Category: Modernization of Death in Iran

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

Ghorbani Hajar

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 Read more…

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

Ghorbani Hajar

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 Read more…