Customer Reviews

Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ann Armbrecht shares with us the rarest kind of journey: her account as an anthropologist of years spent living in a small community in one of the wildest parts of Nepal, and at the very same time, and even more importantly, a journey deep into herself. She walks a challenging and at times tortuous road, but her grit and heart carry her home to her deepest self. This is no ordinary anthropologist's tale -- but rather a true tale of a gradual and gentle awakening, an unmasking of all that we deem so important, a journey to the core of who she is, and who we all are. HIghly recommended! A word of advice: the book starts off slowly, be patient, because after the first 50 pages or so it takes off like a rocket, arcing higher and higher, deeper and deeper... and oh yes, the *chapter* Thin Places is worth the price of admission alone...

Only a few people in this world have the courage, the skill and the discipline to create a work such as this. This honest personal account of study, adventure and turmoil creates many wonderful avenues for thought. Thin Places is a diary of Ann's ongoing experiences interwoven with gems of writing that can only come from true reflection and a yearning for understanding. Be sure to have a pen in hand so you can return again and again to your favorite passages. Thank you Ann for sharing, you will touch many and everyone will be better for the experience.

I love this book! It wasn't a book that I read quickly, but instead savored as her story drew me in deeper and deeper. Armbrecht writes beautifully- in fact I found myself doing something I NEVER do- underlining passages that resonated with me and passages that were so wonderfully written that I want to come back again and again. I highly recommend this book, and in fact keep thinking of more of my friends who will love having this on their 'must read' list!

When I picked up "Thin Places," I was afraid that a book about an anthropologist's field study in Nepal was going to be too academic for me. But after reading the first paragraph, I knew I was in for something completely different. Armbrecht's prose is often poetic, and her story grabbed me from the outset.

"Thin Places" is a remarkable story that tells not only of the lives and hardships of villagers in one of the most remote corners of the earth, but also is a moving journey of the author's self discovery and her efforts to reconcile how to live in a world threatened by overdevelopment and loss of meaning.

A young, Harvard-educated American woman, Armbrecht embraced her work in Nepal not as a privileged outsider but as one intent on living in the village in order to work and learn. Her courage and tenacity are remarkable. She learned to speak the language, lived and worked for almost two years in the most primitive conditions, hiked for days in bare feet on a treacherous pilgrimage to holy caves high in the Himalayas, and later faced her own demons on returning to the United States.

I like to read books about people who are both strong and vulnerable, and Armbrecht is one of them -an inspiration to all trying to find their way in a world where people are losing their connecting to the earth, and with it, an irreplaceable part of themselves. Highly recommended.

Ann Armbrecht's beautiful memoir is like an herbal healing, showing us one way that a deep and persistent longing can guide us all home. But the way home, like any overdue healing, is never easy. It begins with painful honesty; it leads to a search for meaning in remote places; it requires losing dear people and ideas and things you didn't ever imagine losing; it means learning the hardest skill of all: to "see double"--to recognize how the visible world is always infused with the invisible, the mundane with the sacred, the personal with the universal. It means seeing that everyplace is a thin, whole place. If you can see that way, you can understand that what you were longing for, what you gave up so much for, what you went to Nepal and across your own country to find, was with you all the time. It's a remedy each of us can concoct for ourselves, but it helps to be guided, as Armbrecht has so generously done here.

Thin Places is one of the most honest books you will ever read. The writing is gorgeous, deep, insightful, and provocative. You will learn as much about Nepal and land tenure and coming to know another culture, as you will about love and relationships and community and trust and human frailty. This is anthropology written for everyone, for exploring who we are as individuals rooted in cultures. This book has so much to offer for both one's own inner reflection and also for group dialogue and debate that I chose to teach it to one of my undergraduate anthropology classes this past semester. A lively, productive, and deep discussion ensued, one that allowed us to get at one of the hardest questions of anthropology: how to address the transformation of the self through the ethnographic experience. For several of the students, it was a life-changing book. Read it, travel to Nepal and back with Armbrecht, and enjoy.

Vermont-based anthropologist Ann Armbrecht's Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home is one of the more ambitious books I've read in some time.

The title refers to the fragile sacredness of those spaces "in between" - and Armbrecht's book, at first glance a scholarly-sounding travel narrative of sorts, ultimately operates on the patient reader in a much more profound way, and at a number of different levels.

The writer chronicles her time spent during the 1990s deepening her understanding of the Yamphu Rai people of northeastern Nepal as they experienced a time of significant cultural and economic transformation. She also considers how her physical, spiritual and intellectual journeys shed light on her own personal and cultural circumstances. As a writer, Armbrecht has a gift for fusing her anthropological background with her own sense of history - as a Westerner, a married woman, and an academic - and the results impressive: by turns didactic, discerning, and deeply moving.

As Armbrecht acknowledges in her story, Westerners have a tendency to romanticize the eastern Other - and Nepal is a much-misunderstood region of the world, one to which Westerners attach their own emotional and spiritual baggage. What Armbrecht discovers on her sojourns, particularly in her focus on the women of the Yamphu Rai, is a sort of shared restlessness, rather than a place-centered groundedness often attributed, perhaps simplistically, to indigenous peoples.

When Armbrecht weaves the stories of the Yamphu Rai together with her own struggles - as a scholar, as a woman in a new and ultimately unsatisfying marriage relationship, as a Westerner trying to transcend a wide variety of cultural differences - she ultimately finds common ground with the individuals who inform her work. "We each blamed our dissatisfaction on something in the world," she explains, "not something in ourselves or in the stories we told ourselves about that world. If only we lived elsewhere, then we would be at home."

And ultimately, convincingly, poignantly, Armbrecht makes her peace with place, through a series of experiences that I won't give away here, for to do so takes away from the power of this intimate and often transcendent story

"I finally understood that there was a knowing in my bones and in my body that I had thought was in the bones and bodies of only the men and, especially, the women who lived in far-off place," Armbrecht concludes. " I now knew that I, too, would pick up the hoe and return to the fields. Again And again. Alone, if I had to. With company if I could. In joy and in sorrow, bare feet on wet earth."

Indeed - Armbrecht's vulnerability, wisdom and unflinching honesty at a time of great crisis for the West make this story one of the most important books of the last year.

I am buying copies of this book for people I love -I can't stop thinking about the complex stories Armbrecht weaves together here. The writing is stunning and gripping and is full of subtle, resonant gems about the stories we tell, sometimes to fit what we already know, sometimes to open to what we don't know. I am hungry for books like this that depart from conventional academic interpretations and show how finding meaning (of other cultures, of our own lives) is not tidy and compartmentalized. What I love most right now about the gift of this book is that it helps me see my own life, full of threads that seem unrelated and confusing, as a pilgrimage. That is healing. This book would be fabulous in undergraduate and graduate courses on ethnography,auto-ethnography, Nepal, epistemology, memoir, place, women's studies, story, conservation, and land. Students will actually read this book with pleasure! Those doing work that crosses anthropology and art will also find Thin Places to be inspiring.

This is a beautifully written book, full of powerful images, that stays with you long after you've put it down. It describes Armbrecht's experience as an anthropologist in Nepal, living in a village of 300 households, ringed round by snowcovered mountains. This is a world unimaginably far from our own. It is a village where every month, on the new moon, the women smooth the walls of their houses with mud, to keep them from cracking.

The book desribes first the author's immersion in Nepalese culture and the ways it transformed her thinking, and then the shock of returning home to the United States. I imagine this shock is common to many of those who have lived for a long time in other cultures: anthropologists, Peace Corps volunteers, others. What do you do with what you've learned? How do you integrate it into your life at home, with the knowledge that you are part of Western culture: you are not, and will never be, Nepalese? In Armbrecht's case, those questions also center on a land ethic: how can you have an authentic relationship with the land, even in a culture where so many of us move so often? The author takes you through her own journey, which leads through the birth of her daughter and the ending of her marriage, through to her own answer to these questions. That answer is personal to her, but it resonated with me in so many ways. I am still thinking about this book.

Ann Armbrecht tells an extraordinary story of a quest to discover deep truths about the world and herself. The book is set both in Nepal where the author conducted extended research in a small village so remote it's hard to imagine and back in the U.S. She weaves together the various narrative strands - the personal and the anthropological - in a remarkable way. When I put the book down after plowing through it in a single day, I was filled with images, questions, and feeling. Such a rich, smart, nuanced book.