Interview with Dr. Tanya Luhrmann

Abstract

Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and an M.Phil and PhD from Cambridge University in Social Anthropology. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural, and the world of psychosis. 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 named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007, and elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. She has published over thirty OpEds in The New York Times, and she is the author of Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, The Good Parsi, Of Two Minds, When God Talks Back, Our Most Troubling Madness, and How God Becomes Real. She is currently working on a book titled Voices. 

For this conversation. For this interview, Pathways sat down with Luhrmann to talk about her fieldwork experience with Americans experiencing schizophrenia, and to discuss the implications of her research on mental health policy and care in the United States.