LITURGICAL SMELLS

Of all the conventional five senses (as distinguished from the less-considered senses like orientation in space or internal distention, or non-ocular light sensitivity) smell is the most primal, since it is the earliest sense, present even in a one-celled animal, for it is the detection of molecules in dispersal, either in fluid or gas. Those without this perception cannot find substances nor avoid substances, nor distinguish whether they are good or bad.

In mammals the sense of smell is directly connected to the brain, even more so than the eyes, and linked neurally directly to the hippocampus which is the locus of memory sorting for preservation. Smells and information or incidents linked with smells are more memorable -- remembered longer and more vividly. Memories connected to “unpleasant” odors (subjective as that may be) are remembered better than those associated with “pleasant” odors. This makes sense in two ways: toxins and rot should be remembered so as to avoid them, and the funky smells of intimate bodies associated with intense stimulation (not just pheromones) should not be forgotten for positive reasons. But unless you’re a bee, the smells of flowers don’t matter that much -- they are decorations.

Octavian Coifan, on his blog called 1000fragrances.blogspot.com, is often eloquent about the primal connection between perfumes and religion. Consider this review of Aesop Mystra, which comes in a small brown bottle as though it were medicine.

“. . . Taking inspiration from religion or past is a hard work but Aesop succeeds at it in all ways. It's not the opulent sexy Byzantine perfume that would make you feel attractive .... but a mysterious mixture like a formula from the past that would transport you in other world. The main ingredients are incense, labdanum and mastic, and a lot of other naturals that would make it dark and uneasy to explore. There is an unusual quality I found inside - it’s profoundly animalic and dirty like a sinful woman. It has the combination of jasmin-amber-musk of the old world. . . a whisper of death in a decadent universe. “

Unafraid of being offensive because he’s in pursuit of deep truths, he traces the associations of perfume to the preservation of the dead, the attempt to prevent corruption, the need to disinfect, and the original substances used by the Egyptians for mummification. “Natron” (which is merely sodium bicarbonate to dry the tissues), minerals, bark derivatives, alcohol, acids, salts, resins, oils were all used and became associated with the hope for an afterlife. Frankincense and myrrh. All aromatics.

Another source of memorable smells is fire and burning. Smudges. Incense. For those people who maintained household fires, the collection and uses of different kinds of wood became a vocabulary in themselves: what burns hot, what makes smoke, what holds embers -- each with a distinctive smell. Through the long period when religious offerings were creatures, burnt flesh in the temple sent messages to Heaven. Add burnt feathers, bone and hair. Ritual cremations of humans at death. As soon as people understood how to make a fire hot enough to smelt metal, those pungent smells also became associated with acts so powerful and mysterious as to amount to magic.

Tanning is a messy process, fairly odorous. First, some means of removing the water in the new skin with salt or other dessicant is necessary; then working out the sub-cutaneous fat, perhaps by diluting it with the fat of brains, well rubbed in; and then removing the glue with a mild acid, maybe vinegar or urine. Native Americans used smoke to preserve. In Europe elegant leather gloves, still retaining a whiff of tanning methods, were all the rage in some historical periods, and traditionally scented by keeping them in a sandalwood box. Shawls being shipped from India were packed with patchouli, an aromatic plant that repels insects. Tobacco and sweetgrass did that, too. Maybe camphor or menthol. Where there is wealth, there are preservatives.

The smells of the pest house and various corruptions were fought with vapors of sulphur and solutions of iodine, all the disinfectants like ammonia or pine-sol and lye. Garlic and mustard were used as poultices. Even so came creeping the reeks of excrement, vomit and rot. Skilled doctors used their noses as much as their eyes to understand what was happening. Not many of us know the smell of blood as well as they did. (I’ve never understood why it smells coppery when it is in fact mostly iron.)

Then the smells of food preservation: pepper, chili, vinegar, char, cinnamon, dill, various dried substances both animal and vegetable, sometimes mineral. The smells of distillation and fermentation, baking and roasting, fresh torn greens and newly shucked peas or corn. These are life-sustaining odors, associated with contentment and energy. The Christian tradition has chosen bread and wine to celebrate, when they could have chosen dried fish or even burnt flesh, but those were about earlier times before households had the time and stability to grind flour or ferment grapes.

The smells of the city and of the industrial age are with us now, but not so associated with religion though they certainly saturate our understanding of reality. Hot asphalt, new tires, WD40, gasoline fumes, hot metal, a passing cigar smoked in the rain on a cold day. Perhaps churches have smells of their own: lemon oil rubbed into the pews, beeswax candles.

Years ago when I was in the ministry I attended the UUA General Assembly back east. It was pretty miserable, too hot and humid. When I got back, I stepped into the dry wind of the little Helena airport and found that all the sweet clover had just bloomed, billowing in a yellow cloud everywhere. When the burnt jet fuel blew off, which didn’t take long in a stiff Montana breeze, I was saturated by the honeyed smell of those weeds. It was so healing that I sat down on the curb instead of going to my pickup and on home. I sat there a long time. Sure, I know that the “sweet” smell of sweetgrass and sweetclover and even sweetpine (balsam fir) is coumadin, which is the blood thinner many people take as medicine. It’s the effective ingredient in rat poison (renamed Warfarin). But my blood needed thinning.

Something similar happened again on another occasion except that I was flying in and out of Portland and got back on a warm spring evening when the frogs had just burst into song in the slough next to the airport parking lot. I stayed there a while, too, watching the full moon rise over the Columbia River. These two threshold experiences are so deeply embedded in my sense memory bank that when I grow very old and can’t smell anymore, I’ll still be able to summon at least one Holy smell and one Sacred sound.

PRAIRIE LITURGY

A competent ethnographer who comes to a new community to study “religion” will look at the most global and thoroughly integrated information possible, but a naive pop religionist will tend to look at rituals in isolation and accumulate “theological” statements apart from everything else, pressed into categories from another continent. This is an radically important difference and will lead to quite different results. Most ceremonies and liturgies arise from within the lives of the people. If their lives are changed -- most likely by the introduction of the industrial revolution and concepts of modernity or Christianity -- the whole meaning of everything will change.

Even the sensory world will change: think of the difference between traveling on horseback and traveling by pickup. The smells, motion, distance traveled, exposure to nature, necessary skills are all radically changed; in fact, as much as it was to go from walking alongside dogs to riding alongside dogs. Dogs remain. Perhaps there are few liturgies about dogs because they are “givens” to all reservation life, participants rather than objects of veneration.

The “givens” of the ecology are the substrate of all religion and culture, so for the Blackfeet the four directions, the cycle, the achievement of harmony (fittingness) are the key to survival and therefore feature in ritual. The sterilizing effect of sun, the unpredictable deadliness of lightning, the persistence of wind, the paralyzing cold, are constants. Circling the lodge, monitoring virtue in the sense of tenacity as much as bravery, the importance of being in the right place at the right time are all vital. "Indian time" in its own context is not about being late: it is about waiting for the proper moment when the forces are aligned, then acting.

Amateurs and some professionals only spend part of the year in locus, which usually means they miss the winter. They might not realize the brevity and harshness of the summer arc when hail storms can be barrages of fist-sized ice chunks rather than the little white pellets many think of. They have not competed with bears in the sarvisberry patches. They have not as children lain quietly by a ground squirrel burrow to snare one of them. Such small but indelible sense memories are threads in the fabric of life. I’ll resist my natural impulse to go on with ideas about that metaphor, particularly since there was no woven fabric until Europeans began to supply it.

In fact, the early culture was about tanned hide, fur, bone, feathers, wood, and stone as incarnated in plants and animals. The beads, ribbons, metal thimbles, brass tacks and falconry bells, the knives and spark-striking firestarters were all from European culture. Blackfeet “bundles” developed out of the need to pack things along on horseback in a life based on movement through the cycle of food availability: camas roots now, chokecherries later, newborn large animals now (the skins are lightweight for clothing and, if kept whole, make a container) and fat bison cows later. In spring move towards the prairie while there is water in rivulets, in winter move towards the stream shores where there is wood to burn.

So now it’s possible to understand the major June gathering when all the small groups of nomads came together while there was grass for their horses and it was a little too early for harvesting most things. The importance of sarvisberry soup, which is made from dried berries, as a ceremonial food becomes clear. It’s not about the body of someone -- it’s about having enough food to have gotten through the winter and to eat the last of the stored berries in faith that there will soon be a new crop. It’s a show of appreciation, which is why one fishes out the biggest, fattest berry and hands it up to the little altar.

Christian liturgies have come to be an individual act even if practiced in company. One [sic] tries to save one’s own soul, though it’s good to pray for others. Blackfeet are far closer to the reality that the unit of survival and evolution is the band. Individual loss and suffering are certainly mourned, but the individual acts on behalf of the whole group. Therefore, the modern young men who seek meaning in the Sun Dance ordeal of piercing are guided by individual motives, but in the original ritual this was only part of a complex that rested on the virtue of one old woman. She was not virtuous for her own glory, but because her acts affected everyone. The same was true for the Bundle Keepers; Bundles were meant to be maintained well because they affected the fortunes of the whole band.

It is very hard to keep any religious ritual from drifting off into personal demonstrations of wealth, like the Pacific Northwest tribes who practiced the ritual of potlatch. In that rich ecology one person could accumulate a LOT of wealth, which he redistributed in a feast so generous that the communal bowl was the size of a canoe. The Blackfeet will give blankets and tobacco, but the Kwaikiutl moguls gave everything they had. They could accumulate wealth in intricately embossed sheets of copper which were broken and thrown into the sea. In return for all this, they were entitled to put a sort of disc on their hat. Some men had several discs.

The complaint that people tend to reduce meaningful rituals into attempts to superstitiously and magically control events recurs again and again. When I did my hospital chaplaincy, the Catholic chaplains hated to supply rosaries because people didn’t use them to discipline devotional prayer (keeping track of the number of repetitions of the formula) but rather considered them magical. I wangled a rosary for a young mother with a baby who needed surgery that would require resources the mother didn’t have -- not even emotionally -- and, sure enough, she wound the rosary into the baby’s crib and disappeared, as though the “magic” of some beads would be compensation.

In the same way the liturgies of indigenous peoples are used to supply prestige and “magic” without any real care for the context of the land itself, which is only a backdrop for them rather than the substrate of existence that it has always been.

THE ULTIMATE DIMENSION OF ARTIFACTS

In the beginning of James Clifford’s chapter on collecting art and culture, he quotes a poem by James Fenton:  “ The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.”  The Museum is one of those crammed, unsorted, jumbled places full of oddities and atrocities, the very opposite of an orderly, properly labeled, clean and well-lighted place.  In fact, probably much more like the places the collections came from.  He quotes the opening and then a later stanza:

“Go,

As a historian of ideas or a sex-offender,

For the primitive art,

As a dusty semiologist, equipped to unravel

The seven components of that witch’s curse

Or the syntax of the mutilated teeth.  Go

in groups to giggle at curious finds.

But do not step into the kingdom of your promises

To yourself, like a child entering the forbidden

Woods of his lonely playtime.”

Clifford adds:  “Do not step into this tabooed zone ‘laid with the snares of privacy and fiction/ And the dangerous Third Wish’ a personal “forbidden woods” -- exotic, desired, savage and governed by the (paternal) law.”

So what is this “dangerous Third Wish”?  I think it is about identity and therefore must be dangerous two ways:  narcissism and anthropocentrism.  That is, first, losing the connection to people who are “other” because of preoccupation with one’s self, and, second, thinking that the world is about human beings.  If one collects Native American objects or practices as “curiosities,” even as aesthetic objects without connection to their makers, then the collection is empty.   Their human meaning is lost.  What remains is what you-the-collector admire or associate with them.  It’s easy to make the objects into child’s toys.

The other problem lies along the boundary between what is emotional (attachment, identification, love) and what is spiritual, some power quite beyond any human mind.  If one is collecting as an emotional enterprise, then what one finds is fair game for children’s play, for books and movies, for paintings and sculptures, even historical assumptions.  Many people are very much attached to what they know about American Indian cultures in just this way and it can be quite a majestic and moral motive, like maybe “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” or the Museum of the American Indian on the Washington Mall.  They aren’t “bad,” but they can be transgressive and they can cheapen important objects with imitations and misunderstanding.

When I was small, my parents went to the Pendleton Roundup and brought us each back a certain kind of Indian doll.  They just fit into a grownup’s hand and seemed to be an Indian wrapped up in a blanket with a realistic head at the top.  There are some sophisticated versions at http://www.native-expressions.com/native_style_dolls.html  I took mine apart, expecting to see a body inside, but it was only stuffing.  They were realistic, amusing, nice for a child to hold, human, even thought-provoking.  This is what I mean by an emotional connection.

There is another dimension in some artifacts that is much older.  “Spiritual” is a weak word.  “God” is an ownership word.  Maybe “Mystery” will do.  What I’m trying to get to is the numinous, overwhelming, terrifying sense of existence, which can grip a person on a starry night, in the midst of a whiteout blizzard, on a bleached-dry desert, or an alpine peak screaming with wind.  I think this is the dimension of the Third Wish, the wish to be drawn into that strange existence beyond all emotion or familiarity where the great visionaries have felt hot/cold, falling/clasped, dazzled/unseeing, as they report to us when they have recovered -- if they ever return.  It is not a matter of death.  It is beyond either death or life.  Maybe Tillich’s Ground of Being.

Some indigenous cultures will speak of harmony and the yearning and necessity to stay in harmony.  They don’t mean anything trivial.  The ultimate harmony is to lose one’s identity, which is death except that if one has joined eternity, there is no death.  It is only terrifying here on this side, not after one has entered it.  

Not only do we seem to have diminished this experience into horror movies, but we seem unable to connect with the original power of the uncanny, even when presented with the gorgeous gyring of the cosmos in deep space images.  I think this is because of clutching our identity tightly, a narcissism, and because we have never let our imaginations reach for eternity and infinity.  We know they’re there, but like Calvin and Hobbs, we hurry back indoors.

Properly managed and if sensory connections to either the original referents or equivalents are found in the existing world, religious artifacts can be a way of putting aside the necessity of being merely “us,” a burden in our daily lives.  We look for it in sex or drugs or extreme sports or the invasion of other peoples, but the threshold is always the inner self as it interfaces with whatever is beyond human perception, which is a contradiction in itself.  

This is not unlike the attempt to conceptualize a god who is beyond human concepts and which always collapses into the narcissistic defense of the status quo or the destruction of all else in the name of human survival.  One must give oneself up in order to transcend oneself, a terrifying prospect.  What happens to the body at that point is an open question because it depends on the existence of the physical world, which may not have been there in the first place.  This is the concept of “dream.”

Hoarding objects, even for scientific study or to preserve their preciousness to many people, denies the reality of the Beyond.  There’s nothing “wrong” about this so long as one has no wish to go farther.  It will always require the settling of competing interests both within and without the originating group, and this can mean violence or it can mean laws that are unable to provide justice -- only order and peace.  But it is the senses that control the consciousness.

From 1,000fragrances, a daily blog by Octavian Coifan

http://1000fragrances.blogspot.com/2011/09/myrrhiad-pierre-guillaume-new-fragrance.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FCDyN+%281000fragrances%29

With "Myrrhiad," Pierre Guillaume . . . goes to the roots of the 8th Art writing the new rituals of perfumery with a precious material found at the heart of Religion and which portrays the constant human desire to go beyond the senses. . . .

Myriad of years go, the 8th ART emerged from the earliest sacred rituals and Myrrh was one the ingredients which accompanied these first forms of religion and the endless human desire to reach the infinite.

This time, the highly talented perfumer who signed an impressive number of modern highly original and creative fragrances, is drawing an imaginary bridge across time and cultures. He links the most ancient ritual of myrrh, a sacred ingredient burnt in the first temples of humanity (and complementary to incense) with the Asian ritual of tea. If myrrh is a ritual of smoke and scent performed inside the coldness and darkness of stone temples in a "social" space accessible to very few, the tea is about taste and the hot vapors, a ritual of intimacy accessible to everyone. Outside (communion with the others and with the Gods) and Inside (the enclosed space of intimate thoughts in silence). . . .Pierre Guillaume is playing with the concepts of scent and taste in an absolutely astonishing way. He takes 2 major cultural references and twists each with the signs of the other. Myrrh becomes bitter and sweet like a cup of black tea with sugar. The tea becomes black, smoked, bitter and highly scented like the real smoke of myrrh. . . . collective memory and intimacy.

(This is the end of this phase of the series.)

THE NOSTALGIA OF SMOKESTINK

Once in a while I will unexpected catch the sharp stink of hot metal: molten bronze, welded iron, a blacksmithy.  It sweeps me back to the high alert of our foundry in the Sixties, the Bighorn Foundry because it had a row of full-curl bighorn skulls along the eaves.  We were always aware that what we were doing, melting bronze and pouring it into a baked mold,  came from the beginning of the Bronze Age when humans squatted by a small hot fire doing the same thing.  Therefore, a recent remarkable  post on 1000fragrances.blogspot.com  struck me.  After all, I have the scents of ferric nitrate, copper nitrate, liver of sulphur, and nitric acid literally deep within me from the days when I stood all day patining and inhaling molecules from heating sculptures and steaming those chemicals into chemical reactions with the bronze surfaces and my alveolar lungs.

I am in the habit of smudging when I make my morning coffee.  I grow a bed of sweetgrass in order to throw a pinch of it on the hot stove burner after I make my morning coffee,  the brief smoke a sort of fragrant prayer.  

So this particular post from 1000fragrances.blogspot.com went to my heart, startling though it is.  Octavian Coifan usually talks about historical perfumes and complains about the degeneration of once memorable and intense scents into baby smells: pretty, fruity, and even tinted pink.  This time he went into the future and found there -- the past.  I quote:

_______

“A long time ago I "predicted" the appearance of a new direction - smoke, burnt things, caramelized resins, and all the spectrum of notes that share this empyreumatic facet in an oriental or woody context. Metaphorically this will be a return to the first experiences of man with scents, thousands of years ago, when he discovered how some things are smelling pleasant when they are burnt.

Today in Paris I am surrounded by (exotic) fruits, flowers from all around the globe, spices, beautiful perfumes and like any consumer space and time (the seasons) are no more a impediment to enjoy the natural beauty. But this is quite unique in the history of our race.

About 15 000 years ago the climate and the landscape was rather different in Europe. Forget oranges, bananas, vanilla, even rose and jasmine and try to figure out the scents of the "Ice Age". It is said that we cannot mourn what we've never had or knew. All these scents were theoretically unknown here, even if a "glimpse" could be found in some European wild herbs. But we started our journey on this planet in a much different landscape, before the earliest migrations out of Africa, 50,000 years ago, witnessed by the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. Do we carry an "olfactory souvenir" in our genes and the discovery and use of aromatic plants is our conquest of "the lost paradise"?

In the post about "singularity and living memory" with the reflection about the scent in the world of androids / replicants, there was something suggesting the mood of the 1982 masterpiece, Bladerunner. This movie is set in 2019 and let us imagine that in the future some catastrophic event might hit this planet. What is shocking inside all these apocalyptic visions is the destruction of the natural environment. What would disappear are also the scents as we know them today - not exactly the perfumes, but the scents of living things, the fruits, the flowers, the trees. What you could enjoy today in every public park would become the sinister metropolis with a scent of fire and smoke, so beautifully depicted in the opening scene from Bladerunner, or the pure white "virtual" universe from Matrix. In both cases lose contact with the "real thing" and our food will become a "pill". . .

In this universe a new place will appear, much similar to the opium smoking rooms in China, and here you can experience the real thing - the scent of an apple, a blooming rose, a juicy grapefruit or the scent of somebody you loved and lost before the Event.

About 10 years ago, The Demeter Fragrance Library did something unique, capturing those basic scents of life, not exactly perfumes, but more a fraction or a quote from our environment. The core exhibition of the UK pavilion for the "Expo 2010 Shanghai" presented a "Seed Cathedral" where visitors were surrounded by the seeds in a 20-meter-high hollow cube with 60,000-plus transparent acrylic rods. If the seeds of plants are preserved by botanic institutes around the globe, the scents of our world are not "preserved", analyzed, they are not even known and classified. We consider scent either futile or commercial, we are focused on how we smell (biology, psychology, etc) and less on what we smell. Libraries, as a collection of humankind knowledge, have started thousands of years ago. Libraries of scent (from the specific scent of a flower, an exotic wood to a perfume) are utopian even in 2011. Who would invest in something that captures the "air"? There are only 3-4 places in the world where this information has been gathered, but not really available even for the perfumers working for these companies. If tomorrow the 2019 scene from Bladerunner takes place, we'll understand the crucial role of the perfumer in our society, the only one who is able to understand and master a sense that was considered too futile. 

_________

When I was a child, my parents went to some event in Pendleton,  OR, probably the roundup, and brought me back a little doll, a kind that has a name I forget.  It’s really just a head with a body like a beanbag, wrapped in a bit of flannel to look like a sitting Indian in a blanket.  It smelled of smoke.  I loved it.  

I love the smell of smoke-tanned buckskin.  The smell of Indian Days was for me cottonwood fires (Bob used to smudge cottonwood bark in the evenings), now replaced by propane or electricity.  The smell of the Bundle Openings was old bird skins and rope tobacco, the big leaves simply twisted and dried, looking almost like dry meat.  You can have your delicate madeleines dipped in elderflower tea.  I crave those old funky alerting smells.  

Empyreumatic.  I never had a word for it before.  Not the smells of holocaust and death-dealing disaster like Japan right now, but rather a daily, homely, human smell.  Sometimes on chilly evenings the scent of neighbors’ woodfires slip under my doors.  It’s reassuring. I do not expect a smellsample of it to turn up as an insert in Vanity Fair.  So I came back here.

"SWEETGRASS" -- The Movie

"The Sheepherder" by Bob Scriver


“Sweetgrass,” is a simple but profound “documentary” -- more like visual poetry really. A record of the last high country summer trailing of more than a thousand sheep near Big Timber which is near Yellowstone. This movie is dead center on the cross-hairs of two of my high values: on the one hand, abstract near-literary analysis and on the other hand raw sensory experience. Watch this DVD twice, first with the commentary off. Watch it like music: just letting it come but watching for the themes and the chords. Then after a while or on another occasion, watch it with the commentary to see what the makers saw. This is NOT like the usual breathless witlessness of young people from back east who gasp, “How beautiful!” “How spiritual! How privileged I am to be here!” and completely miss the danger, the inhumanness, the desperate edge.

Many of us have the iconic world of the sheepherder in our minds as a marker for freedom and fiefdom alone with our dogs where we can be heroes, as though a sheep (or bear) cares. And some see it in a jokey way as “Brokeback Mountain” where men too good for sheep at least have each other.

I’m going to include some jargony high-concept quotes from the web here, because it will have meaning for some, but what it boils down to is an attempt to get at the actual experience of life, to go deeper, reach the core through all the fancy theory that has bogged us down in the last decades in order to get at what the theory is meant to clear your eyes for. Not romantic, not composed, not making a point. It just IS. It’s not a Western and it’s not an anti-Western, though the makers talk about it in those terms afterwards.

* * *

Quoting:

Ilisa Barbash is the wife of Lucien Castaing-Taylor, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences at Harvard and the 
Director, Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL)

I.

The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard is a unique collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Visual & Environmental Studies (VES). Harnessing perspectives drawn from the human sciences, the arts, and the humanities, the aim of SEL is to support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence. As such, it encourages attention to the many dimensions of social experience and subjectivity that may only with difficulty be rendered with words alone. SEL provides an academic and institutional context for the development of work which is itself constitutively visual or acoustic — that is conducted through audiovisual media rather than purely verbal sign systems — and which may thus complement the human sciences’ and humanities’ traditionally exclusive reliance on the written word. The instruction offered through SEL is thus distinct from other graduate visual anthropology programs in the United States in that it is practice-based, and promotes experimentation with culturally-inflected, nonfiction image-making.
Director, Film Study Center

II.

“Visual representations from all cultures, such as sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs are included in the focus of visual anthropology. Human vision, its physiology, the properties of various media, the relationship of form to function, the evolution of visual representations within a culture are all within the province of visual anthropology.” What we make and what we see entwine.

III.


“Castaing-Taylor’s work seeks to conjugate art’s negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life.  He recently recorded Sweetgrass (2009), a film (produced by Ilisa Barbash) that is an unsentimental elegy at once to the American West and to the 10,000 years of uneasy accommodation between post-Paleolithic humans and animals. He is currently completing a related series of video and photographic Westerns that variously evoke the allure and ambivalence of the pastoral, including Hell Roaring Creek (2010) and The High Trail (2010). “ This is beyond idle tourism, penetrating into deep engagement.

If that’s too much for you, here’s a bit of more accessible interview.

IV.

An interview in the MARCH/APRIL 2010 issue of “Believer” magazine.

“I ALWAYS FOUND A CERTAIN IRONY IN THIS IDEA OF MEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO NURSE LAMBS.”

For nearly twenty years, filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor have sought to depict, as honestly as possible, the beauty and ache of actual lived experience. In their new film, Sweetgrass, the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based couple examine the world of raising sheep and sheepherding in the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, in south-central Montana. This pointedly unsentimental and often startlingly intimate film provides, without commentary, an everyday view of life on a ranch and up in the mountains where three thousand sheep are being driven to feed—for the last time. Sheepherding is relentlessly grueling work, and the film, simply by getting out of the way, allows for viewers to experience this hard labor firsthand. Sweetgrass was an official selection at the 2009 New York and Berlin film festivals and opened theatrically at the Film Forum in New York City this January. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor met in film school at USC in the late 1980s. Barbash is a curator of visual anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. Barbash grew up in New York City; Castaing-Taylor in Liverpool, UK. The interview was conducted over email and the phone in December 2009.
—Peter Orner

THE BELIEVER: What I especially appreciate about Sweetgrass is that, like the best literature, it refrains from overexplaining. The film opens and we immediately descend into this world of sheep and sheepherding. But why sheep? How did you get started with this project?

ILISA BARBASH: We were teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in film and anthropology, and looking for local topics. When we found out that a Montana rancher was the last in the county to be driving his sheep up into the mountains, we thought it might make a great film topic. It was close enough to be feasible, in a beautiful area, and involved some drama. We also loved the fact that it was the last of something. It’s a hackneyed and by now totally discredited trope of ethnographic filmmakers to film cultures on the wane, or in their death throes—it’s called salvage ethnography. I don’t mean to sound callous about the tragedy of these disappearing life ways, nor to denigrate the importance of documenting them. I did, however, enjoy the irony of finding such a moment in such a modern setting in my own backyard.

LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR: I went up there in the spring of 2001 and stayed for a week, wondering if there might be a movie there. I wasn’t sure, but we decided to devote a summer to it as a family. It was an amazing experience for us all. I ended up falling in love with the people, just as I was falling in love with the West at the time. The landscape, the freedom, the aesthetics of the space—everything about it bowled me over. As a European, I could never get over the sheer scale of the Absaroka-Beartooths, the fact that there could be anywhere so remote in the lower forty-eight. It takes them four to five weeks to trail the sheep from the ranch to the basins—about eighty miles, on hoof the whole way. In the Alps and the Pyrenees these days, they’re trucked up to the pasture. And here we are in twenty-first-century USA.
To read the rest of this piece, please purchase this issue of the Believer online or at your local bookseller.


“Salvage ethnography.” I live in the middle of it. Maybe I should be more intentional with a camera.