Cattle Branding Ceremony, Pampachiri, Peru from The Seedling Project on Vimeo.
For your viewing pleasure I have put a very simple video of a cattle branding ceremony up on vimeo. This is very much an anthropological experiment—there are so many records of events that Hannah and I filmed when we were in Peru that don’t really fit into any specific narrative arc but are enlightening simply in how different they are from life in the U.S. I also feel that this kind of minimal editing fulfills some of the promise of the original Seedling Project proposal, which was to record methods of Andean farming before they are lost. When I wrote that proposal I thought I’d come back with a tidy list of how-to advice on terrace farming like the Incas did it. Once I was in Peru I could see that individual tips and tricks of farming (start your plowing on the outside of the terrace and work your way in, for example) are really quite useless unless taken as only a part of the whole. How different life is there! I could not expect us here in California to elect three water mayors per town (every year) and for them to run along the canals every August to see that they are in good condition. Would you dig up a bottle of homemade hooch from last year and drink it down though it has a little dirt in it, and bury a new bottle along with a few coca leaves and a prayer for a good harvest? I suppose if you are reading this blog you just might.