Tue 8 Feb 2011
Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home by Ann Ambrecht
Posted by carynmg under eco-anthropology
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Ann Ambrecht’s fascinating ecological memoir, Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, looks at the stories and culture in rural Nepal from an eco-anthropological perspective. The book is soon to be in paperback, and here’s an excerpt. You can also find the book here.
While studying anthropology and while first living in Hedangna, I believed that I eventually would understand enough to say something conclusive about another culture, at least about the women in that culture or the children or the educated men, or even something conclusive about another person. I was looking for a place where I could gain a bird’s-eye view of the cultural landscape. Instead, everywhere I turned, I discovered ambiguity, fields and rights overlapping, truths that looked different depending on where I was standing. This awareness was deeply unsettling, not simply because I began to doubt my reasons for having gone to Hedangna in the first place and my ability to communicate what I had discovered, but because the one truth I had been raised with was that there was a truth and that I should tell it.
When I tried to write about Hedangna—about Devimaya, Dhanmaya, Raj Kumar, or Amrit—I often thought about how, as an anthropologist, I might explain the choices I had made. Everything that seemed to matter most in my life, all the decisions I was making, emerged from the most intimate and private moments of my life, from things beneath the surface, the things I chose not to share with others, particularly outsiders. I thought of the different voices speaking to me at each step along my journey— those of Brian, my mother, my father, my sisters and brother, my advisers, and my friends; those from books I had read; those of Devimaya, Baiseti Thuma, and Chute Rai; those from my experience as a witness to Julie’s journey—all these voices clamoring for a say in each choice I made. And, most important, especially in understanding my unexpected decisions—going to Nepal, climbing into the cab in Kathmandu—I thought of my own voice struggling for a say amid the rest. That listening to my voice was difficult, yet essential, that speaking not simply in private but in secrecy was easier, was connected to my personal biography, not to anything meaningful that might be said about my culture. Certainly there were things I could say about my place in the social structure, about my education and my class, or, to be slightly more specific, about where I had grown up and had and had not t traveled. But none of that revealed very much, or at least not the things I was interested in knowing. All the voices, each expressed and repressed for different reasons, were what mattered. How could anything so particular to my own journey ever add up to anything meaningful that I might say about my culture?
I thought of the shaman’s journey to Manguhang, a journey into the heart of the world. I wondered if I might find what I was seeking by going more deeply into life, into each moment—into the details—rather than stepping back and removing myself from the context and searching for a vantage point from which I could perceive the whole. I wondered if the essence I was seeking—an essence that transcended the particular—could be found only in the particular.
boss, Ruth Farmer, gave to The Magazine of Yoga about real learning, the importance of skepticism and trusting the process, tinkering and leading, progressive education, and what all we do at Goddard College in terms of holding the space for people to ask their most relevant questions and quest toward answers. See Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. Ruth discusses some of the specific programs at Goddard — particularly the BFA in Creative Writing, and Individualized MA — but moreover, she and Susan Moul, the interviewer (and co-founder of The Magazine of Yoga), and herself a Goddard graduate, talk about real learning, and how to find what meaning we can and need to forge out of our studies, art, work and life. This is also obviously applicable to learning about our place, our bodies, our communities. You can learn more about Goddard here, and see more wonderful articles at The Magazine of Yoga here. (I also write a weekly column on yoga, being a body, and poetry, including bi-weekly poems and writing prompts). Enjoy!