The Weight of Physical Environment: An Ethnography of Emotions and Bodies in a Marginalized Neighborhood in Tabriz

My ethnographic fieldwork research among a poor neighborhood in Tabriz, showed me that the physical environment is the main ground in which and on it, experiences and lives of this people has been shaped. The particular physical environment of the neighborhood of Malla Zeinal, with its general shape of valleys and hills, its narrow and hundred-steps alleys, moisture lands, humid and rancid homes, constitutes a physical environment which creates some of emotional patterns and some process of ill bodies and diseases. With this field-based understanding, I used anthropology of emotions and medical anthropology to grasp the practical and lived realities theoretically. The data of this research is obtained by a six-month long-term fieldwork. Through written pieces in an ethnographic style, including fieldnote excerpts and analytic commentaries, I will disclose how the physical place penetrate into the everyday experience of Malla Zeinal people and then by which the emotional culture and social relations affected.