Abstract

When we survey the earliest shapes and forms of gravestones in Iranian culture, it becomes evident that deceased persons’ places of burial are not personalized by symbols. Instead, they merely provide us with the person’s name and dates of birth and death. In following the footprints of visual gravestones and checking records of individual visualizations of death, we discover that some gravestones have been inscribed and etched with motifs and inscriptions. They generally inform us about the gender and occupation of the deceased person, but there are no images of the deceased on the gravestone. After the Bam earthquake in 2003, a new form of gravestone emerged; etched portraits of the deceased were added to gravestones in the region. This practice soon spread to other Iranian cities. A question, therefore, arises: What does this change in the form of gravestones in a transition from the invisibility of the dead person’s face to his/her visibility? Does it show an intense wave of individualization in Iran? Interestingly, the faces of women can also be seen on the new forms of gravestones in the cemetery but not on the death notices on the walls of the city. What does this mean? This paper addresses these questions, including reasons visualization of the dead has emerged in Iran in the last fifteen years. What is the difference between the meaning of the visuality of departure from the classic to new gravestones? Why are women’s faces not seen in the death notices on the walls of the city but can lately be seen on headstones in Iran? What does this change show on a discursive level in public about the shape of the visuality of death in Iran in the form of the individual faces of men and women? To provide answers to these questions, comparative fieldwork was carried out in Bam, Rasht, Gonbad, Shiraz, and Tehran. The paper draws upon participant observation, interviews with key informants, and the nominal groups’ method of inquiry. On both ethnographic and anthropological levels, the results of this paper underscore a change in the Iranian worldviews and standpoints on the meaning of death and life.