Iranians’ Attitudes toward and their Moral Judgment of Market Place Shrewdness

Abstract

The cultural concept of zerangi (market place shrewdness) is semantically ambivalent between two senses: shrewdness and wiliness or craftiness. The aim of the study was to investigate Iranians’ attitudes toward the concept of zerangi (market place shrewdness). It also aimed at investigating the Iranians’ moral judgments in this regard. Using data collected from 200 personal weblogs, this study employed content analysis to investigate the semantic aspects of zerangi. It also used five discourse completion tasks to find out Iranians’ attitude toward and moral judgment of the concept in question. Thirty-three university students of the Jahrom University and 20 university professors of the Shiraz University and the University of Isfahan were included in this study. The results suggested that the participants had a negative attitude toward this concept in its pejorative form. Also, the analysis of results indicated that the majority of the participants in the study preferred unambiguous and absolute judgmental terms to ambiguous ones as an explanation for success stories, suggesting that Iranians prefer making absolute moral judgments to relative ones.

Keywords

• cultural keyword
• cultural scripts
• cultural linguistics
• ethno pragmatics