Paper short abstract:

Sonic ethnography evoking the fieldwork on lamentations sung by Bahktiari women, South-Iran. Laments often accompany the process of mourning with music, song and poetry.

Paper long abstract:

Through sounds that convey the patterns and rhythms of lamentation, the research outcome is a reflection and a space of sensation in the form of a Lament, where individual and collective memories come together in a practice of healing.

The researcher's own body is also part of her research. By working with the traces of the past and using personal sound recordings, the researcher becomes herself a living archive and a body of transmission. She performs a practice of "auto-ethnography," claiming the codes of ethnography - a discipline that has a tradition of patronizing or labelling persons and communities as exotic - to tell her own story.

The immersive soundscape represents ‘the song of the mothers’. It is a collection of sounds that draws on the tonalities of earth, water, minerals, alongside recordings of lamentations sung by Bahktiari women living a nomadic life in the Southern Iranian desert.