Aesthetics and the Art of Living in the Zagros Mountains of 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.

Erika Friedl is the E.E. Meader Professor emerita of Anthropology at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, U.S.A. A Distinguished Faculty Scholar and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Iranian Studies, she has done some seven years of ethnographic research in an ethnic Lur community in Southwest Iran between 1965-2015, chronicling various aspects of the fast-changing culture. In addition to many articles, she published seven books about her work: Religion and Daily Life in the Mountains of Iran (I. B. Tauris, 2021) deals with local Islam; the previous four are on oral literature; the second and first, Children of Deh Koh (Syracuse University Press, 1997) and Women of Deh Koh (Penguin 1991) are on facets of family life.