Tanya Luhrmann | |
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Born | 1959 (age 64–65) |
Education | Harvard University (BA) Christ's College, Cambridge (MPhil, PhD) |
Spouse | Richard Saller |
Awards | AAA President's Award (2004) Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture (2006) Guggenheim Fellowship (2007) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Psychological anthropology |
Institutions | Stanford University University of California, San Diego University of Chicago |
Doctoral advisor | Jack Goody Ernest Gellner |
Website | tanyaluhrmann |
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Medical and psychological anthropology |
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Social and cultural anthropology |
Tanya Marie Luhrmann (born 1959) is an American psychological anthropologist known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and studies of how culture shapes psychotic, dissociative, and related experiences. She has also studied culture and morality, and the training of psychiatrists. She is Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. Luhrmann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. [1]
Luhrmann received her A.B., summa cum laude , in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1981, working with Stanley Tambiah. She then studied social anthropology at Cambridge University, [2] working with Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner. In 1986 she received her PhD for work on modern-day witches in England, later published as Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989). In this book, she described the ways in which magic and other esoteric techniques both serve emotional needs and come to seem reasonable through the experience of practice. [3]
Her second research project looked at the situation of contemporary Parsis, a Zoroastrian community in India. The Parsi community enjoyed a privileged position under the British Raj; although by many standards, Parsis continued to do well economically in post-colonial India, they have become politically marginal in comparison to their previous position. During Luhrmann's fieldwork in the 1990s, many Parsis spoke pessimistically about the future of their community. Luhrmann's book The Good Parsi (1996) explored the contradictions inherent in the social psychology of a post-colonial elite.
Her third book explored the contradictions and tensions between two models of psychiatry, the psychodynamic (psychoanalytic) and the biomedical, through the ethnographic study of the training of American psychiatry residents during the health care transition of the early 1990s. [4] Of Two Minds (2000) received several awards, including the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology (2001). [5]
Her fourth book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (March 2012), examines the growing movement of evangelical and charismatic Christianity, and specifically how practitioners come to experience God as someone with whom they can communicate on a daily basis through prayer and visualization. It was the focus of a book review symposium in Religion, Brain & Behavior . [6]
Her other projects include a NIMH-funded study of how chronical or periodic homelessness contributes to the experience and morbidity of schizophrenia. [7]
Tanya Luhrmann was a faculty member in Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, from 1989 to 2000. From 2000 to 2007, she was Max Palevsky Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, where she was also a director of the program in clinical ethnography. [8] Since 2007, she has been a professor of anthropology at Stanford University. [9]
She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, [10] president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology for 2008. [11] She has received awards for scholarship, including the American Anthropological Association's President's award for 2004 [12] and a 2007 Guggenheim award. [13] [14] In 2006, Luhrmann delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the University of Rochester. [15]
Tanya Luhrmann was raised in New Jersey. She has two sisters, including children's book author Anna Dewdney. [16] [17]
Luhrmann is married to interim Stanford University president Richard Saller. [18]
Medical anthropology studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives. It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied anthropology, and is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health, health care and related issues.
Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis introduced by Julian Jaynes who argued human ancestors as late as the ancient Greeks did not consider emotions and desires as stemming from their own minds but as the consequences of actions of gods external to themselves. The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Jaynes who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age.
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
Clinical ethnography is a term first used by Gilbert Herdt and Robert Stoller in a series of papers in the 1980s. As Herdt defines it, clinical ethnography
is the intensive study of subjectivity in cultural context...clinical ethnography is focused on the microscopic understanding of sexual subjectivity and individual differences within cross-cultural communities. What distinguishes clinical ethnography from anthropological ethnography in general is (a) the application of disciplined clinical training to ethnographic problems and (b) developmental concern with desires and meanings as they are distributed culturally within groups and across the course of life.
Person-centered ethnography is an approach within psychological anthropology that draws on techniques and theories from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to understand how individuals relate to and interact with their sociocultural context. The term was first used by Robert I. Levy, a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, to describe his psychodynamically informed approach to interviewing during his anthropological fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal.
Robert I. Levy was an American psychiatrist and anthropologist known for his fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal and on the cross-cultural study of emotions. Though he did not receive a formal degree in anthropology, he spent most of his adult life conducting anthropological fieldwork or teaching in departments of anthropology. In developing his approach to anthropology, he credited his cousin, the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, and Gregory Bateson.
A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States is a sociological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the Northeastern United States. It was written by American sociologist Helen A. Berger of the West Chester University of Pennsylvania and first published in 1999 by the University of South Carolina Press. It was released as a part of a series of academic books entitled Studies in Comparative Religion, edited by Frederick M. Denny, a religious studies scholar at the University of Chicago.
Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America is a folkloric and anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the United States. It was written by the American anthropologist and folklorist Sabina Magliocco of California State University, Northridge and first published in 2004 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It was released as a part of a series of academic books titled 'Contemporary Ethnography', edited by the anthropologists Kirin Narayan of the University of Wisconsin and Paul Stoller of West Chester University.
Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco is an anthropological study of the Reclaiming Wiccan community of San Francisco. It was written by the Scandinavian theologian Jone Salomonsen of the California State University, Northridge and first published in 2002 by the Routledge.
Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited is an anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the United States. It was written by the American anthropologist Loretta Orion and published by Waveland Press in 1995.
Living Witchcraft: A Contemporary American Coven is a sociological study of an American coven of Wiccans who operated in Atlanta, Georgia during the early 1990s. It was co-written by the sociologist Allen Scarboro, psychologist Nancy Campbell and literary critic Shirley Stave and first published by Praeger in 1994. Although largely sociological, the study was interdisciplinary, and included both insider and outsider perspectives into the coven; Stave was an initiate and a practicing Wiccan while Scarboro and Campbell remained non-initiates throughout the course of their research.
Persuasions of the Witches' Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England is a study of several Wiccan and ceremonial magic groups that assembled in southern England during the 1980s. It was written by the American anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann of the University of California, San Diego, and first published in 1989.
Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia is an anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in Australia. It was written by the Australian anthropologist Lynne Hume and first published in 1997 by Melbourne University Press.
Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology is an anthropological study of contemporary Pagan and ceremonial magic groups that practiced magic in London, England, during the 1990s. It was written by English anthropologist Susan Greenwood based upon her doctoral research undertaken at Goldsmiths' College, a part of the University of London, and first published in 2000 by Berg Publishers.
Anna Elizabeth Dewdney was an American author and illustrator of children's books. The first book she wrote and illustrated, Llama Llama Red Pajama, received critical acclaim in 2005. She wrote numerous other books in the Llama Llama series, which have all been New York Times bestsellers. Her work has been adapted into stage plays, dance performances, musicals, and an animated television series for Netflix. Many states and non-profits use her books for literacy campaigns and programs, including the Library of Congress.
Charles Lindholm is the University Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. He is the author of nine books and over seventy articles and reviews. His writings have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Chinese, Arabic, and Portuguese.
Niloofar Haeri is an Iranian-American Islamic scholar, anthropologist and linguist. She is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, and the Program Chair in Islamic Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Byron Joseph Good is an American medical anthropologist primarily studying mental illness. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University, where he is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology.
James S. Bielo is an American socio-cultural anthropologist, specializing in the Anthropology of Religion, the Anthropology of Christianity, American Religion, Urban Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, and the study of Material Religion. He is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. He was awarded his Ph.D. in anthropology in 2007 from Michigan State University. With Carrie M. Lane, he is the series founder and co-editor of the “Anthropology of Contemporary North America" book series at the University of Nebraska Press. He is one of the founders of the AnthroCyBib, an online bibliographic resource for the anthropology of Christianity that is hosted by the University of Edinburgh. He is also a founder and co-curator of Materializing the Bible, an interactive, curated a catalogue of biblical themed environments that covers "Protestant, Catholic and, to a lesser extent Jewish and Latter-Day Saints sites, that in different ways transforms the Bible into physical, interactive and choreographed environments, for purposes of immersion, personal piety, religious education and conversion."
Janis Hunter Jenkins is an American psychological and medical anthropologist. She is Distinguished Professor at the University of California San Diego, on faculty in the Departments of Anthropology, Psychiatry, and the Global Health Program. She is Director for the Center for Global Mental Health at UCSD.