Abstract

This article is available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license as part of Berghahn Open Anthro, a subscribe-to-open model for APC-free open access made possible by the journal’s subscribers. Mourning at New Year’s Day (Nowruz) Cultural Practice against Ideology Reinhold L. Loeffler and Erika Friedl Abstract: As Persian Muslims, Iranians observe Old Persian rituals in the solar calendar, such as the spring equinox, as well as Islamic rituals in the lunar calendar, such as mourning the martyr’s death of Imam Huseyn. In 2006, the dates coincided, causing distress as people tried to combine the demands of a joyful, life-affirming tradition with that of a religious ideology that allowed no compromise. Living in a tribal village at that time, we recorded people’s reactions and their solutions to the problem of doing right by both the demands of their tradition and those of a government-enforced ideology of martyrdom that moved the affair from the cultural and practical plane to the political and ideological plane. Keywords: Arba’yin, Ashura, ideologies, Iran, mourning, New Year, Nowruz, rituals, tribal life Iran has two calendars guiding its rituals. One is based on the cycle of the sun with the year always beginning on the