Aesthetics and the Art of Living in the Zagros Mountains of Iran - by Erika Friedl

About the Book

Explores Persian tribespeople's changing ethics, feelings and lifeways in tough times.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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.--Richard Tapper, University of London

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.--Mary Hegland, Santa Clara University