Person's detail

Tanya Luhrmann

E-mail: luhrmann@stanford.edu

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is Watkins University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. 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, with Zoroastrians and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. She is author of the books Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (1989), When God Talks Back (2012) and Our Most Troubling Madness: Schizophrenia and Culture (2016).
[Updated: 11. 5. 2020]