Category: Fieldwork in Iran

Songs of Sorrow: The Tradition of Gagriv in Luri Culture

In Lor and Bakhtiari society, the tradition of funeral lamentation—known as Moyeh or Gagriv—functions as a powerful ethnographic site of oral history, communal resilience, and collective memory. Far beyond a spontaneous expression of grief, it is a highly structured, gendered ritual primarily led by senior women (Bi-Bis), who employ improvised oral poetry set to evocative melodic structures (dong-e dal). Through these performative verses, women articulate the moral economy and social virtues of their community, contextualizing the deceased’s life by exalting traits such as hospitality, bravery, and ancestral lineage for men, or virtue and domestic devotion for women. As the lead soloist introduces a verse, the surrounding assembly of women joins in a antiphonal, repetitive chorus, transforming individual sorrow into a shared cathartic experience that reinforces tribal solidarity, preserves linguistic heritage, and mediates the social disruption caused by death.

Photographer: Hajar Ghoraani, November 2024, Shushtar, Iran

Bakhtiari Ethnic Group

My doctoral research is based on long-term ethnographic engagement with death, mourning, cemeteries, martyrdom, political violence, and material culture in Iran. In 2024, I conducted a multi-sited fieldwork project across several regions of the country, moving between borderlands, urban centres, cemeteries, museums, ritual sites, villages, war landscapes, and spaces shaped by political mourning.

This fieldwork included research in Arab Khuzestan, Kermanshah, Kurdistan, West Azerbaijan, Baluchistan, Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Shahin Shahr. Across these sites, I examined how death is mourned, governed, ritualized, remembered, and politicized through bodies, graves, laments, music, images, objects, ceremonies, and public space.

A major part of this research focused on local and vernacular mourning practices, especially women’s lamentation, Lur and Kurdish mourning traditions, Hurreh/Horeh singing in Kermanshah, Balochi lamentation and music, and forms of grief that circulate outside official institutions. I was especially interested in how women participate in mourning as ritual actors, narrators, singers, memory-keepers, and political subjects.

At the same time, I conducted fieldwork in more official and institutional sites of death, including Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Tehran, museums related to death and martyrdom, national and religious ceremonies, 22 Bahman commemorations, and funerary events for unknown martyrs. This allowed me to compare local, familial, and vernacular forms of mourning with state-organized, ideological, and institutional forms of death management.

Together, these field sites form the empirical foundation of my doctoral project on the social and political agency of dead bodies in contemporary Iran. They allow me to trace how the dead continue to act through ritual, material culture, gendered mourning, burial spaces, public memory, and political contestation.

Photographer: Ahmad Hassanpour, Khuzestan, Iran

Fall 2024