The objective life of death in Tehran: a vanishing presence

Abstract

The present article investigates the objective life of death in Tehran. It explores specific instances indicating the public presence and sequestration of death in the city’s physical space. Using Simmel’s method of direct observations and lived experience, we characterise the public profile of death through such objective indicators as death notices, funeral and mourning services, the design of the cemetery, executions, and so on. We discuss factors that influence this public profile from changes in life expectancy and mortality rates to religion and lifestyle factors. We show that the socio-economic and lifestyle factors that sharply divide the population of Tehran also have an impact on the extent to which death is present or sequestered. The objective indicators of death are more strongly present in traditional and working-class neighbourhoods while the signs of its sequestration are more visible in middle-class and affluent neighbourhoods.

Keywords:

• Indicators of death
• lifestyle
• Tehran
• sequestration of death
• denial of death
• multiple modernities

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor Thomas Kemple for his valuable feedback on the first draft of this paper and for sponsoring Reza Taslimi-Tehrani’s visit at the University of British Columbia, which allowed us to write this paper together. We would also like to thank the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia for hosting Reza. Last but not least, we also would like to thank the anonymous referees for their feedback.