Portrait of a Cultural Explorer: Ann Armbrecht Interview

Post written by Laura Cococcia. You can follow Laura on Twitter.

As a part of my never-ending quest for cultural education, I love to experience new cultures first-hand. But it’s just as important for me to actively seek out other cultural explorers to learn from their experiences, insights and amazing journeys.

I first connected with Ann Armbrecht on She Writes, a community of women writers that Christa and I came across a few months ago.

A bit about Ann: Ann is a cultural anthropologist and the author of memoir Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home. Thin Places also won a 2009 Gold Nautilus Award, given to books that are changing the world. Other exciting news is that Thin Places is a finalist for the Banff Mountain Book Award.

Ann also is the co-creator of a new documentary: Numen: The Nature of Plants, which focuses on the healing power of plants.

I’m so glad Ann and I had the chance to connect to find out more about her story and explorations – I’m thrilled to be able to share them with you.

Laura: Anthropology and cultural studies fascinate me. What made you choose anthropology as a career?

Ann: After graduating from college as an English major, I went to Jawalakhel, a small community outside of Kathmandu, to work in a Tibetan refugee school teaching English. I was more interested in writing than teaching though, and so, at the request of the Tibetan organization for whom I was working, I began documenting the resettlement of Tibetan refugees in Nepal in what eventually became a book: Settlements of Hope: An Account of Tibetan Refugees in Nepal, published by Cultural Survival.

This project gave me an excuse to ask Tibetans the questions I’d been longing to ask, but had been far too shy without a formal reason. And as I tried to figure out how to do the research as I went, I became curious about how I would do it were I actually trained as an anthropologist.

And so I went to graduate school in anthropology but I think it isn’t so much that I chose anthropology as a career as it is that anthropology offered me a structure and a reason to travel to faraway places and ask questions about other people’s lives. On some level it is just that: desire to see the world: My parents traveled a great deal when I was a child and I remember lying on the living room rug watching slide shows after their return, entranced by their images of Peruvian women on the road by Machu Picchu, by the ruins, by the faces of the children.

But beneath that it is some of what I talk about in Thin Places: the belief that out there, in some far away place, lies a purity we can’t find at home. And the journey I explore in the book is coming to see how to find that purity at home.

Laura: I always enjoy memoirs – I think we all have stories to tell. From previous interviews, other memoir writers mentioned that the process of recalling their lives while writing is both exciting and challenging. When writing Thin Places, what did you find most challenging? Rewarding?

Ann: Ah, the most challenging part for me was reaching a point where I was ready to include my own story as part of the narrative. To include my story felt self indulgent, when my reason, was to tell the stories of the men and women I came to know in Hedangna and beyond that to gain insight into our relationship as a culture to the earth, about why we keep destroying it and what it might take to live in ways that were less destructive.

It was only after I came to see that my story could be a window into that world, helping readers see things they might not otherwise have seen, rather than a window reflecting back on myself that I reluctantly decided to have my journey provide the arc of the book.

Other challenges: the pain of reliving experiences that I can’t change, sadness over the passing of time and the loss of people and moments and times in my life, the struggle of searching for the right way to express things that felt so true and right and yet so difficult to put into words. A challenge I anticipated in the writing: revealing myself so fully, hasn’t been nearly as difficult as I anticipated – though I did have a moment of panic as I walked into an ethnographic writing class I was teaching, ½ of whom were men in their twenties, and wondered what in the world I was thinking to assign something so personal for my class to discuss!

The rewards are also twofold: in the writing: writing about something always helps me understand it more fully which in turn offers a kind of solace. And it has been amazingly rewarding to hear the ways that Thin Places has touched people. The book isn’t necessarily read widely but it seems it is read very deeply. One day I received a clay rattle with the words: Thin Places, Walking Walking (a recurring in the book) and an image of mountains etched in the top made for me by a potter. I couldn’t believe that something I had written had moved someone to create something so beautiful.

Laura: Are there authors or books that inspired you during the writing process?

Ann:

Terry Tempest Williams: Refugee and Leap for the risks she takes in her work and for the centrality of belief that our bodies and the body of the earth are inextricably linked and that what we do to one, we do to the other.

Robert Pogue Harrison: Forests: A Shadow of Civilization. I love this book, which explores the place of the forest in the western literary imagination but is also about so much more. I love the way he constantly opens his exploration up, the breadth of his sources, the complexity of what he is trying to say. Not easy to quote but very good for the imagination!

Linda Lear: Rachel Carson: Witness to Nature. I find this book so inspiring on so many levels, less in the writing, though that is very good, and more in the story of Carson’s life, what she was up against, the stand she took, her persistence, her dedication and her incredible hard work.

When I go to sleep at midnight, I think of Rachel Carson, hoping for a second wind so she can keep writing into the morning hours.

Laura: For those of us who are interested in learning more about other cultures, but may not have a career that’s aligned with that passion, what are some ideas you have for us to become more engaged and active in the learning process? Perhaps we can become “mini” anthropologists?

Ann: Part of the story I tell is about the lives of the men and women I came to know both in Nepal and then at home, on a journey around the U.S. looking at communities that were protecting their land.

The other is about my marriage and its unraveling. I realized that I had had all this training in understanding kinship and rituals and economic systems, and yet never once in my work in graduate school did we talk about how difficult it is to know another person: not the external apparatus of their lives, but what it means to see through their eyes, to be in their bodies.

Robert Murphy’s book, The Body Silent, is the only book I read in graduate school that made that connection between other cultures and our own experiences/understandings. And so I don’t think we have to go far to do anthropology – I think it’s really about listening, listening for what is and isn’t said.

It’s about paying attention. It’s about making room for another person’s life. Anthropology offers tools for doing that with more depth, for understanding the larger context, that sort of thing. But it can start with paying more attention to the world around you, being curious.

That’s what I mean by pilgrimage and thin places, thin places are those moments where we open to the world around us. And we don’t have to go halfway around the world to do that – though for me that certainly made it easier!

Find out more about Ann and what she’s up to by following her on Twitter.

Tagged as: Ann Armbrecht, Book Reviews, Cultural Anthropology, Global Cultures, Interviews, Laura Cococcia, Learning Moments, Writing