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Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home | 
 enlarge | Author: Ann Armbrecht
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
Buy New: $20.45
You Save: $7.05 (26%)
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 106977
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 296
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 0231146523
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.89549
EAN: 9780231146524
ASIN: 0231146523
Publication Date: November 3, 2008
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Product Description
Thin Places is an eloquent meditation on what it means to move between cultures and how one might finally come home, a particular paradox in a culture that lacks deep ties to the natural world. During the 1990s, Ann Armbrecht, an American anthropologist, made several trips to northeastern Nepal to research how the Yamphu Rai acquired, farmed, and held onto their land, how they perceived their area's recent designation as a national park and conservation area, and whether--as she believed--they held a wisdom about living on the earth that the industrialized West had forgotten. What Armbrecht found instead were men and women who shared her restlessness, people also driven by the feeling that there must be more to life than they could find in their village. "We each blamed our dissatisfaction on something in the world," she writes, "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." Charting Armbrecht's travels in the mountains of Nepal and the United States and her disintegrating marriage back home, Thin Places is ultimately an exploration not of the sacred far-off but of the sacredness of places between--between the internal and external landscape, between the self and other, and between the self and the land. She finds that home is not a place where you arrive but a way of being in place, wherever that place may be. Along the way Armbrecht explores the disconnections in our most intimate relationships, how they stem from the same disconnections that create our destruction of the land, and how one cannot be healed without attending to the other.
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| Customer Reviews:
A courageous anthropologist's memoir to find her true Home starts slowly and takes off like a rocket! December 2, 2008
wildearth (New Hope, VA USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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...
Remarkable and Moving Tale December 4, 2008
Nina (Westchester, NY)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
This book stays with you December 15, 2008
Woden Teachout
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Exquisite book! January 2, 2009
Karen Werner (Montague Ma)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
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