The following photos are part of a visual anthropology project I did between 2005 and 2008. For the project, I took pictures from and interviewed with participants in the lamentation rituals of Moharram in Iran.
Every year, the lamentation rituals begin on the first day of the Islamic month of Moharram and goes on for ten days. At noon on the tenth day of Moharram, the same moment when Imam Hussein was reputedly killed in 680 A.D., the rituals end with a collective prayer. During the ten days of Moharram, the rituals are performed in various combinations of processions, chants, formalized body movements, beating chests, mournful and martial musical practices, passion plays, ritual self-flagellation and self-wounding, public recitations and expressions of sad emotions, sacrifices, wearing black, and food-sharing.
In The Sorrowful Carnivals of Moharram: Transgression and the Bloody Rituals of Lamentation, a paper in which I used a few of the photos shown here, I write:
“The bloody, intensive, and bodily-involved rituals of Moharram, once expelled from city centers, have now returned with a new look to the well-to-do neighborhoods of large cities. Although the two varieties look radically different, they both share the same quality of transgression. Mohseni Square, an affluent neighborhood in North Tehran, is now the host to one of the largest crowds participating in the annual rituals. What had been expelled as the Other, has now returned as the object of nostalgia and fascination.
Many who live in affluent neighborhoods, like Mohseni Square, wear their finest black clothes and rush to watch the processions, take photographs, and participate in the rituals. People of socio-economic classes that once condemned the irrationality of bodily rituals to identify themselves as rational modern urbanites, now chant (while moving their bodies in formulated patterns) “If you haven’t seen a maniac, [look at us,] we’re maniacs. If you’ve heard of lunatics, [that’s us,] we’re lunatics… My brainpower has left me. And craziness has replaced it. If you have something to say, say it to God who has taken away my brainpower.” At the same time, each Moharram, others, with cameras in hand, travel to remote places to watch the same bloody and bodily-involved rituals they had once condemned.”
