My Publications Archives - Hajar Ghorbani

Book Chapter: Governing the Dead’s Territory

The Politicization of Death in Iran
Hajar Ghorbani
Published in Death and Institutions: Processes, Places and Past
Bristol University Press / Policy Press, 2025

Governing the Dead’s Territory: The Politicization of Death in Iran examines Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery as a major institutional space where death, burial, urban management, religious nationalism, and state power intersect in post-revolutionary Iran. The chapter asks how a cemetery can become more than a site of burial and mourning: how it can function as a governed territory through which the dead are classified, commemorated, organized, and incorporated into broader political narratives.

The chapter focuses on the transformation of Behesht-e Zahra into a large-scale municipal, ritual, and political institution. It considers how cemetery space, bureaucratic management, burial practices, martyrs’ sections, official ceremonies, and public memory contribute to the politicization of death in contemporary Iran.

This chapter is part of my broader research on death, mourning, material culture, political violence, and the social agency of dead bodies. It reflects my interest in how dead bodies and burial spaces continue to shape public life after death, generating forms of memory, obligation, legitimacy, and political meaning.

Publication Details

Chapter: “Governing the Dead’s Territory: The Politicization of Death in Iran”
Author: Hajar Ghorbani
Book: Death and Institutions: Processes, Places and Past
Editors: Kate Woodthorpe, Helen Frisby, and Bethan Michael-Fox
Publisher: Bristol University Press / Policy Press
Publication date: February 28, 2025

Read the chapter / View publisher page:

Social Studies of Death in Iran

Edited by Hajar Ghorbani
Anthropology Publication, 2021
Original Persian title: Motāleʿāt-e Ejtemāʿi-ye Marg: Jostārhāyi Darbāb-e Marg dar Farhang va Jāmeʿeh-ye Irāni
Persian title: مطالعات اجتماعی مرگ: جستارهایی درباب مرگ در فرهنگ و جامعه ایرانی

Social Studies of Death in Iran is an edited volume in Persian, published by Anthropology Publication in 2021. The book brings together a group of scholars and writers to examine death, dying, mourning, burial, sacred death, medicalization, memory, art, literature, and cemetery spaces in Iranian society.

The volume was developed at a time when death studies had not yet been established as a recognized interdisciplinary field in Iran. Although death has long occupied a central place in Iranian religious, political, literary, and cultural life, it had rarely been approached as a sustained field of social inquiry. This book was therefore conceived as an attempt to open a space for interdisciplinary conversation around death and dying in Iran.

The book approaches death not as a merely biological event, but as a social, cultural, political, and material phenomenon. It asks how death is managed, symbolized, ritualized, medicalized, represented, and governed in Iranian society. It also considers how different historical periods, religious traditions, political transformations, urban institutions, medical systems, artistic forms, and literary representations have shaped the ways Iranians encounter death and mourning.

The volume is organized around several major themes: the social history of death, changing meanings of death, the medicalization of death, sacred death and martyrdom, representations of death in art and literature, and the emergence of large-scale cemetery spaces in Iran. Through these themes, the book introduces death as an interdisciplinary object of study and brings together perspectives from anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, medicine, psychology, literature, art, and cultural studies.

A central concern of the volume is the place of death in modern and post-revolutionary Iran. The book examines how processes such as urbanization, state formation, medicalization, war, martyrdom, cemetery management, and the institutional organization of burial have transformed the social experience of death. In this sense, the volume does not treat death as a private or marginal matter. It shows how death is embedded in public life, political authority, religious meaning, family relations, urban space, and collective memory.

The section on sacred death and martyrdom is especially important for understanding the relationship between death and political life in Iran. The book situates martyrdom, war death, memorialization, and cemetery organization within the broader history of the post-revolutionary state. It pays attention to how the Iran-Iraq War, martyrs’ graves, funeral ceremonies, memorial policies, and cemetery landscapes have contributed to the political and cultural organization of death in contemporary Iran.

The volume also engages with the visual and material dimensions of death. Tombstones, cemeteries, memorial forms, artistic representations, literary images, and funerary spaces are treated as important sites through which death becomes visible and meaningful. This attention to material and visual culture connects the book to broader questions that continue to shape my own research: how the dead remain socially present, how material forms organize memory, and how bodies, graves, images, and objects participate in the making of social and political worlds.

For me, editing this volume was an important early step in developing death studies in relation to Iranian society. It brought together scholars from different disciplines and created a platform for thinking about death beyond a single theoretical or disciplinary framework. The project also shaped the trajectory of my later doctoral research on the agency of dead bodies, political mourning, martyrdom, cemeteries, and the politics of death in contemporary Iran.

Decolonising Death Studies

Edited by Panagiotis Pentaris, Stacey Pitsillides, and Hajar Ghorbani
Routledge, 2026

Decolonising Death Studies brings together international and interdisciplinary perspectives that rethink death studies beyond primarily Western frameworks. The volume foregrounds decolonial, situated, and globally diverse approaches to death, dying, mourning, ritual, care, and end-of-life knowledge.

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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