نشریه نامه انسان شناسی
پیاپی 33 (پاییز و زمستان 1400)

Entertainment and games are part of popular culture. Indigenous and local games in Iran have a certain variety because they are often derived from the geographical environment, occupation and livelihood of the people of a region. In Iran, as well as in other parts of the world, people play indigenous and traditional games to maintain a collective spirit and create vitality and happiness. The purpose is introducing Kūs Čāl game as one of the popular cultural heritage of Ahram city, the center of Tangestan city in Bushehr province, which has been done since the distant past and continues to live and dynamic among the people. This research is descriptive-analytical that collects information from library and field sources and interviews with local informants, actors and spectators of this game. According to the results of this article, this game shows the lifestyle, attitude and socio- cultural beliefs in the city of Ahram. It seems that this game was published and spread by the migration of tribes from the Safavid and then Afshari eras who came to this region. The features of this game are simplicity in tools and equipment and no need for special facilities and space, relying on accuracy, vigilance and cheerfulness between actors and spectators.

Bull- headed gorz (Gorz-e-Gāvsar), is a symbolic weapon in Persian culture which has been described in various texts, from Avesta to Šāhnāma and historical texts of Islamic era. It has represented in forms of myths, literatures, texts and paintings as heroes’ weapon to kill dragon. This essay has considered the weapon of bull-headed gorz as a symbol which obtained its meaning through texts and correlation with ancient rituals, studied its duality. On one hand, in Ferēdūn story, this symbolic weapon represented as a totemic symbol which remind us prohibition of scarification animals (in this case: bull) in Zoroastrian religion. This totemic side has been confirmed in Zoroastrian texts and also prolonged to Islamic era and its historical books. On the other hand, related to manhood community, bull- headed gorz is a weapon of its primier hero, Garšāsp, and has spreadly prolonged and revived in Indo-European civilization, from myth to epic and folkloric culture. Although this symbolic and ritualistic aspect of bull-headed gorz is not accepted directly by Zoroastrian religion, but has survived its symbolic characters in Avesta narrations, Šāhnāma and Persian folk tales.

Besides being the cradle of civilization, Iran is considered as a pioneer in the field of theoretical and practical medicine. This article took the three key concepts of ancient Iranians medical point of view, i.e. holism, quality and equilibration into conderation by reliance on such documental and library resources as Avesta, Rig Veda and Pahlavic texts, and examined them in connection with the more extensive Iranian mental and social structures, and moreover, had a glance on their transformational trajectory from ancient Iran to ancient Greece and threreafter to Alexanderia, Islamic age of Iran and at last, to the present modern universal medicine (biomedicine). One of our most important findings reveals that the changes and modifications with which the three key concepts after introduction to ancient Greek medicine have encountered, can probably be accounted as a turning-point that after which, the above mentioned transformational trajectory has been progressively propelled to give consideration to the other key concepts such as empiricism, particularity and induction.

Despite the thousands of years old of traditional Iranian medicine background, this health care system has not yet been able to find a complementary place in modern medical treatment. This study is an attempt to show the political mismatch in the field of cultural contextualization that is necessary for determining the place of traditional medicine in the Iranian health system. The research method is exploratory study with a qualitative approach that has used the thematic analysis method of Brand and Clark to extract and analyze the data. The applied tool was in-depth interviews with 30 key specialists and experts in traditional medicine. After extracting the main concepts and reviewing the upstream documents, the sub-themes and finally the main theme were gradually obtained. The results of this survey make it clear that some of the inconsistencies in traditional medicine go back to the mismatches of cultural policy in representing the position of Iranian traditional medicine, which is subject to cultural resistance in some parts of society and the medical education system. At the same time, the ideological formulation of some proponents of traditional medicine and the incoordination within and between departments in relevant organizations to introduce and realistically inform the capabilities of this medical knowledge has caused incredulity in some members of society to the capacity of this knowledge.

Vow is a ritual and religious behavior and although it is important as a religious act in many religions, but among Shiites, vow is also integrated with the daily life of the people and like other religious behaviors, both in social and cultural context. It is a voluntary ritual-religious behavior, and and in some cases might be completely innovative and unique. By deciding to make a vow, a contract is made between the person and the sacred, and usually has no connection with the social and cultural system until he/she makes his vow. It is entirely internal, mental and semantic. But as soon as the person makes the vow, the vow rises from a mental matter to a cultural and social construct. Nevertheless, vows are made in a cultural context as a ritual behavior. In this article, an attempt has been made to analyze the meaning of vows as a ritual behavior from an anthropological point of view. For this purpose, the historical view of vows has been analyzed and an attempt has been made to analyze the meaning of this ritual in everyday life by reviewing the cultural history of vows. The emphasis of this study is on the position of vows among women in Tehran. In this article, we will try to study the meaning of vows in the lived experience of women living in Tehran, women's mental constructs about vows based on the concept of "security", fear of world ignorance and insecurity caused by unknown, vague and frightening events. This study was performed using interpretive phenomenological method.

Elements of nature such as the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, water, plants, fire and mountains have always had a special value and prestige among different nations and peoples of the world; To the extent that they considered these manifestations of nature sacred and made symbols and signs for them or attributed gods to them. In ancient Iran, too, plants were highly respected and valued. This study has been done with the aim of explaining the people’s lived experience of the Konar tree in Dezful city. In this qualitative study, researcher used descriptive phenomenology method, purposeful sampling and in-depth interview technique for collecting data with 15 persons who resorted to this tree. Data were analyzed based on a seven-step Colaizzi’s model. The research findings, which are the result of interviews, include twenty concepts and three categories: "resource management", "collective solidarity" and "individual-social control". The results show that the maintenance of the Konar tree via resource management and long-term use of its therapeutic and health properties is related to its material functions, and resorting to and respecting this tree to solve some issues and problems of life that lead to collective solidarity and preservation of social order has spiritual functions.

Proverbs are important parts of popular culture and are mostly taken from people's lives. Foods that play an important role in people's lives are of the most important elements widely reflect on proverbs. They are used in various ways with various topics in this branch of popular literature. In this article an attempt is made to study the different aspects of this reflection by the means of descriptive-analytical method, qualitative content analysis using library documents. The findings show that foods have played an important role in shaping the cultural identity of this people and their proverbs. Geographical environment and cultural- religious- social perspective play a key role in making proverbs based on food. Elements such as cooking utensils, material contents, utensils used for taking food, rituals surrounding taking food, difficulty of cooking food and written form of foods have been considered in the proverbs to address issues such as disturbing work of others, proper upbringing, forgetting the past, hospitality, worthlessness of gifts and people, complaint of destiny, imposing something upon someone, poverty, restraint of profiteering, contentment and as the most important, making effort. Entirely, the reason of proverbs is constituting the ethical issues in a society.

The main question of the article is what are the similarities and differences between the childhood experience of poverty in girls and boys? Data collection was performed using observation, group discussion, and semi-structured interviews with the participation of 30 children (16 girls and 14 boys) aged 10 to 17 years who had experienced a life of poverty. Data analysis was performed using conventional qualitative content analysis. Findings show that girls and boys have similar and different experiences of poverty at the same time. While the lack of clothing, housing, and food is similarly experienced and perceived by girls and boys, girls' work at home, their lack of access to public space, make things different for them. On the other hand, the gender division of labor in early childhood applies strictly to girls and boys in poor families. As boys gain access to money, the resources available to them outside and inside the home increase. But wage labor from an early age increases the physical and psychological stress for boys. Girls have domestic gender roles and unpaid labor and suffer from severe social constraints.

There are few researches on the naming in short and long story characters of contemporary writers and long Iranian folktales, but so far no similar research has been done on Iranian short folktales. The present descriptive-analytical study is an attempt to investigate the male naming in Iranian folktales with emphasis on folktales of Lorestan province. The legends of the two collections, which were collected by “Anjavi-Shirazi” and “Farahvashi” from different regions of the country and Lorestan province, respectively, were used in the study. Mohammad, Ahmad, Hassan, Ali, Abbas, Ibrahim and Jamshid were the most common male names. The high frequency of Mohammad, Ahmad, Ali and Abbas can be justified according to Islamic culture. The names of Jamshid and Ibrahim alone or in combination are not among the 50 most frequent names in Iran. In folktales, Jamshid is always called King Jamshid, beautifully described, associated with iron weapons, kills demons and dragons, and flies into the sky, suggesting a connection between persons named Jamshid in folktales and the mythical Jamshid. Thus, the high frequency of “Jamshid” in folktales is justified. The high frequency of “Ibrahim”, which is not an Iranian name, seems interesting. In the first centuries A.H., it was tried to consider Zarathustra and Ibrahim as one personality. Thus, the ancient Iranian prophet has two names. The new name gradually replaces the old name in folktales. The high number of Ibrahim in folktales is due to the efforts of Iranians of the first centuries of Islam to preserve the name of Zoroaster.

Social capital and its main components such as participation and social trust have become critical in social and numerous studies have been done on this subject, but the main point to consider is that a few studies have been paid to inequalities, especially gender inequalities. Studies have shown that the importance of social capital, access to and use of it is different for men and women. So the social capital inequality provides little opportunity for women to improve their status and participate in the process of development. Therefore, in this study by using the systematic review of the research and the meta-analysis method, studies on social capital and gender have been reviewed. Findings have shown that gender neutrality dominates on social capital research, a few studies have been focused on gender and social capital then women have been neglected in this era; this issue is important because gender blindness increases inequality and gender discrimination between men and women and it also reflected in the management structure of society, government policy-making and access to political resources. Thus, women as half of the population have been neglected and have less social capital than men. Gender neutrality in the study of social capital with a dominant quantitative method indicates that the role of women in development by providing strong social networks, participation, trust, and other components of social capital has been neglected.

The researches results in understanding the demands of society members from the past to the present show a clear image of the political, cultural, and economic situations of different social groups. Women's demands and the ways to achieve them in different historical periods are some of the controversial issues in the field of socio-historical studies. By such an approach, the present study examines the marriage contracts' stipulations of 130 years of Qajar period, and by extracting common issues of the society in that period, analyzed the women's needs frequency. So some demands such as housing right, the right to divorce, dowry, travel permit, and economic stipulations were extracted and analyzed. On the basis of written documents, the findings of this study make a challenge to the unrealistic view of the women reflected in the historical narratives about Qajar era.

This article aims to quantitatively evaluate the biodiversity of medicinal plants in order to protect vulnerable species. Biodiversity has been involved in a crisis rooted in human activities since past. In lack of control over unlimited human expectations, the destructive effects on  environment will increase and the crisis will exacerbate. Iran has a variety of ecological regions where have created animal and plant biodiversity and also a variety of climates, ethnics, cultures, customs and rituals.The present study is based on field studies in the rural areas of Darab city of Fars province: Morvarid, Hyderabad, Dehmord, Fath al-Mubin. Based on the findings, 89 species of medicinal plants belonging to 43 families are identified in the target areas. The largest number with 14 species belongs to the mint family. This area has 6 biological type, 4 vegetative forms, 8 consuming organs with 3 germination periods that are distributed on both even and steep surfaces. According to the results, 9 plants are seriously exposed to damage: Ferula Assa-foetida, Pistacia Atlantica, Zataria Multiflora, Amygdalus Scoparia Spach, Ziziphus Spina Christi, Prangos Ferulacea, Dracocephalum, Myrtus Communis, Ziziphora Clinopodioides. High interest in the use and exploitation of medicinal plants, failure to record indigenous knowledge and lack of revitalization, development, conservation and supervision, will probably lead to deletion of effective plant genes of this region in the near future.