Luisa Del Giudice’s edited volume, On Second Thought: Learned Women Reflect on Profession, Community and Purpose, is an intriguing and thoughtful collection of thirteen essays written by women working in different occupations. They are anthropologists, artists, folklorists, historians, professionals in religion, physicians, and federal training officers, and they consider the role of spiritual experience and practice in their pursuit of knowledge and, intrinsically related, of a vocational career. In doing so, the contributors offer insight into the intersecting relationship of professional paths, social and religious upbringings, and individual explorations of purpose in life that is rarely found within the academic field. In strong prose, the authors unfold highly varied accounts. Yet, as different as their tales are, what binds them together is the feminist insistence that the voices of learned women need to be heard as a challenge to entrenched—often male-made—ideas of success and career, and to ways of defining and practicing knowledge and wisdom. By reflecting intensely on the role of religion in their lives and their professions, the authors particularly contest the epistemological binary of religious worldviews versus secular academic knowledge, and lay open the complex interdependence of both forms of pursuing an understanding of life. In this context, the stories simultaneously counter the still-prevalent feminist unease about religions and their patriarchal cosmologies with stories of empowering—sometimes joyful, then again painful—reinterpretations of spiritual practice and experience.

Each of the successive biographical narratives unfolds in another, often unconventional, style, written as creative nonfiction, sometimes in a mélange of (self-composed) poems and engaging fables. All of the tales portray the author courageously in her vulnerability: in moments not only of success, but also of suffering and loss, of felt denial of recognition or of hard-to-endure professional instability. This form of openness to the reader teaches, as Del Giudice puts it, “that career paths, albeit nonlinear and sometimes unremunerated, are nonetheless careers and perceived as such by colleagues” (19). Most of these women grew up in families of an Italian or Hispanic background. Their ancestors and family migration histories have shaped their life paths in important ways. A prevailing and highly instructive motif of the authors’ tales is “being between two worlds” or “betwixt and between” two cultures (see Magliocco’s entry, page 94). Charlene Villaseñor Black, one of the contributors, utilizes the Aztec word “nepantle” for the state of in-betweenness and thus terminologically expands the familiar concept of “liminality.” Furthermore, through nepantle, she makes productive an idea that derives directly from her research and simultaneously mirrors her Chicana/o background. Among other aspects, the status of being in between has influenced the subjects the contributors are mostly drawn to—be it, for example, Hispanic or Italian art, customs, or literature. “Being neither nor” and often in the “middle place” has also affected their ideas of what “knowledge” really constitutes. The conceptual spectrum is wide-ranging and encompasses the intellectual practice to see “the other side of the wall” and to be resistant to academic boundaries (Del Giudice’s entry, pages 140-170, especially page 149), as well as the competence to tell the lives of ancestors and let them “grow in stories for future generations” (a per Zinni, pages 63-93, especially page 86); or, again, the skill of turning the experience of material thrift and resourcefulness into modern performative art (Guancione, 184-214).

Religion is always a vital component of the authors’ understanding of profession and communal engagement. They apply a wide definition of religion and/or spirituality and of the ways it is practiced, which is analytically stimulating. Hence, some of the contributors show how religion, as an organized and/or inherited form of spirituality, can work as a re-assuring ground upon which to meet “others” with compassion and, as in the case of Lauren Vitiello, who works at the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Office, to be an emphatic and believing “gatekeeper” for those who try to find “feet” with a new society and state (Vitiello, 313-336). Religion, again, can foster an intellectual curiosity in religious poetry (Brown, 116-139) as well as a more holistic understanding of (corporal) existence, away from a rather de-compartmentalizing perspective on life and body, and yet—now and then—in synchrony with the so called “school medicine” (Pastore, 290-311). Some of the authors—instead of “inheriting” a form of religious (denominational) identification—acquired their specific religious or spiritual (new) perspectives during their life paths and their professional careers (e.g., Magliocco, 94-115; Leslie, 238-260). Sometimes their “self-chosen” religious worldview put their cultural in-betweenness into spiritual practice, as for instance in Neopaganism, where the state of “in-between the worlds” is looked upon as a (magical) space of transformation and the source of strength to change the world for the good (Magliocco). The Jungian analyst Willow Young, finally, leaves religion to the fluid idea of an inner “force other than will and intuition” and in that way relates it to the psychological concept of the unconscious (Young, 276-289).

The authors always interweave their spiritual/religious understanding with their emancipatory, feminist viewpoints and artistic or intellectual striving for knowledge (especially Giunta, 40-62, and Guglielmo, 215-237). Grace Schireson, a Zen abbess and psychologist, for example, refreshingly re-writes and re-tells the history of Zen by making her female Zen ancestors visible and hence a part of the taught canon (Schireson, 261-275).

Through all of these stories of learned women, the reader is offered an unusually intimate perspective on the situatedness of knowledge, on professional life paths, and on purpose in life. This is intellectually highly intriguing. Yet, some aspects in these narratives cause one to disagree. The interdependence of religious persuasions and intellectual, secular knowledge is crucial to reveal, as is done in the tales. However, a certain feminist and academic unease arises when these two spheres of seeking an understanding of life are linked too closely and used to define research methods such as ethnography with verve and rather rigorously as an individual practice of spirituality (Del Giudice, 163). Certainly, these spheres are highly interrelated, yet, it is epistemologically liberating to simultaneously reflect and lay open the fine yet solid line of difference between them. This remark is less an objection to viewpoints and interpretations developed in the book, and more of an invitation to further debate and ongoing exchange.

On Second Thought is a profound contribution, particularly to the current field of the anthropology of knowledge at the interface of biographical and gender research. It is highly recommended as a textbook for students, since it provides insights not only into the plurality of knowledge, but also into how our pursuit of understanding the world is deeply intertwined with social structures, cultural settings, and the individual search for fulfillment, and thus with biographies and gender. It calls for courage towards analytic texts “written as imaginatively engaging stories” (see Narayan 2012, x).

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[Review length: 1117 words • Review posted on October 8, 2020]