Tanya Luhrmann

Tanya Marie Luhrmann (born 1959) is an American psychological anthropologist best known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and psychiatrists. She received her AB summa cum laude in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1981, working with Stanley Tambiah. She then studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, 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. [http://www.jstor.org/view/00029602/dm992717/99p0138m/0 Mary Jo Neitz "Review: "Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England"."The American Journal of Sociology © 1990]

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 have continued to do quite well economically in post-colonial India, they have become politically marginal in comparison to their previous position, and many Parsis speak 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, and the most widely acclaimed, 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. [ [http://archive.salon.com/books/review/2000/05/25/luhrmann/ Laura Miller "Review: "Of Two Minds" By T.M. Luhrmann" Salon, May 25, 2000] ] "Of Two Minds" (2000) received several awards, including the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology (2001). [ [http://www.aaanet.org/spa/prizewin.htm SPA Prize Winners] ]

Currently she is working on two projects. One is an NIMH-funded study of how life on the streets contributes to the experience and morbidity of schizophrenia. [ [http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/557181_print Medscape Perspectives on the 2007 Annual Sessions of the American Psychiatric Association: May 23, 2007] ] The other project 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.

Tanya Luhrmann was a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, from 1989-2000. From 2000-2007, she was Max Palevsky Professor in the [http://humdev.uchicago.edu/ Department of Comparative Human Development] at the University of Chicago, where she was also a director of the program in Clinical Ethnography. [ [http://humdev.uchicago.edu/luhrmann.htm http://humdev.uchicago.edu/luhrmann.htm] ] As of spring 2007, she is now a professor in the [http://www.stanford.edu/dept/anthroCASA/ Department of Anthropology] at Stanford University. [ [http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/2/1/anthsciAndCasaMergeIntoOneDept The Stanford Daily, 2007 Feb 1: "AnthSci and CASA merge into one dept"] ]

She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, [ [http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/030529/acad.shtml University of Chicago Chronicle, May 29, 2003 – Vol. 22 No. 17] ] president of the [http://www.aaanet.org/SPA/officers.htm Society for Psychological Anthropology] for 2008. She has received numerous awards for scholarship, including the AAA President's award for 2004 [ [http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/an.2005.46.2.21 Anthropology News, February 2005] ] and a 2007 Guggenheim award. [ [http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/may2/ppl_gugg-050207.html Stanford Report, May 2, 2007: Honors & Awards] ] [ [http://www.gf.org/newfellow.html Guggenheim Foundation 2007 Fellows] ] She often publishes as T.M. Luhrmann. In 2006, Luhrmann delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the University of Rochester, considered by many to be the most important annual lecture series in the field of Anthropology. [http://www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=524051]

References

elect Publications

* Luhrmann, Tanya M. (1989) "Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft". Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Luhrmann, Tanya M. (1996) "The Good Parsi: the postcolonial anxieties of an Indian colonial elite". Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Luhrmann, Tanya M. (2000) "Of two minds: The growing disorder in American psychiatry". New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
* Luhrmann, Tanya M. (2004) "Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity". "American Anthropologist" 106(3):518-528.