Aesthetics and the Art of Living in the Zagros Mountains of Iran
- Explores local people's reactions to their own cultural habits, traditions, religious proscriptions rarely figure in ethnographies
- Investigates the lives of local Shi'a Muslims with a 'lived religion' marked by various habituated beliefs and ritual practices that provide choices for coping with life's challenges
- Shows how these people's circumstances, traditions, values and their lived religion offer choices for behaviour and lifestyles
- Explores how, in the near-absence of an art-scene in the small world of the traditional transhumant way of life, people tend to channel their creativity in an 'aesthetics of the everyday' and express it in many ways in their daily routines
- Demonstrates how the aesthetics of people's lives surrounds habits and judgements of behaviour, accounting for their feelings about themselves, their own cultural features as well as about theologies and the problems of the day in Iran
In this rare approach to half a century of ethnographic study of a pastoral ethnic community in the hinterland of Iran, the emotional and judgmental reactions local people have to conventions and customs of their own culture is in sharp focus. The book rests on a longitudinal ethnographic study of an agro-pastoral group over five decades in a remote mountain area in Iran. The effects of hard work, poverty, and lifestyle changes over the past decades have moulded people's likes and dislikes, their comforts and pains and what they deem beautiful and ugly. In the aesthetics of everyday life, social structures, traditions and local habits provide many choices for behaviour and experiences, and also for the feelings the various options allow or even provoke. This focus on the cognitive and emotive side of culture affords insights into how rural/transhumant people evaluate their life conditions, their relationships to others, to nature, to time, to religion, and thus to the aesthetic dimension of their lives over half a century of rapid change.
Preface: Earthquakes, Demonstrations, 'Tribe'
Introduction: Purpose, Place, Residence, Methodology
- Art and Aesthetics
- The Senses are Friends
- Aesthetics of God's Order
- The Flair of Kith and Kin
- The Aesthetics of Needs
- Reason, Logic and the Good Life
- Useful Religion
- Shapes of Things to Come
Friedl pioneers a new anthropological field. Five decades of observing and listening to commentaries reveal complications, choices, contradictions and rationales in evaluating what is good, useful, moral and why one is sometimes “forced” into decisions and actions. Excellent for understanding Iranian people and society over time and directions of change.
After fifty years of research among the Boir-Ahmad of Western Iran, Erika Friedl’s latest book reveals a profound understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, emotional lives and philosophies of her subjects. The outstanding culmination of an unparalleled series of publications on a tribal people, it will be widely read and enjoyed.
