Iranian Advancement

I found the PBS mini series, Iran, Yesterday and Today, hosted by Rick Steves, both informative and problematic. On one hand, it provides a brief (helpful for the unfamiliar viewer) political and cultural history of Iran. On the other hand this history is littered with commentary comparing Iran with western European countries, using the latter as the standard.

Steves approaches Iran from the admittedly bias viewpoint of an American, and to his credit, he reacts well to anti-American murals. His bias becomes problematic as he attempts to react to Iran as his country's "other." He says things like, "This shopping district could be in Paris or London." It left me wishing that he could just present this country without calling attention to the pre-existing negative stigma it gets in the United States. By constantly declaring how surprised he is that parts of Iran are "modern" and even that women attend college, Steves orientalizes Iran. His way of defending and befriending Iranians is to show their similarities to Americans and Europeans. Their differences, in turn, are treated as "advancements only of Iran's past." Steves looks at Iran with a strictly American definition of advancement.