{"id":8284,"date":"2015-06-12T20:05:09","date_gmt":"2015-06-13T01:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=8284"},"modified":"2021-06-13T21:53:28","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T02:53:28","slug":"the-cosmopolitics-of-herzogs-bears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/12\/the-cosmopolitics-of-herzogs-bears\/","title":{"rendered":"The cosmopolitics of Herzog&#8217;s bears"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>One of the films that gets a&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/10\/22\/2-or-3-things-about-the-cinema-book\/\">lengthy treatment<\/a> in my book <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wlupress.wlu.ca\/Catalog\/ivakhiv.shtml\">Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/a><em> is Werner Herzog&#8217;s <\/em>Grizzly Man<em>, about the death of Timothy Treadwell at the hands of a brown bear in Alaska. I characterized it&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=rxzaAgAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;q=Grizzly%20Man&amp;f=false\">there<\/a> as a complex and nuanced film that provides a series of somewhat contradictory &#8212; but&nbsp;cognitively and affectively compelling &#8212; approaches to the human-animal boundary.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>What I neglected to examine in any depth was Herzog&#8217;s nod&nbsp;to the Alutiiq Native population to help make his own case about that boundary. I should have done that. A film about relations between humans and bears in a part of the world where such relations have existed for centuries requires delving into what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bruno-latour.fr\/node\/209\">Latour<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.upress.umn.edu\/book-division\/books\/cosmopolitics-i\">Stengers<\/a> would call their &#8220;cosmopolitics&#8221; &#8212; the ways in which they have been shaped and continue to affect divergent&nbsp;forms of &#8220;naturecultural&#8221; coexistence <\/em>beyond<em> the &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.colorado.edu\/geography\/class_homepages\/geog_6402_f10\/Latour%20modern%201-2.pdf\">modern constitution<\/a>&#8221; of Euro-American modes of thought and practice.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.earthhouseproductions.com\/\">Filmmaker<\/a>&nbsp;(and UVM graduate student) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.earthhouseproductions.com\/crew\/\">Finn Yarbrough<\/a> took up this issue in a short paper for the&nbsp;course I&#8217;ve just finished teaching. The paper ranges insightfully from&nbsp;the film&#8217;s queerish gender subtext to Alutiiq shamanism. I&#8217;m sharing that paper as a guest post below, with Finn&#8217;s&nbsp;permission.&nbsp; &nbsp;&#8212; A.I.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yySvdJeBcEg?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>The White-Faced Bear<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Guest post by Finn Yarbrough<\/em><\/p>\n<p>What interests me most about the Timothy Treadwell story is the controversy surrounding the morality of his life and death. Discussion seems to center around whether or not he was right to live as he did, from a social, personal, or ecological perspective, whether or not he \u201cgot what he deserved,\u201d and seems to universally acknowledge that the real tragedy is the death of his girlfriend, whom the film portrays as a sort of reluctant ghost, drawn into Treadwell\u2019s fantasy world and tragically slain by it. Much in the way that Treadwell seemed to fight an inner battle for his own identity, I think that these debates ultimately say more about our society and the tensions that we feel with our environments than they say about him.<\/p>\n<p>One lens that caught my attention is the lens of archetypal (white) American masculinity. I read into the vitriol expressed by the helicopter pilot, which is the kind of response I can imagine being fairly typical amongst men who have formed identities around their proximity to the wilderness and its perceived savagery. In that response, I saw the triumph of a kind of machismo: the wilderness is for real men, men who must prove themselves against it (rather than \u201cbecome one with it\u201d), and a liberal, frou-frou, former actor with a page-boy haircut who still sleeps with a teddy bear has no place in this fraternity.<\/p>\n<p>Even Werner Herzog nods to this homophobia, or queer-phobia, by his inclusion of Treadwell\u2019s comical (and somehow incompletely convincing) \u201cI\u2019m not gay\u201d diatribe. Treadwell sins against this order by being so completely vulnerable, and yet somehow surviving for 13 years. He calls into question the past 100 years of mythmaking of the Alaskan male identity. His uncomfortable \u201cI beat you, motherfuckers\u201d rant seems foolish, but when viewed in this light, takes on a kind of truth and calls out the men like the helicopter pilot, who may not actually want to kill him as Treadwell suspects, but are nevertheless happy to see him dead.<\/p>\n<p>But what I think Treadwell unwittingly goes looking for, and ultimately falls victim to, is essentially Alutiiq shamanism. I was intrigued by the Alutiiq museum curator\u2019s terse assessment that Treadwell \u201cshowed disrespect\u201d to the bears, and so I looked into what kind of folklore there might be surrounding bears in that culture. A <a href=\"http:\/\/ankn.uaf.edu\/Curriculum\/PhD_Projects\/AlishaDrabek\/Drabek_Dissertation_Final.pdf\">dissertation<\/a> by Alutiiq scholar Alisha Susana Drabek gives some interesting context:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">&#8220;Within ancestral Alutiiq traditions, animal transformation or shapeshifting is a common practice and symbol for the interrelationship of all life. The relationship between humans and animals is familial and deeply valued, with a thin veil between their world and ours. Living in close relationship to the land and animals, the Alutiiq value a kinship that once enabled direct communication and travel between these worlds as they engaged in their traditional subsistence lifeways&#8230; Specifically significant within this story [The Woman Who Became a Bear] is the wife\u2019s transformation into a bear, which is a common theme and vehicle for escape among other Alutiiq stories. The Alutiiq relationship to bear is comparative in nature, as the bear resembles humans in the way it walks, moves through the world, and raises its young. This story has also been used to explain proper respect for bears, as the Alutiiq have had to share their lands with their cousins the Kodiak Brown Bear, the world\u2019s largest brown bears.&#8221; (Drabek 182-3)<\/p>\n<p>Although much of the moralism surrounding Treadwell\u2019s death focuses on the untraversable gulf between humans and animals, Alutiiq cosmology has somewhat of a different perspective. Not only is the boundary between human and animal more porous than ours (European-American), but the Alutiiq creation story positions humans and animals more closely than does the Judeo-Christian:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">\u201cAccording to a legend recorded by an anthropologist, our animals came from the body of a young woman. One day she lay down and gave birth to all the creatures of the sea and land. As she delivered, her two uncles threw the animals into the water or onto the land\u2014wherever they were meant to go. The woman was married to a star, a spirit man from the sky world, who told her that they would have to kill some of their animal children to feed themselves. (Manosa, 2005)\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adfg.alaska.gov\/static\/research\/plans\/kodiakbear\/pdfs\/kabcmp2.pdf\">paper about Kodiak bear management strategy<\/a>, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has this to say:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">\u201cMyths and traditional stories about bears are common in all Alaska Native traditions, and those recorded from the Alutiit are similar to stories told by Yup&#8217;ik elders in western Alaska and by Alutiiq elders. The main themes of the myths revolve around the similarity between bears and humans, including the ability of bears to change into people and vice versa, and the mystical nature of bears because of their proximity to the spirit world.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This summary is anecdotally reinforced by a passage in Drabek\u2019s dissertation:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">\u201cElder Phyllis Peterson reminds us, that wherever the animals came from, bears (taquka\u2019aq) are very different. They were once people. [She says,] \u2018&#8230;My grandpa used to tell me&#8230;people run away a long time ago. They wanted to be bears&#8230;The bears, talk to the bears, they\u2019ll understand you\u2019\u201d (Manosa, 2005).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Is Timothy Treadwell one of these bear-people? My thought is that he is, but that he may not have been prepared for what becoming a bear really entails. He saw the bear people for who they are: he talked to them, and they understood. But people can be dangerous too. He repeatedly voices his willingness to die for the bears, but in that battle cry the implication is that he expects to die at the hands of humans, not the bears themselves. In his obsessive, even deranged, flight from human society and pursuit of the bears, Treadwell steps into an Alutiiq skin-walking narrative he doesn&#8217;t fully understand.<\/p>\n<p><em>The White-Faced Bear <\/em>is an Alutiiq legend that features a man tricked by a shaman into donning a bear\u2019s skin and becoming one. Once in this form, the white-faced bear roams the countryside revenging himself on unfastidious hunters who take more than their fair share of bear meat, or who hunt without the proper respect. In this way, the white-faced bear becomes a guardian of the bear people, much in the way that Treadwell sees himself. There is a sublime beauty in Treadwell\u2019s horrifying death. Transformation is painful. In the end, he wore the bear\u2019s skin. And once in bear form, the imagined enemies of his paranoid fantasy were finally able to gun him down.<\/p>\n<p>What \u201cinvisible border\u201d did Treadwell cross that, after 13 years with the bears, would have him eaten? Did his outsider\u2019s intrusion anger an Alutiiq shaman, one with the power to cast a bearskin upon him? Maybe, but I tend to think that he finally won the battle with himself, the battle for an identity that fit within a narrative of his own choosing, even if the specifics of that narrative were unknown to him. The killer-bear\u2019s dramatic death in fire and smoke may be of little consequence to the stability of this narrative, if the <a href=\"http:\/\/alutiiqmuseum.org\/word-of-the-week-archive\/478-legends.html\">Alutiiq Museum\u2019s summary<\/a> is a clue:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">\u201cAlthough everything in the Alutiiq universe is believed to have a&nbsp;<em>sua<\/em>\u2014a person inside that gives it consciousness\u2014only humans and animals are thought to have souls. When an animal dies, its&nbsp;<em>sua<\/em>&nbsp;dies as well. However, if the animal is properly treated, its soul survives and can be reincarnated in another animal. As such, respectful human action is critical to regeneration of game. The Chugach Alutiiq people of Prince William Sound believed that an animal\u2019s soul rested in a particular part of its body and hunters had to be careful to release this part to the environment. Honoring the animal\u2019s inner person, or&nbsp;<em>sua<\/em>, was also an important part of regeneration. Many of the masked dances performed at winter festivals were dedicated to this task.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The coroners bagged Timothy&#8217;s body up and left the bear to rot. Did the gunmen perform an Alutiiq masked dance to honor the bear&#8217;s sua? If not, then Treadwell&#8217;s imagined &#8220;motherfuckers&#8221; may have ended him after all.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ankn.uaf.edu\/Curriculum\/PhD_Projects\/AlishaDrabek\/Drabek_Dissertation_Final.pdf\">http:\/\/ankn.uaf.edu\/Curriculum\/PhD_Projects\/AlishaDrabek\/Drabek_Dissertation_Final.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.adfg.alaska.gov\/static\/research\/plans\/kodiakbear\/pdfs\/kabcmp2.pdf\">http:\/\/www.adfg.alaska.gov\/static\/research\/plans\/kodiakbear\/pdfs\/kabcmp2.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/alutiiqmuseum.org\/word-of-the-week-archive\/478-legends.html\">http:\/\/alutiiqmuseum.org\/word-of-the-week-archive\/478-legends.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the films that gets a&nbsp;lengthy treatment in my book Ecologies of the Moving Image is Werner Herzog&#8217;s Grizzly Man, about the death of Timothy Treadwell at the hands of a brown bear in Alaska. I characterized it&nbsp;there as a complex and nuanced film that provides a series of somewhat contradictory &#8212; but&nbsp;cognitively and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688745,196],"tags":[123640,123641,16796,123639,123638,123644,123643,123642,380],"class_list":["post-8284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema_zone","category-ecoculture","tag-alutiiq","tag-animal-philosophy","tag-cosmopolitics","tag-finn-yarbrough","tag-grizzly-man","tag-queer-ecologies","tag-shamanism","tag-timothy-treadwell","tag-werner-herzog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-29C","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1246,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/04\/18\/the-event-or-%e2%80%98nature-at-its-finest%e2%80%99\/","url_meta":{"origin":8284,"position":0},"title":"the Event (or, \u2018nature at its finest\u2019)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 18, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Volcanic eruption films aren't plentiful enough to make their own genre. Most of them fall into the disaster genre or the straight documentary video. Werner Herzog's 1977 film La Soufri\u00e8re, about the anticipated eruption in 1976 of an active volcano on the island of Guadeloupe, is different. Like his quasi-science-fictional\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"eruption-at-eyjafjallajokull-23.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/04\/eruption-at-eyjafjallajokull-23.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1101,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/07\/11\/cinematic-ecologies\/","url_meta":{"origin":8284,"position":1},"title":"cinematic ecologies","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"As ecocriticism expands and deepens in scope (of subject matter & media examined), extent (internationally), and diversity (in approaches, connections with other schools of thought, etc.), its interactions with non-literary fields such as cinema studies, theatre\/performance studies, and musicology (as I posted about recently) are starting to develop in healthy\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"stalker7.png","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/07\/stalker7.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4552,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/06\/10\/herzogs-cave\/","url_meta":{"origin":8284,"position":2},"title":"Herzog&#8217;s cave","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 10, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Cave of Forgotten Dreams is probably not an essential Werner Herzog film, and I sympathize with those (like Bill Benzon) who'd much rather just see the pictures and do without Herzog's prattling on or the \"banshee muzak,\" as Bill calls it. In both the prattling and especially the banshee muzak\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/06\/cave-of-forgotten-dreams-image-275x242.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8394,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/09\/18\/eco-humanities-glossolalia\/","url_meta":{"origin":8284,"position":3},"title":"Eco-humanities glossolalia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I'm currently teaching (in its third incarnation), \"Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.\" The course has also turned into a book project I'm working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities.\u00a0Both course and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Academe&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9066,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/12\/06\/reassembling-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":8284,"position":4},"title":"Reassembling democracy?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 6, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's the abstract I've just sent in for the keynote I'll be giving at the Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource conference in Oslo in February: Reassembling A Broken World: Toward Practices of Anthropocenic Mindfulness If democracy is to be reassembled, with the aid of ritualized practices, how is it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Spirit matter&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9503,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/11\/12\/fugitive-radioactivity\/","url_meta":{"origin":8284,"position":5},"title":"Fugitive radioactivity","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 12, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The Washington Post reports that \"Ruthenium-106, named after Russia\" has been wafting all across Europe. Two quick observations here. (1) \"Ruthenia\" is the Latin rendering of Rus', which predates Russia (as we know it) by several centuries. The chemical element Ruthenium was named by its discoverer, Karl Ernst Claus, after\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Carpathians\"","block_context":{"text":"Carpathians","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/tag\/carpathians\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/tubcVylNOa0\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8284"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11961,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8284\/revisions\/11961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}