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Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home
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 in 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 that are between—between the internal and external landscape, the self and others, and the self and the land. She finds that home is not a place where we 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.
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 in 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 that are between—between the internal and external landscape, the self and others, and the self and the land. She finds that home is not a place where we 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.
- GenresMemoirAnthropologyTravel
296 pages, Hardcover
First published October 31, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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February 2, 2009Gorgeous prose, brings back remincences on a pre-conflict perspective on a Rai community in Nepal, an eloquent discourse on fieldwork and its resonance in one's own life
May 20, 2025
A friend (and climber of Mt Everest) had highly recommended this to me. My wife & I had visited Nepal in 1989, and our daughter spent six months there five years ago...she came back speaking Nepali and enthralled by her time living in a remote village. So, this book resonated on a few levels.
I enjoyed it - the descriptions of people, structures and relationships were strong, I thought. The twinning of the author's marital challenges provided a melancholy backdrop. I've been reading a lot of history and novels; I found the author's anthropological lens a bit challenging. How can one observe in a neutral, dispassionate, judgment-free way? Don't think one can, and it seemed to me the author came to recognize this.
I enjoyed the book and yes, bought it for my daughter's upcoming birthday. Shh!
I enjoyed it - the descriptions of people, structures and relationships were strong, I thought. The twinning of the author's marital challenges provided a melancholy backdrop. I've been reading a lot of history and novels; I found the author's anthropological lens a bit challenging. How can one observe in a neutral, dispassionate, judgment-free way? Don't think one can, and it seemed to me the author came to recognize this.
I enjoyed the book and yes, bought it for my daughter's upcoming birthday. Shh!
April 28, 2026
having spent close to 8 hours reading and annotating and thinking about this book for school, i can say with conviction i would not have continued to read this past the halfway mark had i any choice in the matter.
April 20, 2025
3.5 stars
February 11, 2014
I was honored to read this book. That's how I felt throughout--honored. Armbrecht's delicacy in representing another culture on the page, and in representing the *process* of representing the "other" gives the book a roomy feeling. The reader has plenty of ground to stand on as the book unfolds.
Armbrecht is concerned with sacred place. How is that defined? She studies land ownership traditions in a remote area of Nepal and shows how well-meaning international conservation efforts can undermine traditional societies. She well articulates the between-two-worlds position many young Nepali villagers find themselves in, as they acquire more education and more access to Western lifestyles, but still are not afforded the opportunity to participate in a Westernizing society. Nor can they fully return home, as education and professional development systems in Nepal as in most countries do not use traditional values as a starting place. Students aren't educated on the basis of their strengths, and little thought is given toward how development could accommodate traditional social and spiritual values.
The parallels with the experiences of many Native Americans were obvious.
Sacred boundaries also delineate where the soul can most feel at home. Geographically, sure, but also within a person. The village she studied saw humans as possessing four souls, each of which needs to be nurtured and kept anchored to one's body and life path. Her observations led her to consider the state of her own soul, what it means to be at home in a world where physical boundaries constantly mutate, where family ties are easily severed, and where friends can move away or die. As a result of her work abroad, Armbrecht learns to listen better to her own needs and to honor her instincts.
There overlapping and interwoven structure of the book sometimes led to a lot of repetition. I sometimes thought some more direct exposition on her marriage and its decline would have been more effective. I found myself thinking of Gretel Ehrlich's A Match to the Heart, which is a wonderful book--but which lost itself in its own metaphors sometimes. You just wanted Ehrlich to come out and say what the hell happened to her marriage.
This book is a bit of a hybrid of scholarly work and reflection aimed at a lay audience. Thus, there are these odd moments when Armbrecht seems to feel the need (reflexively?) to do that year:page academic citation system. Not the end of the world, but it's a little odd when she's quoting TS Eliot, for example. All you really need to say is As Eliot wrote, blah blah. No one cares which edition you're referring to and anyway they can google the phrase. This type of thing gave the prose a clunky feel at times... also, while overall I appreciated her cautious, reverent tone, sometimes she may have equivocated a bit much.
I dogeared so many pages, I hardly know which to turn to now. I was especially moved by Armbrecht's articulation of the liminality of early motherhood, where it may seem that you're losing an identity, when you're actually gaining one. You ARE in the process of becoming someone else, and if you can embrace this rather than fight it, there's enormous potential for growth. In one sad section, her husband says it seems to him that Armbrecht's wings have been clipped by motherhood, when her internal experience is just the opposite. She's just stunned that he hasn't seen the transformation in her, how she's grown into her intuitions, how she has developed as a person as a result of being so intimate with her daughter. Perhaps she's less involved in worldly matters, such as her career, but she *feels* expanded by what she's going through, and it's a great grief to learn that her husband not only doesn't value this growth, but might not even see it.
What else do we miss?
Armbrecht is concerned with sacred place. How is that defined? She studies land ownership traditions in a remote area of Nepal and shows how well-meaning international conservation efforts can undermine traditional societies. She well articulates the between-two-worlds position many young Nepali villagers find themselves in, as they acquire more education and more access to Western lifestyles, but still are not afforded the opportunity to participate in a Westernizing society. Nor can they fully return home, as education and professional development systems in Nepal as in most countries do not use traditional values as a starting place. Students aren't educated on the basis of their strengths, and little thought is given toward how development could accommodate traditional social and spiritual values.
The parallels with the experiences of many Native Americans were obvious.
Sacred boundaries also delineate where the soul can most feel at home. Geographically, sure, but also within a person. The village she studied saw humans as possessing four souls, each of which needs to be nurtured and kept anchored to one's body and life path. Her observations led her to consider the state of her own soul, what it means to be at home in a world where physical boundaries constantly mutate, where family ties are easily severed, and where friends can move away or die. As a result of her work abroad, Armbrecht learns to listen better to her own needs and to honor her instincts.
There overlapping and interwoven structure of the book sometimes led to a lot of repetition. I sometimes thought some more direct exposition on her marriage and its decline would have been more effective. I found myself thinking of Gretel Ehrlich's A Match to the Heart, which is a wonderful book--but which lost itself in its own metaphors sometimes. You just wanted Ehrlich to come out and say what the hell happened to her marriage.
This book is a bit of a hybrid of scholarly work and reflection aimed at a lay audience. Thus, there are these odd moments when Armbrecht seems to feel the need (reflexively?) to do that year:page academic citation system. Not the end of the world, but it's a little odd when she's quoting TS Eliot, for example. All you really need to say is As Eliot wrote, blah blah. No one cares which edition you're referring to and anyway they can google the phrase. This type of thing gave the prose a clunky feel at times... also, while overall I appreciated her cautious, reverent tone, sometimes she may have equivocated a bit much.
I dogeared so many pages, I hardly know which to turn to now. I was especially moved by Armbrecht's articulation of the liminality of early motherhood, where it may seem that you're losing an identity, when you're actually gaining one. You ARE in the process of becoming someone else, and if you can embrace this rather than fight it, there's enormous potential for growth. In one sad section, her husband says it seems to him that Armbrecht's wings have been clipped by motherhood, when her internal experience is just the opposite. She's just stunned that he hasn't seen the transformation in her, how she's grown into her intuitions, how she has developed as a person as a result of being so intimate with her daughter. Perhaps she's less involved in worldly matters, such as her career, but she *feels* expanded by what she's going through, and it's a great grief to learn that her husband not only doesn't value this growth, but might not even see it.
What else do we miss?
July 14, 2009
This is a fascinating look into the life of an anthropologist in process. Ann Armbrecht's thoughtful assessment of her doctoral fieldwork's intersections with life and marriage encourage compassion among sojourners everywhere. In some way, even though we may grow into wisdom, we are always learning and vulnerable when in touch with our thin places, and those in the world.
June 25, 2009
Beautifully written
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews