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Ethnos: Journal ofAnthropologyPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

Thin Places: A PilgrimageHomeJeanne Kormina aa Department of Sociology , Higher School ofEconomics , St Petersburg , RussiaPublished online: 19 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Jeanne Kormina (2012) Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, Ethnos:Journal of Anthropology, 77:1, 142-144, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2011.595812

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.595812

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technologies from textbooks and from themedical tourists who spend weeks ormonths working in Malawi. They knowabout them from enclaves of transnationalresearch or private clinics in South Africa.But in their everyday practice there is only ayawning gap ‘between clinical reality andmedical possibility.’ Wendland argues thatfor some students at least, this disjuncturewas ‘a major impetus forcing them to reima-gine the work, and renegotiate the moraleconomy of medicine.’ (p. 198). For others,of course, the impetus was to go wherethe technology was materially present.

Wendland knows of what she writesabout the working conditions of QueenElizabeth Hospital. As an obstetrician–gynecologist, she spent an exhaustingtwo days a week examining high-riskmothers and performing surgery. Butthis double role of doctor and ethnogra-pher was also an ethical problem. Toavoid clinical teaching contact with thestudents she was studying, she went outof her way not to spend time with themin the hospital. Nor did she seek themout beyond. Her material comes frominterviews with 31 medical students indifferent years, focus group discussions,as well as interviews with faculty and 11

graduates. The book is thus heavilyreliant on what the medical studentstold her within the frame of a formalinterview. Following the principle of‘interpretive charity’, she takes the stu-dents at their word. The words are infor-mative and thought-provoking. Eachchapter of the book ends with one ortwo personal narratives that bring the stu-dents and their situations alive. Yet, welearn little of their actual practice on thewards, their interactions with oneanother and the patients, or how theylived when they were not in the class-room or hospital. How are their asser-

tions about ‘heart’ or their intentions ofpolitical activism reflected in practice?

The reader is left wondering whethertheir ‘heart’ will hold after they leavemedical school, whether they willremain in public health facilities inMalawi, and how the combination oflow salaries and high status will shapethe family, community, and politicallives of these doctors. One can onlyhope that Wendland will some day giveus a follow-up on this excellent book.

Susan WhyteUniversity of Copenhagen

Denmark# Susan Whyte

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.586468

Ann Ambrecht. 2009 Thin Places: APilgrimage Home New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 296 pps.

Once, at a Quaker wedding I attended,the father of the groom talked aboutthin places, places where one’s nerveendings are bare. People make pil-grimages to thin places . . . What thepilgrims encounter – the blessingsthey perceive – depends as much ontheir receptivity as on the sanctity ofthe land they pass through (p. 87).

The book ‘Thin Places: a PilgrimageHome’ written by Ann Ambrecht, anAmerican anthropologist specializingin Nepal, is a vivid example of autoethno-graphy, a form of experimental (andcontroversial) anthropological writingadvocated by some and criticized byothers. The main characteristics of auto-ethnography are present in this text: (1)it makes the author’s own experience a

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topic of investigation; (2) it tells emotion-al-laden personal stories intended toraise strong emotional responses in thereader; (3) it blurs the boundary betweenacademic writing and literature as a fineart. In other words, these kinds of textscan be criticized as egocentric, manipula-tive and unclear in terms of genre and thetarget audience. On the other hand, it canbe praised for its sincerity, lyricism andhumanism – qualities not necessary foracademic texts but usually welcomed byeveryday readers.

Those familiar with anthropologicaltexts would recognize the scenario of‘rite de passage’ structuring the contentof the book: the period of departurefrom someone’s home and social status(Part 1: Departure), being in between(Part 2: Initiation), returning home (Part 3:Return), and celebrating a new socialstatus (Part 4: Birth) obtained as a resultof the journey. Ambrecht starts herjourney as a PhD student in Harvard,happily engaged to a boy who shares herinterest in Nepal, travel and nature – andends up as a professional herbalist deeplydisappointed with academia, and as adivorced single mum. Suffering of differentsorts, physical as well as moral, accompa-nies the protagonist throughout the book,corresponding to the idea hidden in thecomposition of the book: every subject ofan initiation ritual is expected to experiencepain and humiliation as she does. Thehero’s physical tortures include bleedingfeet, hunger and cold. Even more importantare the moral tortures, such as loneliness,suffering from being separated from thebeloved (first from the boyfriend and later,in the American part of a journey, from atoddler-daughter, who is living three daysper week with her father, the formerboyfriend of the hero), lack of privacy(during fieldwork), the process of a dissol-

ving marriage, and the experience of thedeath of a close friend.

The book is well written and skillfullycomposed. This is a small wonder bearingin mind the fact that before having beenenrolled in a graduate program inanthropology, the author studied litera-ture and writing. If one tries to definewhich literary trends influenced theauthor, directly or indirectly, one wouldnote the ‘bildungsroman’, recognized asa ‘novel of formation’ it deals with thematuration process of the protagonist ofa novel. ‘Thin Places’ tells the story –the female story – of the young Americanintellectual going through this processand becoming an adult with an unshakenidentity and belief system.

The painful rite de passage is ajourney replete with lost illusions. InNepal Ann is disappointed with theMakalu-Barun Conservation Project,which changed the everyday lives ofher Yamphu informants and the sacredlandscape of Himalayas. Likewise, inAmerica she reveals the hypocrisy of awell-known couple, back-to-the-landersHelen and Scott Nearing, and ‘thingsthat the Nearings had chosen not tomention in their books’ (p. 227).However, the culmination of this disillu-sion in her narrative takes place duringthe pilgrimage with her informants tothe sacred Khembalung cave, whichturned out to be an ordinary placedespite the difficult and dangerous trip.Nothing special happened there, asAnn did not experience the sacrednessof the place, only pain in her bleedingfeet.

This personal search for the sacredseems to be the most thought-provokingpart of the book, problematic and inter-esting at the same time. The protagonistof the book confesses, that during her

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fieldwork she, ‘cared less about theresearch and theory than about theopportunity it offered to experience lifefully’ (p. 159), that is, in particular, tounderstand her ‘own views of sacred’(p. 246). She came to the conclusion that‘the sacred not only is present in far-away places, but is a quality we experi-ence when we open to the world aroundus, to the sacred spring that flowsthrough all our lives, if only we know toperceive it’ (p. 179). This essentialist state-ment might be rooted in an intellectualtradition represented in the works ofphenomenologist Mircea Eliade, but itseems that here the author speaks as anative believer who shares new ageideas, rather than as a critically mindedintellectual.

Jeanne KorminaDepartment of Sociology, Higher School of

Economics, St Petersburg, Russia# Jeanne Kormina

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.595812

Sonia Silva, 2011. Along an African Border:Angolan Refugees and their DiviningBaskets. Philadelphia: University of Penn-sylvania Press. 1 + 172 pp.

Despite the perspicacious and pioneeringexplorations by Arjun Appadurai, IvanKopytoff, Marilyn Strathern, JanetHopkins, and others of what we nowfamiliarly call ‘the social life’ or ‘culturalbiography’ of things, anthropologicalunderstanding of how and why humanattributes become invested in extra-human objects, or, for that matter, howand why objective meanings get pro-jected onto human subjects, has reflecteda prevailing interest in politico-economicmodalities of exchange and value. As if

under the sway of the objects withwhich it is concerned, the dominantanthropological discourse has tended tobe objectivist in character, even whendescribing the subjective properties ofthings. Often labouring with an either/or logic, and a habit of identity thinkingthat all too readily reduces objects andsubjects to cultural signs, this discourserepeatedly returns to questions ofproduction or consumption, commodityor gift, reason or emotion, partibility orimpartibility, modernity and premoder-nity. What is so refreshing and compel-ling about Sonia Silva’s book is that shesuspends this vocabulary in order tofocus on what is at stake for the Luvale-speaking people among whom she livedand worked in northwest Zambia. Theresult is neither a naıve nor unreflectivere-description of their lifeworld, but ameticulous exploration of how variousmeanings are successively fore-groundedand back-grounded in the course of prac-tical, everyday social life – a life in whichpeople and things are equally significant.

For phenomenology, the world in itselfis neither one thing nor another – or,rather, it can be perceived, thought,indexed, and experienced in many differentways. Rather than seek to define whatthings may be in themselves, the phenom-enologist follows the Socratic method ofdiscovering the truth of things through ananalysis of what we say and think aboutthem, and in the ways we interact withthem. This entails a methodological firstprinciple of bracketing out or setting asidequestions as to whether or not anything‘real’ is covered or captured by the termsanthropologists and non-anthropologistsdeploy in speaking about their lifeworlds– commoditisation, globalisation, value,power, baraka, mana, tapu, and God – inorder to explore the extent to which

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