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About MARIAL MARIAL in the News
Film shares family, faith of camp meeting The sawdust from the Salem campground finds its way into every corner of the lives of Salem's pilgrims. It comes home in their shoes. It is sometimes sprinkled on the floors of the delivery rooms where Salem women have babies. And many request that a handful of shavings precede them into the grave, no matter where their coffins are lowered. That way, as one older camper put it, "I know I rest on Salem sawdust." Traditionally used as a covering on the dirt floors and front porches of the rustic cabins on this 70-acre Newton County retreat, the sawdust is a recurring motif in a new documentary film about the Salem experience, "Family Revival," produced by Emory University's Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life. Two years in the making, the 48-minute film will be shown Sunday at the campground's tabernacle, the central gathering place during the weeklong event, which began Friday. "Big Sunday" is the day when, historically, bishops and other notable figures in the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches have addressed the Salem congregation, their exhortations stirring a humid haze of mosquitoes and wildflower pollen. This year Salem is scheduled to hear from the Rev. Jonathan Holston, who was among the candidates for bishop of the North Georgia Conference, along with Fahed Abu-Akel, former general moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Yet church politics and the ways of the modern world are de-emphasized at Salem, where residents of Newton and Rockdale counties take a yearly break from 21st-century rhythms. Each year, for a week, about 40 extended families convene in this rural setting to attend church services three times a day and otherwise spend their time visiting, chatting and eating. In the early 1800s, campers attending the revival slept beneath their wagons, or in tents. Later, more established families built simple shanties. The tabernacle, which seats 900, was built from hand-hewn timbers in 1854 and sits at the center of the Salem campground and the Salem experience. With all the foot traffic from the cabins to the tabernacle to the nearby Salem Spring, Salem is like an 1800s replica village, except with better plumbing. Sam Ramsey, mayor of Covington and the fourth generation in his family to be in charge of the camp meeting, serves as unofficial narrator. "I've been trying to explain to people for years what camp meeting is all about," said Ramsey, 65, who aired the film earlier this week on Covington's public access cable television Channel 20. "But this film does a better job of explaining than anything I ever did." Interestingly, the movie is not a product of Salem regulars, but outsiders. It was filmed by anthropology student Scott Edmondson, who at the time was freshly returned to the United States from two years of Peace Corps service in a village deep in the Ivory Coast. During his time in Africa, said Edmondson, "I spent a lot of time hanging out on people's porches, while women cooked and shot the breeze. And here I was, in Salem, doing the same thing." Edmondson, 27, now a student of film and anthropology at UCLA, was hired by producer Bradd Shore, director of Emory's MARIAL center and a student of Salem traditions for the past four years. Shore, a self-professed "Jewish boy from New York City," became so entranced with the Salem lifestyle that he recently relocated his family to nearby Covington. "My fieldwork showed me that this is a better way to live," said Shore of his new Newton County home. While Shore sees Salem as a demonstration of a uniquely Southern matrilineal heritage --- a tradition passed down through the women in the group --- Edmondson is more taken with the spiritual underpinnings. He refers to Salem as a "thin place," one of those mythical locales where the barrier between the everyday world and the supernatural is gauzy and transparent. The film has been screened for folklorists and anthropologists in New York and Los Angeles, though it has yet to find a public television distributor. Edmondson said viewers have commented on the powerful iconography of the campground's everyday objects, such as the Ramsey cabin, with its hundred-year accumulation of photographs and camp meeting mementoes. Said Edmondson, "One of the anthropologists looking at [Ramsey's cabin] said this is like the barn that Jesus was born in." But the campers who appear in the film speak of Salem in the most familiar terms, as a place that serves as their strongest earthly anchor, no matter where they roam. "When other things change, Salem stays the same," says Ramsey's aunt, Mary Ramsey, who died before the film was completed. Toward the end of the film, viewers hear her voice offering a kind of benediction, saying, "There is a healing feeling [here] --- that you are not alone, and no matter what happens during the year, you are loved, and you are accepted, and God's going to be with you, and you're going to make it through." > ON THE WEB: For more information about the Salem Camp Meeting: www.salemcampmeeting.org To view the film online: www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/MARIAL/exhibitions
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