August 21, 2019

46: Culture and religious practice. A conversation with Tanya Lurhmann.

1 hour 8 minutes

Dr. Lurhmann, professor and psychological anthropologist at Stanford University, begins our conversation defining the term culture. She answers the question: What are the patterns of culture that inform how we should think and behave, and what happens when our individuality and the culture are at odds? Dr. Lurhmann is interested in the power of the mind and how certain aspects of the imagination and one’s intentions inform their experience of the world. She posits that our emotions – the inner world of an individual – can influence the experience of the outer world. We discuss the underlying social and relational structures of various cultures and how these universal patterns reflect for all of us hidden and inner aspects of each of us. Dr. Lurhmann is interested in the power of our human experience. We explore her early work with witchcraft in England as an entry into her current work as presented in her book, When God Talks Back, wherein she engages an evangelical Christian community to understand their relationship with God. She notes that throughout the book, she is trying to figure out how Jesus becomes a relatable person for those practitioners who seek a personal relationship with the divine. We discuss the formation of modern Christianity in the west and explore the changing definition of the term belief – obviously, how we define this term has a massive influence on our modern notion of religion. One particular aspect of the evangelical community that Dr. Lurhmann is interested in is the practice of prayer as an active experience, wherein the individual acts “as if” God is present – this has reportable and noticeable consequences for the individual and the community at large.

Bio:

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and persons, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing.

She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. When God Talks Back was named a NYT Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, and received the 2014 Grawemeyer Award for Religion, a prize that carries $100,000. She has published over thirty OpEds in The New York Times, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Science News, and many other publications. Her new book, Our Most Troubling Madness: Schizophrenia and Culture, was published by the University of California Press in October 2016.

Stanford profile:

https://profiles.stanford.edu/tanya-luhrmann

https://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614/

Theme music provided by:

http://www.modernnationsmusic.com

Band of the Week: Polydogs

Music Page:

https://music.apple.com/us/album/polydogs/1457744929

Website:

http://polydogstx.com

Learn more about this project at:

http://www.thesacredspeaks.com