Our Dead and Us: Practices, History, and Memory at the Behesht Zahra Cemetery

"Our Other Dead": a doctoral workshop at the Institute of African Worlds at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS).

Modern societies keep lists of their dead. On monuments, in official statements about an epidemic like the COVID-19 pandemic, during moments of silence, but also now on Facebook walls that remain “forever,” or in village WhatsApp groups. This persistent practice—at once bureaucratic, ritualistic, and digital—has a flip side. Alongside those whose numbers are precisely counted, there are those whose numbers are only roughly estimated (such as the bodies recovered from the Mediterranean, tallied by NGOs in the absence of state action), those buried without a headstone, those whose loved ones await remains that will never return, or those who do not appear in any official collective registry. This does not mean, however, that they do not belong to any “us”: more often than not, they are part of alternative, minority, and sometimes clandestine communities that claim them from the margins.

The workshop aims to explore these varying thresholds of visibility through a question that is simple to formulate but difficult to answer: what makes a deceased person “ours,” and what, in turn, does the process of becoming “ours” entail? When a state speaks of “our fallen soldiers,” or a family of “our departed,” the possessive does not merely acknowledge a preexisting bond: it establishes it, makes it public, and renders it enforceable. Conversely, the dead who find no claimants within any dominant “we” are the subject of a process that removes them from the claims of the majority, while opening up, through this very absence, space for other practices.

We would like to grasp the full complexity of this process by bringing together three movements. First, a movement of subtraction, through which certain deaths are classified into administrative categories that neutralize them (the “unidentified,” the “anonymous”). Next, a movement of reappropriation, through which relatives, minority groups, diasporas, or political movements reclaim these deceased from the process that removed them. And finally, a movement of creation, through which the liminal moment opened up by death—especially when it is distant, withheld, or devoid of a body—becomes a catalyst for new practices: reimagined rituals, lasting digital tributes, and a renewed capacity for action on the part of the survivors. We will see what death, as both a social and biological event, makes possible.

The social sciences of death have historically been organized around funeral rites, individual mourning, or the biopolitics of populations. The question of how communities symbolically appropriate certain deceased individuals while leaving others on the threshold of visibility—and how these processes, in turn, give rise to new ways of engaging and new capacities for action—remains scattered across research fields that rarely engage with one another: migration, armed conflicts, transitions from dictatorship, diasporas, and the anthropology of the digital.

This doctoral workshop aims to open up discussions about death in the social sciences by embracing the convergence—and at times the productive friction—between sociological and anthropological approaches, and by bringing together situated studies whose very dissimilarity makes possible a comparative analysis of these collective appropriations.

Speaker : Sepideh PARSAPAJOUH

Learn more:
https://enseignements.ehess.fr/2026-2027/ue/300