T M Luhrmann
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 10941 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | T M Luhrmann |
| NOMBRES | T M |
| APELLIDO | Luhrmann |
| FIRMA | LUHRMANN T M |
| AFILIACIONES | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9923-4234 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 90 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 594 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 91 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1984 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Prayer as collaborative problem solving
Why do people pray? In this paper, we suggest another important dimension of prayer, namely that prayer is a form of collaborative problem solving. In this paper, we use both qualitative evidence drawn from interviews and quantitative evidence from a survey and an experiment to show that people use prayer to solve practical problems in their lives. We also argue that the informal and personal ways in which people address God in prayer put God int…
A thank you note
Why it matters that religious credence is (mostly) weaker than matter-of-facts beliefs
A Blending of Energies
Energy" is a central concept among spirit mediums in the United Kingdom. This article investigates how energy is understood by spirit mediums and the practices by which energy comes to be experienced and accepted as real. Interviews with forty such mediums revealed a shared understanding of energy that participants used reasonably consistently. We argue that the concept of energy is learned both conceptually, through metaphors, and practically, t…
Theories of mind and trauma after war in Uganda
After years of armed conflict in northern Uganda, many local people have turned to Evangelical churches for help with healing and recovery. We observe that the healing practices in these churches encourage particular notions of what the mind is, how the mind works and whether it is bounded or porous to the outside world. In the traditional cultural setting in which these people grew to adulthood, many accept that vengeance can attack supernatural…
Voice hearing as a social barometer
The comparative study of voice hearing is in its early stages. This approach is important due to the observation that the content of voices differs across different settings, which suggests that voice hearing may respond to cultural invitation and, ultimately, to learning. Our interview-based study found that persons diagnosed with schizophrenia in China (Shanghai), compared to those diagnosed with schizophrenia in the United States, Ghana, and I…
Hearing voices among Russian patients with schizophrenia
There has been relatively little work which systematically examines whether the content of hallucinations in individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia varies by cultural context. The work that exists finds that it does. The present project explores the way auditory hallucinations, or 'voices,' manifest in a Russian cultural context. A total of 28 individuals, diagnosed with schizophrenia, who reported hearing voices at the Republican Clinical Psyc…
The Experience of Psychosis in Psychiatric Inpatients During the Covid-19 Pandemic Among Unhoused Individuals
Anthropology as spiritual discipline
This essay invites us to understand ethnography not only as a science-like comparative enterprise but also as a spiritual discipline. This is because ethnography enables us to imagine other ways of living in the world. The fieldwork, the writing, and even the reading of ethnographies provide people with some external perspective on themselves. Ethnography thus allows people to develop a more a nuanced sense of what, for them, should constitute th…
The Shaman and Schizophrenia, Revisited
This paper presents evidence that some-but not all-religious experts in a particular faith may have a schizophrenia-like psychotic process which is managed or mitigated by their religious practice, in that they are able to function effectively and are not identified by their community as ill. We conducted careful phenomenological interviews, in conjunction with a novel probe, with okomfo, priests of the traditional religion in Ghana who speak wit…
On Anthropological Findings
The puzzles that remain
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
Big comparison
Les voix de la folie
La phénoménologie de la psychose est notoirement difficile à appréhender. Je propose ici une étude de cas de voix psychotiques dans lesquels ni les mots ni la voix proprement dite n'ont une place de premier plan. J'examine l'étrangeté de ces expériences, puis j'attire l'attention sur les caractéristiques de ce phénomène qui consiste à entendre des voix, que je considère comme étant d'une importance capitale : le non-moi ; une différente forme de …
The voices of madness
The phenomenology of psychosis is notoriously difficult to grasp. I offer here a case study of psychotic voices in which neither words nor voice proper figures prominently. I reflect on the strangeness of these experiences, and then point to the features of voice-hearing which I take to be of central importance: not-me-ness, a different realness, and presence. When it begins, madness can feel like grace, or art. The dull everyday becomes iridesce…
Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths
Significance The sensory presence of gods and spirits is central to many of the religions that have shaped human history—in fact, many people of faith report having experienced such events. But these experiences are poorly understood by social scientists and rarely studied empirically. We present a multiple-discipline, multiple-methods program of research involving thousands of people from diverse cultures and religions which demonstrates that tw…
To Believe Is Not to Think
Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people themselves recognize such a difference. We addressed this question in a series of sentence completi…
The sense of presence
The sense of presence—or the sense of “being there”—is a poorly understood phenomenon, especially in the case of “unseen others,” e.g., God. We used the tools of virtual reality (VR) to explore the effects of active imagination in creating a sense of presence of an ambiguously real other. We found that adding a visual representation was more effective than verbal language alone in evoking a sense of social presence in a ten-minute intervention, t…
Mind
There is something phenomenologically basic about the human experience of awareness, or consciousness. All ethnographies describe people who think, feel, imagine, hope, and are aware. Yet anthropologists have shown that different social worlds understand mental life (we will call this ‘mind’) in different ways. Different cultures imagine mental life differently, both in what thought can do, and how one might draw the boundary between mind and wor…
Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures
How God Becomes Real
The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real …
How God Becomes Real
What Counts as Data?
How God Becomes Real
When God Talks Back
Metakinesis
Contemporary U.S. religion is shaped by a new emphasis on bodily and trance experience. This article describes the learning process through which evangelical congregants come to use language and bodily experiences in particular ways, which I call here “metakinesis.” Through this process, congregants build remarkably intimate relationships with God
The Absorption Hypothesis
In this article, we use a combination of ethnographic data and empirical methods to identify a process called "absorption," which may be involved in contemporary Christian evangelical prayer practice (and in the practices of other religions). The ethnographer worked with an interdisciplinary team to identify people with a proclivity for "absorption." Those who seemed to have this proclivity were more likely to report sharper mental images, greate…
Subjectivity
Anthropologists use the word 'subjectivity' loosely, often to refer to the emotional life of the political subject. In this article I argue that a psychological model of emotion helps us to create a clearer anthropological theory of subjectivity, and in the process helps us to make sense of some of the anthropological quarrels about emotion as well. The article concludes with a discussion of the subjectivity of homeless, often psychotic women, wh…
The Cultural Kindling of Spiritual Experiences
In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized by individuals by a broad and almost indiscriminate range of physical events); bodily affordances (e…
A Hyperreal God and Modern Belief
This article argues that there is an epistemological style associated with much American evangelical Christianity that is strikingly different from that found in never-secular Christianities. This epistemological style is characterized by a playful, self-consciously paradoxical framing of belief-claims in which God's reality is both clearly affirmed and qualified. One can describe this style as using an "epistemological double register" in which …
Hallucinations and Sensory Overrides
Hallucinations are a vivid illustration of the way culture affects our most fundamental mental experience and the way that mind is shaped both by cultural invitation and by biological constraint. The anthropological evidence suggests that there are three patterns of hallucinations: experiences in which hallucinations are rare, brief, and not distressing; hallucinations that are frequent, extended, and distressing; and hallucinations that are freq…
The Art of Hearing God
The Art of Hearing God:Absorption, Dissociation, and Contemporary American Spirituality T. M. Luhrmann (bio) In an essay surveying the use of the term "spirituality," Sandra Schneiders writes that most scholars of religion these days use the term in an "anthropological sense," by which she means that "there is a growing consensus that Christian spirituality is a subset of a broader category that is neither confined to nor defined by Christianity …
The Taste of Ethnographic Things
Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation
How does prayer change the person who prays? In this article, we report on a randomized controlled trial developed to test an ethnographic hypothesis. Our results suggest that prayer which uses the imagination-the kind of prayer practiced in many U.S. evangelical congregations-cultivates the inner senses, and that this cultivation has consequences. Mental imagery grows sharper. Inner experience seems more significant to the person praying. Feelin…
Making God real and making God good
Many social scientists attribute the health-giving properties of religious practice to social support. This paper argues that another mechanism may be a positive relationship with the supernatural, a proposal that builds upon anthropological accounts of symbolic healing. Such a mechanism depends upon the learned cultivation of the imagination and the capacity to make what is imagined more real and more good. This paper offers a theory of the way …
Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality
This article explores the complex relationship between magic, science, religion, and rationality. Luhrmann and Tambiah argue against a simple, linear progression from magical thinking to scientific rationality, proposing instead a more nuanced understanding of how these domains interact and overlap across different cultures and historical periods. They examine how rationality is culturally constructed and how seemingly "irrational" practices can …
The Magic of Secrecy
Mind and Spirit
This special issue reports the findings of the Mind and Spirit project. We ask whether different understandings of 'mind', broadly construed, might shape the ways that people attend to and interpret thoughts and other mental events - and whether their judgements affect their experience of (what they take to be) gods and spirits. We argue in this collection that there are indeed cultural differences in local theories of minds, in the way social wo…
Our Master, Our Brother
Thinking about thinking
The Mind and Spirit project found that the way a social world invites its members to experience thought appears to have consequences. When the boundary between inner awareness and outer world is culturally represented as porous, so that thoughts can be construed to move in and out of the mind as if they had agency and power, people are more likely to describe their experience of invisible others as if those others could be experienced with the se…
Lord, Teach Us to Pray”
A secular observer might assume that prayer practice affects those who pray by making the cognitive concepts about God more salient to their lives. Those who pray, however, often talk as if prayer practice – and in particular, kataphatic (imagination-based) prayer – changes something about their experience of their own minds. This study examined the effect of kataphatic prayer on mental imagery vividness, mental imagery use, visual attention and …
The Good Parsi
Etude sur les Parsis qui constituent une communaute reduite de la classe moyenne de Bombay apres avoir forme, sous l'empire britannique, une elite tres occidentalisee. Durant l'epoque coloniale, ils se sont identifies aux Britanniques, aux valeurs progressives, rationnelles, et masculines que ces derniers representaient. Quant aux autorites coloniales, elles ont identifie les Parsis a la masculinite, par contraste avec le reste de la population, …
Touching the Divine
Why do religions that are in some sense invented out of the western scholarship on shamanism and paganism have such a hold on the western imagination? This article reviews four recent contributions to the literature on neo-paganism and neo-shamanism. As exemplified in the books under review, these religions have three basic characteristics—magical realism, playfulness, and experientalism—which are not unique to them, but shared by many modern fai…
Encountering the Supernatural
In this article we compare the encounter with the supernatural—experiences in which a person senses the immaterial—in Thailand and in the United States. These experiences appear to be shaped by different conceptions of the mind. In the US, there is a sharp, natural division between one's mind and the world; in Thailand, individuals have the moral responsibility to control their minds. These differences appear to explain how people identify and se…
Amazon Healer
Voice hearing as a social barometer
The comparative study of voice hearing is in its early stages. This approach is important due to the observation that the content of voices differs across different settings, which suggests that voice hearing may respond to cultural invitation and, ultimately, to learning. Our interview-based study found that persons diagnosed with schizophrenia in China (Shanghai), compared to those diagnosed with schizophrenia in the United States, Ghana, and I…
The Shaman and Schizophrenia, Revisited
This paper presents evidence that some-but not all-religious experts in a particular faith may have a schizophrenia-like psychotic process which is managed or mitigated by their religious practice, in that they are able to function effectively and are not identified by their community as ill. We conducted careful phenomenological interviews, in conjunction with a novel probe, with okomfo, priests of the traditional religion in Ghana who speak wit…
Faith in Anthropology
Talking back about When God talks back
Response to Hau Book Symposium on Luhrmann, Tanya. 2012. When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf
Evil in the Sands of Time
T the great texts of the great traditions are in some sense unchanging, but as Milton Singet pointed out, the anthropologist's task is to "find fot these ideas a local habitation and leain how they operate in the lives of ordinary people" (1972, 39). What I wish to present here are the changing meanings of texts that are thought to form the core of the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism and the story of how their interpretations have altered as t…
Popul Vuh and Lacan
Persuasive Ritual
Luhrmann Tanya M. Persuasive Ritual : the Role of the Imagination in occult Witchcraft / Les Rites de persuasion : le rôle de l'imagination dans la magie noire. In: Archives de sciences sociales des religions, n°60/1, 1985. pp. 151-170
Religion in Context
Anthropology and Autobiography
The Magic of Secrecy
Persuasions of the Witch's Craft
Our Master, Our Brother
T.M. Luhrmann and the Anthropologist's Craft
Robert Pearson Flaherty, T.M. Luhrmann and the Anthropologist's Craft: Differential Identity and the Ethnography of Britain's Magical Sub-Culture, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 152-155
Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality
This article explores the complex relationship between magic, science, religion, and rationality. Luhrmann and Tambiah argue against a simple, linear progression from magical thinking to scientific rationality, proposing instead a more nuanced understanding of how these domains interact and overlap across different cultures and historical periods. They examine how rationality is culturally constructed and how seemingly "irrational" practices can …
The Taste of Ethnographic Things
Persuasions of the Witch's Craft
Amazon Healer
General/Theoretical Anthropology
Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West
The Blood Libel Legend
The Good Parsi
Etude sur les Parsis qui constituent une communaute reduite de la classe moyenne de Bombay apres avoir forme, sous l'empire britannique, une elite tres occidentalisee. Durant l'epoque coloniale, ils se sont identifies aux Britanniques, aux valeurs progressives, rationnelles, et masculines que ces derniers representaient. Quant aux autorites coloniales, elles ont identifie les Parsis a la masculinite, par contraste avec le reste de la population, …
Never again the Burning Times
Other Intentions
Critical Events
Partial Failure
The paper identifies and tries to explain a style of argument that can be found in recent psychoanalytic writing and anthropological writing. In particular, it seeks to explain why similar styles of argument (which emphasize narration, interpretation, uncertainty, and the professional's incomplete knowledge of the patient or field subject) are presented in these different fields with such different effect. The paper suggests that these difference…
The Good Parsi
God as the Ground of Empathy
Identity in Anthropology
Commentary
The Ugly Goddess
Sociology (52 obras) · Philosophy (42 obras) · Psychology (40 obras) · History (32 obras) · Epistemology (26 obras) · Social Psychology (22 obras) · Aesthetics (21 obras) · Anthropology (21 obras) · Art (21 obras) · Philosophy (21 obras)