A Reappraisal of Child Naming Practices in the Rural Communities of the Dashti Region under the Qajar and Pahlavi Dynasties

The naming of infants, as a multi-layered cultural act, reflects how various factors influence rural societies. The Dashti region, with its rich historical background and rural texture, provides a suitable context for studying the transformations and continuities of naming patterns over time. Investigating the various factors affecting the choice of names for infants constitutes the main problem of this research. This article employs a historical-ethnographic method, and the required data were obtained from five main sources: official documents and registration records of the region's Civil Registration Office from the beginning to the end of the Second Pahlavi era, archives of old village schools, written historical sources related to the region, interviews with local informants and elders, and an examination of tombstone inscriptions in cemeteries.
The findings of the research indicate that, during the aforementioned period, several categories of factors acted as the main driving forces in the naming of rural infants in the Dashti region: religious inclinations and tendencies; folk beliefs, gender attitudes, family and local memory, national and literary attachments, natural events, and the class system. Although during the Pahlavi era, due to labor migration to the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and the introduction of the requirements of the modern educational style, grounds for a change in naming taste emerged, the influence of the aforementioned factors was so deeply rooted that it prevailed over the naming of infants until the end of that period.