Folksongs from the Mountains of Iran: Culture, Poetics and Everyday Philosophies

(Hardback)

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In Iran, folksongs are part of folklore and offer an intimate portrait of a vanishing era. They are also 'the voice' of ordinary people, providing a medium to express emotions, opinions and concerns. This book is based on folksongs collected over a 50-year period among the Boir Ahmad tribal people in the Zagros Mountains of West Iran. Erika Friedl has recorded, transcribed and translated more than 600 lyrics from a Lur community, and her analysis of the folksongs provides an intimate portrait of local people's attitudes, attachments, fears and desires. From songs of love, sex and mourning, to lyrics discussing beauty, infatuation and the community's violent tribal history, Friedl's solid understanding of the cultural background, lifestyle and worldview of these people lets her add ethnographic details that illuminate the deep meaning of the texts. In this way, Friedl goes far beyond a translation of words: she sheds light on a culture where beliefs, critical evaluation of circumstances and philosophical tenets are shown to be integral to each song's message.
Based on fieldwork that began in 1965, Erika Friedl's research on the folklore in Boir Ahmad represents the best-documented modern folklore compendium on an Iranian tribe. This new book will be important for future generations of scholars, including ethnographers, Iranists, linguists, ethnomusicologists and those researching Persian literature and cultures of the Middle East.

Reviews

Remarkable ... Friedl is careful to explain that the songs are dialogical in the full sense of the word, many entailing dialogues but also encapsulating a multiplicity of views. One gets the sense that the volume as a whole is equally dialogical, the product of fifty years of con-versations. This is poetic history. * Anthropos *

Author Bio

Erika Friedl is The E.E. Meader Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Western Michigan University. Between 1965 and 2015 she won numerous grants to carry out fieldwork in Boir Ahmad, West Iran. Her honours and awards include the Presidential Scholar Award; Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award; and Phi Beta Kappa. Friedl is the author of several books on the people of Boir Ahmad, including: Women of Deh Koh, Children of Deh Koh, Warm Hearts and Sharp Tongues: Life in 555 Proverbs from the Zagros Mountains of Iran, and Folktales and Storytellers of Iran: Culture, Ethos and Identity.