TV Rituals and "Religious Grief" Representation; a Pathological Study of Occasional Events on Iranian TV in Muharram

A variety of occasional programs comprise a good portion of the post-revolutionary Iranian television production. Actually, a transformative feature of the Iranian national television and radio has been attending to a convergence of the society's cultural, historical and religious dimensions. One branch of this has been the gradual production of calendar-based programs, i.e. those which relate to different occasions. A unique coexistence of both the lunar and solar calendars next to Shia's high potential in this regard have shaped the foundations of the Iranian official chart of events.
These programs, however, have been branded as uninvited guests due to their overall low quality and monotony, especially during Muharram ceremony. Some exceptional productions such as The Tenth Night, and Mukhtarnameh, have provided tinges of hope, but the point is that these occasional programs have not been accorded sufficient attention in research. The present article intends to fill this gap by providing a serious study of these programs and focusing on the ones shown in channel 1 in Muharram 1433 L.H. (1393 S. H.).The survey period consists of ten days prior to the start of the mourning month till five days after Ashura (25 days altogether). The research basis is the ritual communication backed by a demographic approach, followed by recording and analyzing the religious grief feature with "constant comparison of the data" method as related to the Iranian TV ritual input and output. Among quality methods, demography is the one which contains enough flexibility for recording the visual hypertext transformations within 25 days of broadcasting programs by a TV channel. To do this, by watching and reviewing the daily programs of channel 1, the gradual changes in the setting and signs of each were described and recorded separately. This resulted in almost 200 pages of described data. The data were then processed in several phases according to category system and by using constant comparative technique, and finally the TV ritualization of grief was classified under metaphorical titles. The TV grief indexes as represented by channel 1 in the above-mentioned period are as follows: maximum pretense of grieving, weeping to a minimum, funereal grief, distinction between codes of passion and awareness, imposing start and unimpressive ending, solo grieving in the studio corner as opposed to community grieving in public, attending to mourning ritual more than mourning per se, historical representation from traditional media.