For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing....
Ecclesiastes 9:5
"The Val d’Anniviers, which snakes up the highest peaks of the 
Swiss
Alps, is a case study inhow mountains isolate valleys and villages,
breeding unique traditions. When Swiss anthropologist Yvonne Preiswerk
first arrived to conduct fieldwork here, she noted strange funeral
rituals reminiscent of ancient Egypt.
“We are struck by … a special kind of mountain Catholicism,” she
wrote in the 1992 paper “Death, the Priest, the Woman and the Cow:
Chronicle of Research in the Village.” In centuries previous, she
explained, visitors appalled by these pagan practices had labeled the
locals “barbaric,” positing that they’d descended from the Huns.
The rituals that shocked them involved a mix of death and cheese. Growing seasons are short and winters are long. To survive the cold, villagers had to preserve nutrient-dense food. That’s why residents of Grimentz, like people elsewhere in the
Alps, breed bovines adapted to the steep landscape, bringing them to
high pasture in summer to graze. Pooling abundant summer milk, they make
giant wheels of cheese.
To render the wheels sturdy, cheesemakers “cook” the curds to
firm them, and press them to expel as much whey as possible.
In Grimentz, it manifested in elaborate funerals. After a death, the
bells of the deceased’s cows were removed, so that the animals, too,
could mourn.
Families added a “picnic of the dead” to the casket, which
included a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese (as well as sturdy boots,
as ghosts were rumored to wander the glaciers after dark).
As one of Preiswerk’s interview subjects recounted, the
funeral guests were told, “Come to the meal, because the dead man has
left enough.”
In a historically poor area, “leaving enough” required advance
planning. “There was the ‘cheese of the dead,’” explains Zufferey.
“Everyone had a wheel of cheese so that they had something to serve at
their funeral.” When the inevitable time came, the chiseled cheese was
washed down with vin des glaciers, the local wine.
According to anthropologist Claude-Alexandre Fournier, families
gradually stopped overseeing funeral rituals at home. “Mortuary
knowledge was no longer transmitted,” he wrote in the 2013 ethnography Odette Fournier, Sage-Femme,
“thus depriving families of the ‘death equipment box.’” Yet in a few
basements scattered throughout the valley, you’ll still find carefully
stacked wheels of funeral cheese."
AtlasObscura/MollyMcDonough
