the bāzaar, coffeehouses (qahvekhāneh), travel lodges (cārevānsarā), baths (hammām), schools (madrasah), religious establishment (waqf), religious ceremonies, and sport clubs (zurkhāneh), I argue that this process of spatialization, manifested in the orchestration and transgression of collective interaction, constructed ambiguous communicative sites, wherein the widening gap between state and society led to the formation of the early modern Iranian public sphere.