March 2022 - Hajar Ghorbani

Cultural Semiotics of Gravestones’ Visual Signs in Isfahan Takht-e Fulad Cemetery: The Sing of Combs

This paper (presentation) is a part of my fieldwork in Isfahan Takht-e Fulad cemetery in 2011.

The Takht-e Foulad cemetery is located in Isfahan and the south of Zayandeh-rood River. This cemetery took its power from the Safavid dynasty, which was a Shiite dynasty. [Azimi, 1379 AP., p.193]. The gravestones in Takht-e Fulad are of three kinds: horizontal or horizontal box and flat, mast and horizontal beside each other) Moreover, it is divided into two main parts (surrounded by Takaya and open.).

The signs on the gravestones in this cemetery can be divided into two signs, including visual signs and textual signs. By observing the pictorial and textual signs on the gravestones in the Takht-e fulad and interpreting them, what is revealed at first is that these signs express the job or profession of the deceased person. To find more precise meanings for these signs, we should find out the cultural relationship of these graphic patterns besides other signs on the gravestone. Combs are carved along with turbah, rosary, and some other signs, in some of the gravestones in this cemetery.

In the logic of determining the signs on the gravestones, the issue of being literate or illiterate in traditional culture is of great importance. So it seems in the era in which most people were illiterate. The text on the gravestone was a sign of the higher dignity of the deceased person, the best way to convey some information about the deceased person and his/her profession, and some other essential traits of that person, especially in the domain of religious values, was pictorial signs. In the past, signs like a wooden comb, rosary, and turbah were the distinguishing religious factors, and this was because of the presence of religious minorities in the city (Zoroastrians and Armenians).

For reading the whole paper please click: Cultural Semiotics of Visual Signs of Gravestones in Isfahan Takht-e Fulad cemetery

The Bureaucratic Professionalization of Funeral Rites in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery

This article is a part of my fieldwork at the Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery from 2014-2015. I published another version of this idea in Persian in Iran in 2017. In the first version, I had a collaboration with Jabbar Rahmani, anthropologist, and this version I had a collaboration with Zohreh Bayatrizi, sociologist. The idea of these papers came to my mind during my fieldwork in the cemetery.

[…] Tehran’s current cemetery is called Behesht-e Zahra (literally, The Paradise of Zahra, named after Prophet Mohammad’s daughter) first opened on 314 ha of land in the southern outskirts of the city in 1970 in a bid to provide a permanent and centralized burial site for its rapidly growing population. Up until then local residents had buried their dead in one of the several graveyards within the city (Behesht-e Zahra, undated).1 Although at first the cemetery struggled to find a taker for its first grave, due to its distance from the city, lack of high-speed public transit, and scarcity of car ownership at the time, it now has over 1.5 million graves and has expanded to incorporate an additional 110 ha in 1997 and another 160 ha in 2009. The eight year war with Iraq (1980–1988) created a sharp rise in burials for the fallen soldiers who were buried in a dedicated parcel and gave the cemetery additional political and sentimental significance. A massive development project began in 1989 with the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, which led to the creation of a mausoleum and a major cultural, religious and tourist complex adjacent to the cemetery. With the expansion of car ownership and the extension of the subway line, the cemetery currently accommodates on average about 15,000 visitors per day with a major spike on the weekends. There are 164 lots in the cemetery, 18 of which are dedicated to the ‘martyrs’ and their parents, 3 to journalists, cultural and entertainment figures, and one to organ donors. These lots are located in prime spots in the older part of the cemetery, which are easier to access and highly sought after. The vast majority of the remaining lots are divided into one-, two-, and three-tier graves. One-tier graves in the new parts of the cemetery can be obtained free of charge. Multi-tired graves and graves in more desirable plots are up for sale.

Up until 1991, the cemetery had one building, which was a dedicated ablution (ritual washing and purification) facility. In that year, the Behesht-e Zahra Organization was officially created and a building built using Iranian and Islamic architectural motifs to house the morgue, ablution facility, reception, registration, banking and other bureaucratic offices. Although Behesht-e Zahra is officially run by the City of Tehran, it was forced to become financially self-sufficient in 1993 with revenues generated through fees for burial services as well as the sale of family mausoleums and multi-level graves, surcharges for burials in the older parcels, and renting out commercial space for flower shops, headstone shops, and other related services (Behesht-e Zahra, undated).

As a result of the above developments, the Behesht-e Zahra Organization has expanded rapidly, creating various bureaucratic arms to cope with a variety of tasks from the daily handling of bodies, to ongoing maintenance, event planning for special occasions (prime among them the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s death every June), human resources management, and long term strategic planning. Here we will focus only on the professionalization and bureaucratization of the funeral rituals, that is the handling of the body from when it arrives at the cemetery until it
has been buried, including corpse washing, wrapping, prayers, graveside rites, and burial.

For buying the whole article please click: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-18826-9_7 or receiving it directly please email me: hghorba1@ualberta.ca

Risk, mourning, politics: Toward a transnational critical conception of grief for COVID-19 deaths in Iran

Mourning with the world: The loneliness of grief in a pandemic

Zohreh, Bayatrizi, Hajar Ghorbani and Reza Taslimitehrani

[…] In the case of COVID-19 deaths, we see these dynamics at play again on local, national and transnational scales. The emerging evidence in Iran indicates that contagion both as a biological fact but also as a social fear and stigma might have led to the increasing loneliness and even stigmatization of the dying and the grieving relatives. In personal interviews, survivors identified separation from the dying and dead relatives as the worst aspect of grief during contagion. A woman who had managed to slip into the ICU room and seen her father for a last time before he died was deeply distraught by the memory of her father’s loneliness. Her distress was renewed with the loneliness of his funeral:

They didn’t let us get close. We were at a distance, struggling to contain ourselves. They didn’t show us his face one last time. We didn’t see it. And my sister says . . . she cannot believe that it was him that they put in the grave. This type of departure, this estrangement, adds to our sorrows. In his last days he was awaiting us in the hospital, alone. . . . I constantly wonder how he must have expected us to visit him. I hope he knows our regret. I always think only if they had shown me his face. My dad’s face. . . . (SZ, April 2020)

Another young woman who lost her grandfather during the pandemic talked about the lingering pain of the lonely funeral:

The cemetery was terrible. Our family is very attached to each other. But we had no one there. . . . Even now my father and uncle complain about the loneliness of it. . . . I’m certain that none of us has accepted it yet because the usual ceremonies were not held, we didn’t go to the mosque and no one was there for the burial, except for us (RK, April 2020)

The lack of physical contact compounded the loneliness for mourners, a fact that is not surprising especially given that grief is an embodied and relational experience (McCarthy and Prokhovnik, 2014):

The loneliness is one thing, the absence of a shoulder to cry on. The worst part of it is that you cannot hold your loved ones. The lack of physical interaction causes the most damage. (AJ, April 2020)

The fear of biological contagion clashed with the social norms of collective mourning in Iran, where families and friends gather around the bereaved for days and where it is deemed cruel to leave them alone. Where mourning ceremonies have traditionally been an occasion for coming together and setting difference aside, the fear of contagion drove some families apart. One interviewee who had lost his brother took offence to the fact that some of their close relatives had shunned them for fear of the virus: ‘My uncle’s family had a banner of condolence made and posted outside our door when we were asleep at home. They didn’t even bother to ring the bell and speak with us from a distance.’ Conversely, a young woman was cut off by her sister’s family after she refused to visit them at home and in-person out of concern for contracting the virus (for more on the family dynamics of disease, see Sobel and Cowan, 2003).

For reading the whole please article clik:https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00113921211007153