Sepideh Parsapajouh is an anthropologist and researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Social Sciences of Religion (CéSor-EHESS). Her first research was on an Iranian shantytown where she discovered an order based on various solidarity mechanisms. This research led her to the importance of immaterial value systems and religious beliefs in the balance of a society. She now studies various aspects of popular Shia religion, individual and collective, intimate and spectacular, in Iran and elsewhere, in particular practices related to death such as the cult of saints and martyrs.