Burial as a Bureaucratic Phenomenon Death Rituals in Behesht-e-Zahra Cemetery

Iran, as a society in the transitional stage, has undergone significant transformation, particularly over the recent fifty years. Likewise, rituals around the death phenomenon(burial rituals) have recently experienced dramatic changes in Iran. Despite their importance and their implications for the cultural studies, there has been little scholarship that aims to investigate and explain these changes in Iran. More precisely, the previous research has been particularly inattentive to the effects of the modernity on the death rituals in Iran. This paper will try to scrutinize such effect. I have been conducting fieldwork (about two years), including participatory observations, in the Tehran’s main cemetery, Behesht-e Zahra. In addition, this study utilized deep-interviews with people who have attended death ceremonies (Like Mobasher, Singer, gravedigger, clergy and corpse purifier). I find that while in the pre-modern Iran, the death rituals and practices were performed in a simple way and have been fulfilled mainly by the survivors, but they have been transformed to a complex process in more recent years, within which survivors have little control over. It is also shown that the modernity not only has influenced the culture of death but also has changed people’s attitudes toward the concept of death in Iran.