Doing penance as a nexus of practice : linguistic and semiotic resources in the social practice of mourning ceremonies

Funeral and mourning rites capture so many aspects of the Iranian traditional and religious rituals and provide members of society with cultural tools of lamenting the dead. The study presents socio-cultural considerations in connection with social space and action, linguistic interactions, and semiotic resources of rituals used in mourning ceremonies for Shiite Muslims in the city of Nur, Iran. The paper relies on a mediated discourse analysis approach as a theoretical framework from which to develop a semiotic analysis of the linguistic practices and mediational means that appear in the mourning events. To this end, I shall draw upon video and audio recorded interactions of mourning rituals personally collected at funerals. The paper demonstrates that while mourning rituals are culturally and religiously framed in Shiite Muslims, one must also include the social space, the discourse cycle, the trajectories of the material resource of individual's historical bodies and of text.