Stanford Humanities Center
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her books include Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, (Harvard, 1989); The Good Parsi (Harvard 1996); Of Two Minds (Knopf 2000) and When God Talks Back (Knopf 2012). In general, her work focuses on the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience.
SHC Project
Hearing God, Hearing Voices, and a Local Theory of Mind
Her project, Hearing God, Hearing Voices, and a Local Theory of Mind, compares the way members of new (neo) Pentecostal churches in California; Accra, Ghana; and Chennai, India experience God and prayer, and the way persons with schizophrenia in those three settings experience distressing voices. The goal is to understand whether different understandings of the mind affect these experiences in systematic ways.
