Death, class, culture: giving meaning to mortality in Tehran

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates attitudes towards death and the social factors that influence them among a sample of residents in Tehran, Iran. Using grounded theory and anchoring our analysis in the meaning of death (what people think happens after death), we were able to conceptualise three broad worldviews on death, which were then further refined into nine attitudes. Our research highlights socio-economic status as a factor potentially shaping people’s attitudes towards death. A large group of our respondents, mainly among less affluent groups, think about death daily, while many among the more affluent and the educated middle class prefer to avoid thoughts of death. Our study in a Muslim majority setting in the Middle East contributes to the existing literature on attitudes towards death by going beyond simple typologies, such as western versus eastern, traditional versus modern, religious versus secular, denial versus acceptance, to show that the diversity of attitudes towards death can both incorporate and transcend all of these dichotomies.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes towards death
• socio-economic status
• lifestyle
• Iran
• class
• denial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The word slum here is used loosely. The Farsi word is hashiy-e neshin, which primarily refers to rural migrants living on the outskirts of major cities, often in homes they have made with no permits and no urban amenities.

2. The deadrise from the graves with an earthquake, fear reins, and people tremble before God. The first night after burial is also depicted in harrowing terms: the soul returns to the body at burial, and at nightfall two frightening angels enter the grave to interrogate the deceased violently (see Dastgheyb, 1981).

3. Charms and amulets have long been part of Islamic folk practice in Iran but not endorsed by religious authorities.

4. Erfan spirituality has a prominent presence in centuries of Iranian poetry and literature in the work of widely read figures such Hafiz and Rumi. Erfan is distinct from official and mainstream religion in that it prioritises the practitioner’s inner spiritual journey over all other outward signs of religiosity, and depicts spiritual development in terms of the gradual unification of the soul with divine love (see Van den Bos, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reza Taslimi Tehrani

Reza Taslimi Tehrani is an assistant professor of sociology at the Research Center for Culture, Art, and Communication in Tehran, Iran. His areas of study include sociology of culture and sociology of death and dying. He has co-authored ”The objective life of death in Tehran: a vanishing presence” (with Zohreh Bayatrizi, 2017) and ”Risk, mourning, politics: toward a critical transnational conception of grief for COVID 19 death in Iran” (with Zohreh Bayatrizi and Hajar Ghorbani, 2021). He is also the author of ”Description and analysis of mourning rituals among new middle class survivors during the corona virus pandemic” (in Farsi, 2021). He can be reached at [email protected]

Zohreh Bayatrizi

Zohreh Bayatrizi is associate professor in sociology at the Univeristy of Alberta. Her expertise include the history of death of dying and socio-cultural aspects of the management of death and dying in Iran. In addition to articles mentioned above, she is a co-author of “Grieving Immigrants: Emotions at the Intersections of Ethnicity and Politics” (2022) and is currently working on a project on the impact of the relations of force on the experience of grief.

Ali Dadgar

Ali Dadgar is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Tehran. He studies class and lifestyle in Iran. His published work in English includes a co-authored article titled “Tehran’s Troubled Youth: A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Suicidality and Family Dynamics (2019). He can be reached at [email protected]