Analytical Approach towards the Shamanic belief System in Sacrificial Rituals of Bandare Turkman

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 MA Graduate, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

2 Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

This research examines the ritual of Eide Qurban or the feast of sacrifice in the city of Bandar Turkmen. This ritual is one of the most prominent annual Turkmen religious events in Iran. This religious feast is based on God's request for Abraham to sacrifice his son that ends up with sacrificing of ram or sheep instead. Every year, at the end of the Hadj ceremony, on the 10th of Zihadje, Turkmen Muslims sacrifice animals like goats, camels, cows, and sheep in their homes. The men - heads of the families - are in charge of throwing the ceremony. The ceremony held in the name of someone who has to put his hand on the body of the animal. The Sacrificing ritual begins by digging a pit in the courtyard of the house, by placing some salt, charcoal, wheat, and blood of the sacrificed animal in it.  A ceremony that may be considered as an indicator of a shamanic cult. The ethnographic method is employed in this research.   The aim of this research is to discover the shamanic aspects of this ritual besides the Hanafi jurisprudence and Islamic traditions among Turkmens. The paper tries to explain the ritual of the sacrifice of the Aide Qurban ceremony, along with the days of Qur and Qurqun. The positive ritual derived from the book of "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" of Emile Durkheim, provides the theoretical base of this paper.

Keywords

Iranian Journal of Anthropological Research
Volume 8, Issue 2 - Serial Number 16
Indexing Databases
March 2019
Pages 123-143

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