Tanya Luhrmann

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Tanya Marie Luhrmann (b. 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.

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. Of Two Minds (2000) received several awards, including the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing.

Currently she is working on a study of the growing movement of evangelical and charismatic Christianity, and specifically how practioners 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 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. As of spring 2007, she is now a professor in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. She is also president-elect of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. She often publishes as T.M. Luhrmann.

[edit] Select 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.