Two-time CASBS fellow and renowned anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann discusses her past and current work as an anthropologist of the mind, both in religious and psychological contexts, in conversation with 2023-24 CASBS fellow Erica Robles-Anderson. Luhrmann's award-winning work investigates visions, voices, psychosis, the supernatural, and other unusual sensory experiences and phenomena, found often at the borderlands of spirit, culture, and the mind.
Two-time CASBS fellow and renowned anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann discusses her past and current work as an anthropologist of the mind, both in religious and psychological contexts, in conversation with 2023-24 CASBS fellow Erica Robles-Anderson. Luhrmann's award-winning work investigates visions, voices, psychosis, the supernatural, and other unusual sensory experiences and phenomena, found often at the borderlands of spirit, culture, and the mind.
TANYA LUHRMANN: Stanford faculty page | Stanford profile page | Personal website | Wikipedia page | on Google Scholar | CV |
Luhrmann, Of Two Minds. Winner of: the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, the Bryce Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology, the Gradiva Award from the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back. Winner of the Grawemeyer Prize in Religion and the Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year.
Luhrmann, "A life in books," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2020)
Luhrmann, et al. "Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021)
ERICA ROBLES-ANDERSON: NYU faculty page | CASBS page | on Google Scholar |
Narrator: “From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.”
“For more than three decades, Tanya Luhrmann has been among the world's most renowned anthropologists, exploring the domains of religion and psychology, of the spirit in mind, culture in mind, and of the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences. Her work often dwells in the borderlands of those experiences, in the realms of psychosis, the supernatural, visions, and voices, all in the service of exploring how people come to feel being called or how they perceive the realness of their own thoughts. As it turns out, Luhrmann’s two CASBS fellowships, first in 1994 to 1995 and later in 2007 to 2008, served as consequential points in her ongoing intellectual journey.”
“Today on Human Centered, a conversation with Tanya Luhrmann, the Albert Ray Lange Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her books include How God Becomes Real, Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others, Of Two Minds, The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry, When God Talks Back, Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, and Persuasions of the Witch's Craft, Ritual Magic in Modern Culture. She's also the co-editor of a volume titled Our Most Troubling Madness, Case Studies in Culture and Schizophrenia.”
“In recognition of her body of work, she's received the President's Award from the American Anthropological Association, is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a long list of other honors and accolades we'll link to in the episode notes. Joining Luhrmann in conversation is Erica Robles-Anderson, an Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at New York University, and a 2023-24 CASBS Fellow. She's currently working on an ambitious book trilogy about American conservative religious technocultures and the narratives shaping them as institutions of social reproduction.”
“Robles-Anderson takes Luhrmann back to her 1994-95 CASBS year in which she wrote the first draft of Of Two Minds, as well as her 2007-8 year when she worked on her most cited book, When God Talks Back, a book in which she employed psychology methods for the first time to strengthen her arguments. Those efforts earned Luhrmann the prestigious Grammier Prize. More importantly, Robles-Anderson teases out a through line of provocativeness, sometimes against foundational texts, that are the hallmarks of her work.”
“How would she take that sensibility into an agenda for the social sciences? And how does it carry forward to her two current projects, one on voices and another on the ways in which people imagine their minds? Let's find out.
Robles-Anderson: Oh, so I'm just thrilled to get to do this with you, Tanya. I'm like a Tanya Luhrmann completist. So I've read all of your books, and the first time I had the opportunity to hear about your work was in your CASBUS Fellowship Year in 2008, 2009, which I believe was both the year of the financial crisis and also maybe the time of the work on evangelicals, right, sort of stuff.
So I thought it might be nice to just jump into that moment, which was your second fellowship, and sort of think backwards a little bit. Like, where were you in your intellectual trajectory in that moment?”
Luhrmann: “That was a year that took the work of the first CASBUS year to a kind of fruition. So I had noticed in my first fieldwork back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had noticed that in effect belief was less important than experience to the way people came to understand divinity, gods, invisible beings, whatever. And I had done that first book with people who were called magicians and witches.
So I was a graduate student. I was hanging out with philosophers at Cambridge. The book the philosophers were reading in anthropology.
The book that had made the most difference to philosophers was Evans Pritchard's Witchcraft, Magic, and Oracles among the Azande. Very famous book. And it argued that apparently reasonable people could believe in apparently unreasonable beliefs, because, and these were people who happened to think that, so the Azande thought that thoughts could be potent and malicious thoughts could leave the mind and hurt other people's bodies.”
“And when philosophers thought about how to make sense of that ethnographic work, which was done in the 30s, 40s, they argued about science, modernity, literacy, the lack of a modern context. I had, I chose to go to London, Darkest London, with all these science-educated people who had some of the same ideas. I thought of myself as studying beliefs, but when I arrived in that world long before I came to CASBS, I realized that people were saying to me, you need to experience this, you need to train, some people can train more easily than others, and the people who really train will come to experience God.”
“So I wrote a book about that and wrote a couple of other books. But before I came to CASBS, I was spending time in an interdisciplinary community, which my first year at CASBS had sort of prepared me for, and I had trotted out my early work on magicians and some initial work with evangelicals, and the psychologist in the room patted me on the head and told me that I had anecdotes and not data. And before I came to CASBS that year, I had sort of figured out that I needed to pay attention to their critique, that I needed to add psychological methods to what I was doing.
So in this 2007-8 year at CASBS, I was also running a project that tried to ask about how God became real to people and added psychological methods. So I had already done years of field work with Evangelical Christians. And the puzzle of that work was that people would say that they could hear God speak.”
“They would say that you could learn to experience God as intimately present in your life. You could learn to experience God as a person among people. And when I spoke to people, that's what it sounded like they experienced.
They would experience God as if God were a person. I mean, there was all many caveats, many, you know, they obviously didn't think that God would actually drink the coffee that they poured for God. But they poured God a cup of coffee, some of them.”
“The pastor told them that if they wanted to experience God vividly, they should pour God a second cup of coffee and a real ceramic mug, and they should drink that coffee. And so, I was trying in my first year, so I had a theory, I had a theory that some people were more able to experience God vividly than others, and that training made a difference. I'd already done a piece of a project where I'd carefully interviewed people, charismatic Christians, people who seek an intimate relationship with God, and I'd figured out that the people who had these vivid experiences were more likely to say yes to the items on a certain psychological scale, the absorption scale, which see, I'm still puzzling about what that scale of measures, but it's something about your trait, your ability, your predilection, your proclivity for getting caught up in your inner world.”
“I wanted to show that practice made a difference. I wanted to show that the more time you spent practicing, praying, you are more likely to have these vivid experiences. So that 2007, 2008 year was slightly mad.
I mean, I had this mountain of fieldwork I was trying to write up, and I had a book to write on how God became real to these people. And I had piles of interviews in my CASBS office. I also had this post-doc or this research assistant, let me use research assistant, sitting in my office at Stanford, because I had just moved to Stanford.”
“And she was trying to run this project with 130 people, who were coming in and we were trying to randomize them to either evangelical-style prayer or to lectures on the gospels or to the equivalent of centering prayer or meditation. She was doing multi-hour interviews with them. She was sitting them in front of a computer and having them do exercises to see whether their mental imagery seemed to change, which was one of the—I thought that that's what I saw among my earlier ethnographic participants.
And she was giving them surveys. And because I wasn't really a trained psychologist, I was not organizing this as a neat, tight psychological experiment. She was—we generated thousands of pages of transcript data.”
“People filled out 30 scales. Maybe 20 scales. We chose psychological experiments that I was trying to figure out how to use a computer to run.
We had an enormous amount of data. And so I was quite anxious during all of this. I had a lovely time with some of the people who were here.
Fred Turner, who I think you know, in communications. There was a, oh my god, I'm not gonna remember her name, a lovely historian of China from UC Santa Cruz. It kind of had this group of people on the block at CASBS.
Robles-Anderson: And so you're up here. And so this place is kind of a specific environment. It's a bit magic mountain-esque.”
“You wouldn't even know it was here, even if you'd been to Stanford many, many times. Way up at the top and you're here thinking about surveys, but also people who are hearing God's voice and practicing and training in these cabin-like monastic offices. Like what is happening to your sensorium, I guess, and your sense of method and evidence at the same time?
Luhrmann: So I have a attenuated relationship with the supernatural content of God. But I was doing a nine-month Ignatian exercise class. So I had done two years of fieldwork in Chicago.
I do immersion fieldwork. So evangelical Christians, I was going to church every week, I was going to a Bible study group every week, I was going to conferences, I was systematically interviewing people. I was kind of in it.”
“And then we moved here because my husband got a job, and they got a job for me, and so we just moved. And so I picked up things at this new similar church, same denomination, although it's not clear it's a denomination, but it's the Vineyard Christian Fellowship. And in this new denomination, they offered the opportunity to participate in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, a very famous model of how to pray that is often assumed as the most kind of intensive and organized prayer practice.
And this prayer practice involves intensely engaging with a series of stories about the Bible. And you have the nativity, you have the transfiguration, you have, what else? You have the passion and you have a sort of a background story.”
“And so while I was creating these prayer practices for my participants to do, and I learned all about GarageBand, people have forgotten about GarageBand, but on the iPod, you can make little musical tracks. And I was learning about how to choose these tracks that would resemble the Ignatian spiritual exercises. And I was choosing musical structure to go on top of it.
And then I was structuring the content the way I had been taught to create these things from low back in the day in London. I was also doing the exercises. And I had a group of evangelical women from the church.
And the rule was, so we met together for nine months, corresponded with my time at CASBS. The women went, met together once a week for two hours. They were all deeply devout.”
“I was this anthropologist. And with a complicated relationship to God. And we would meet Sunday evening.
And I would come in, also following the rule, every morning to CASBS, carrying my dog to do my prayer exercise. And they would give us, or the leader gave us these visualization exercises. And the goal was to do the exercise as using all your inner senses.
So I remember one of the exercises was, Mary and Joseph have a small baby Jesus. They're going to flee into Egypt on a donkey. So the exorcetant had to sit there for half an hour every day with the same story, trying to visually represent it in her, my mind's eye, using all the available sensory information I could generate.”
“You know, sort of smelling the desert heat, petting the donkey, seeing Mary and the baby and the father. And I had to change my imaginative role each of those days. Was I helping with the journey?
Was I Joseph? Was I Mary? Was I the baby?
Was I the donkey? And I had to do that for like half an hour a day for, you know, while my dog Pat made comments about the passing deer. And I was trying to kind of, anyway, so that also was part of my year.
Robles-Anderson: And where did people make like dog god jokes? Like dog is here?
Well, I don't think anyone at CASBS knew that I was doing this until the end of the year when I wrote it in my little description. I didn't mention it to anyone because it was like, it wasn't any of their business. The group, you know, the group of women would make god dog jokes.”
“And I would often come in with my expertise on Harry Potter. And they just thought this was hilarious because I could sort of get into the practice by in part, you know, understanding how Harry experienced Dumbledore after he died. And was that real or was that not real?
And the women I was spending time with, well, they turned out not to be so different from me. They sometimes had difficulty getting into the experience. They didn't, they had much more complicated belief commitments than I sort of had imagined even though I knew that belief was kind of complicated for people.”
“And so it was a really productive year to learn about Christianity because people could describe what they experienced. And sometimes their experiences in prayer were very patchy. There was one woman who told me that she did the Ignatian exercises because although she'd been a Christian for like 20 years, she'd never been able to see Jesus' face.
And the exercises helped her to see his face. And even then, that was a little patchy.
There were people who really struggled to pray. There were people who had great weeks. There were people who talked about collapsing on the floor and speaking in tongues, but that was only like three or four times.
So it was a very productive year. But I don't know whether many people at CASBS knew about it.”
Robles-Anderson: “So maybe we could just dial back to that 95ish, 94, 95 moment. You're also undertaking in your work quite a shift between narrating about the Parsi, right? And also then the psychiatrists and the psychoanalytically minded.
So something feels like a hinge point in reading those works as an outsider, where you can see the arguments that are having about arguments about evidence and argument. And also these larger moves within fields come forward in the field work. Like there's a long section on post-colonialism.
And what are we going to do about these theories in one case? And how should anthropology be rethinking itself when speaking about the Parsi and what makes a good one? And similarly, of Two Minds, which is just honestly my favorite.”
“It's so beautifully narrated, really like shows people who almost become more incommensurable to one another. Even though they live in the same institutional worlds, they have many of the same practices and goals, right? It's like you can feel that tension very early in that work.
And I just wondered if you were aware of it when you were writing it, or to maybe kind of come back to that place?
Luhrmann: It's a good question. I think with the Parsi book, that was my attempt to be cool in anthropology. So that I had done this first book, Witches and Pagans, and that was a little idiosyncratic.
It wasn't an area book, and it wasn't responsive to disciplinary trends. The Good Parsi, which I finished, I copy edited when I was here, that was about this community in what was then Bombay. I was trying to do something that was a little bit like the Pagan book, but I couldn't really do it.”
“I couldn't get, I wasn't allowed into the temples. Anyway, I ended up writing a book that was much more responsive to the temper of the times, which is How Much Does Colonialism Matter? And I just didn't have the outrage that many people writing about colonialism have.
And so I was trying to make the book matter by talking about anthropology, which I thought was just tearing itself apart. It was in my department, it had torn itself apart. And the book about psychiatry was like, I just want to write a book that matters.
And I had at that point decided that to be heard, I just wanted to write a good book that anyone could read. And I wanted to teach myself how to write. And I was a buddy with a historian, Simon Schama, who had come, who was at Harvard.”
“I mean, I met him because I had a good... One of my best friends in graduate school was an historian, and actually a good undergraduate friend. And we sort of taught each other how to write Charlie Burt.
We taught each other how to write as we exchanged dissertation chapters. And she was great because she would look at a dissertation chapter and say, I don't know what you're talking about until you get to the third paragraph. Maybe you could make that a little bit more evident.
And I don't believe that you're, I don't know quite what this quotation is doing, but the sentence in which you explain it doesn't make sense to me. So it was great. And so anyway, she dragged me along to a party back in the dawn of time, when Simon Schama, I think was one of her advisors.”
“And Simon was feeling a little loose at the end of the evening when I met him. And Simon said, witches, witches are ridiculous. You should write about gypsies.
And like four years later, so I was very young when that happened. Four years later, he shows up at a party that Daniel Bell threw for me in Cambridge when my book on witchcraft came out. And Simon said, we should have lunch.
At that point, he was Knaf's best selling historian. And at lunch, I said, how do you do you? How do you be someone like that?
And so he made a call to his editor. He said, you should call this woman I know in Boston. She's starting an agency.
And those are both longer stories. But in any event, I ended up, I knew I wanted to write next about psychiatry. And they ended up persuading me to write this crossover book on psychiatry.”
“And when I was here, I wrote the first draft of that book. And my goal was to tell a story that had intellectual merit, but was a story that anybody at CASBS would be interested in reading.
Robles-Anderson: I think it's a hell of a book. I almost, it's funny, I had forgotten about Knopf being the publisher. I was like, this has got to be, what academic press put this out?
And so then watching that and talking to friends who are psychoanalysts about how much they appreciate that book as a way to understand their own life experience and training has just been remarkable. So there's some things I've always wanted to ask you about that book and that moment, because it's so special about the narrative of two things coming together and apart. I mean, you take a strong stance in the book about not letting madness go as something that is mere culture.”
“And I wondered, because of the emphasis, did that feel like a threat to you at the time that people would treat it as something that was mere culture? You know?
Luhrmann: Oh, yeah. I mean, I went to... When was this?
I moved to the University of Chicago around 2000. I should say, I've always thought that Foucault's Madness in Civilization was a silly book because I know people love that book. I know it's really important, but he romanticizes psychosis and it drove me crazy.
And I said that when I gave a talk at the University of Chicago and one of my anthropology colleagues literally jumped. You could see him jump in the audience. When somebody asked me about that book and I said, well, that's a silly book.
And it would, you know. So I knew it would upset people. I knew, I mean, when I was here in 1994, 95, I gave a talk at Berkeley.”
“I gave a talk at Stanford. And, you know, back in the day, Stanford was a very lovely campus and Berkeley had Telegraph Avenue. And I gave a talk at Stanford and I said, you know, madness is real and there are these two cultures.
And all the questions were about hegemony and oppression and imperialism and the diagnostic overreach and these innocent artistic young women. And I gave the same talk at Berkeley and not a single person asked those questions because the homeless and mentally ill came to the talk. And so they had a very different exposure to what psychosis was like.
And so I knew that the, so I knew that this could upset some people.”
Robles-Anderson: “I mean, in a way, every one of your books feels provocative in that fashion, right? Thank you. And so I've always wondered, like, how do you, how do you carry that kind of immersion and intimacy and then pull back out into rooms that are going to feel the provocation of being challenged to think that there are not only minds not like their own, but that they are being shaped as well to, to their most fundamental beliefs and they don't see it.
Luhrmann: So I grew up as a Unitarian, and I think that that was pretty key.
There are more complicated stories, but when I grew up, my mother was the daughter of a Baptist pastor, and she loved Sam Harris, wrote about, was very angry about religion, wrote all these books about the terrible detriment of faith. My father was a psychiatrist, went to medical school, grew up as a Christian scientist. And his father never, you know, in Christian science, you're not supposed to take medicine seriously.”
“And his father never understood what he was doing in New York when he was in medical school. I also grew up in a Bolsheva shul area. So this is a shul where Orthodox Jewish temple, where people come when they are re-converting to a more Orthodox version of Judaism.
And so I was a Shabbos Goy. So you can, you know, if you are a good, committed Jew, that is a religion which prizes the ability to follow through with the mitzvah, the commandments. And that in some sense matters more than your internal belief state.”
“You are not supposed to, if you are an Orthodox Jew, you are not supposed to touch electricity between sundown Friday, sundown Saturday. It's totally fine to have a little Goyisha girl come over, serve them dinner, turn on and off the stove and the electric, you know, the electric lights. And I think what was really compelling to me is that I could tell this made my mother uncomfortable, but there was no way to formulate it because that was not, you know, the way that, I mean, I knew that the Jewish people, the Jewish family I was spending time with, they just had a different understanding of how, how to understand God.
And my mother couldn't really complain because she never, she didn't really believe in God in that way. And yet it's still, it still upset her. And so, you know, we work, we would go to this church and I was doing, you know, Sunday morning when I went to Sunday school, we were doing Kohlberg moral puzzles problems rather than learning about the Bible.”
“And so I just sort of knew that there was this lot of important stuff that people disagreed about and that I was comfortable, you know, not worrying about.
Maybe extra comfortable, you know, or something.
Yeah. And so I didn't think that madness was real. I did have, I do have a sense that that's part of this material world.
Robles-Anderson: And so this whole arc would have been worked through as also arguments about secularity and secularism are reaching their height, you know, right? And so that must have been something to contend with as an anthropologist working on belief in centers of modern calculation, which also seems like a provocative aspect of where you get started, right? This is London, right?”
“This is a described life that is around people who have, you know, beliefs to unseen things. This isn't supposed to be here. It's the most matter-out-of-place topic a person who studies the modern can choose.
So how do you land there?
Luhrmann: Well, I landed on the witchcraft because of Evans Pritchard, because of this interest in apparently unreasonable belief, and no doubt because of my earlier experience with different, different religiosities. I think I became more aware of the discomfort when I was working on evangelicals. So I was a little annoyed that people could dismiss the witches and the magicians as being odd people.
I mean, did we really care about them? They were just kind of weirdos.”
“After I'd done the psychiatry book, I had a way of thinking about what I thought I had seen. And this is a little more simple than what actually happened. But one way of telling this story is that I was writing this book on psychiatry, on two cultures in psychiatry, but I also noticed that there was a way of doing research on unusual experiences, that unusual experiences really mattered, and that unusual experiences were really, had at least proximally, at their proximal causal nature, they are thoughts that don't feel like they are your own thought.
So there was something about the experience of the mind, broadly conceived, that is altered and leads people to think that there are invisible others. So, I wanted to go back to this puzzle that I felt I hadn't fully solved, which was how do apparently unreasonable people come to believe in apparently unreasonable beliefs. I knew that there were different ways about doing research on this question.”
“I had a little bit of a better handle on what I thought about these experiences, these idiosyncratic experiences. And also, evangelicals really mattered. 1994, 1995, you could be excused for thinking that evangelicals were as weird as magicians.
2007, 2008, there is no question but that evangelicals really, really matter. And so I went that and that was when I began to realize, I knew, I really began to realize, that a lot of anthropologists have what, or think about what a colleague of mine, Courtney Hanman, calls the Christian cooties. That, you know, that, you know, if you're going to talk respectfully about people who believe stuff, like, that's just weird.
And so there was this, an emerging group of anthropologists who were beginning to look at Christianity. I, it took me a while to realize that, that we were all in the same boat together. But, you know, I was on, I was unwilling to say that God didn't exist.”
“That seemed like a mistake. It seemed like the wrong starting point for the research. I mean, first of all, I didn't know.
I'm perfectly comfortable with the world. The idea of the world is more complicated than I imagine. And also it seemed like if you're going to understand, that you couldn't start from the idea that all of this was just a mistake.
That was Durkheim's idea, Durkheim's commitment. And I wanted to, that seemed like a pretty good commitment. But I could tell that it drove people crazy.
I also refused to make the evangelical book to do with politics. And that just drove people crazy too.
Robles-Anderson: It still does.
Luhrmann: I know.”
Robles-Anderson: “Yeah, maybe even more. So not ceding the floor to something that is, for Durkheim, in elementary forms of religious life, sort of that other thing that's not yourself is something like the substance of the social. It's a kind of sociological truth that lets you off the hook from experience, direct experience, or these kind of categories floating in the air, the kind of Kantian something.
It gives you some third way to engage with inquiry, and that's another one of these things, where you take such a strong, provocative move against one of the foundational texts for several social sciences.
What do you think it would look like to open from where you are and re-narrate the agenda for social sciences with a different set of departure points from that Durkheimian social? So we still get to go study the collectivities, but what is it that we're looking at or looking for if we begin with your work instead?”
Luhrmann: “Well, okay, so that's a big question. I think that starting with how people experience their world and taking seriously the fact that it's not just a set of categories is important. So it doesn't mean that the thing that you're experiencing is real.
But the fact that people feel the presence of God, feel the, so to just stick with the things that I know about, the fact that it feels different when you feel the presence of God. It's just, it's not just discourse. When somebody tells you that the voices are really bad, I don't know if I can manage a day, but I'm going to power through.
It's not a way of talking. It's not something they've been convinced of. It's something that's pushing in on their sensorium.”
“I think that that matters for understanding the quality of what it's like to be human, that you feel your world. You often don't know how you're feeling your world. It's just really there.
So trying to get a sense of that. So I find myself now sort of in company with some very odd bedfellows. I mean, I do not, I do not feel like I understand Husserl and Heidegger.
And I just, I am a big believer in clear English sentences. But, but like all these people who, you know, who were trying to really embed themselves in these sentences that I get impatient with, they are now my people. Like my puzzles are things like, so the book I'm writing about now, or the book I'm writing now is about voices.
It's about these experiences that seem so weird as to be not be relevant, but they're really, really important. And, you know, there are voices at the heart of most religions, many religions. A voice is also at the heart of madness.”
“And so trying to figure out of what those experiences are, how can we think about how humans generate them? How much does culture matter? How much are they one thing or many things?
So that's where I go with that. That's where you're going with, yeah. Try to figure out.
So increasingly, I'm in Oliver Sacks territory. What is it like to inhabit this body? And can we look to these more unusual experiences to try to understand what that's like?
Robles-Anderson: So just to spell out the logic of the unusual experience, if I understand, it accepts that people try to make categories, but that everyone who tries to make categories could point to something they would regard within that system is aberrant, right? Like madness or abnormal phenomena, and that there might be something in comparing those unusualnesses across different kinds of people that might let us say something about unusualness, do you think?”
Luhrmann: “Well, I guess my approach is to say, what does that feel like? And what do we learn from that? So I do have some sympathy now with the question of like, well, what is democracy?
But the question I would ask is, what is it like for people to use those words? What are they doing when they're using those words? And my two big domains of inquiry are, what is the sort of epistemic stance of this domain?
Is this, when people use a word like democracy, is this being used more like a set of religious ideas in which people, you know, don't, people may tell you that God is, you know, can do anything, but they never actually ask God to feed the dog, right? They never use God that way. Is this an epistemic stance that's more, you know, playful?
They don't really mean it to mean anything, but they like the idea of it. And the other thing is how do people use their, the domain of the senses to experience it? So what do people point to in their experience of the world that is democracy?”
“Is that a cool MAGA rally? Is that being at phone banks together? Is that reading their Washington Post?
So what I increasingly do is to do this kind of, to do interviews when I'm trying to get at the phenomenology. So I'm trying to get, not at the ideology. I was talking to somebody today, and what I was trying to understand how she came to be experiencing feeling called.
And she was trying to tell me what the content of what it was calling her. And I was trying to figure out what it felt like. Was the, how did she know that it wasn't her?
Or did she think, or when was it her? And so I now have a whole set of ways of talking around the issue. But the funny story is that I was giving a talk.
I've increasingly become what I think of as our lady of consciousness. So I got to all these consciousness events. They're always, the speakers are always boys with bright, shiny toys of neuroscience.”
“And I'm the girl on the podium. And what I can say is that I talk to, I know, I am an anthropologist. I talk to people who come to experience some of their thoughts as feeling like they're not their own thought.
And there are a bunch of questions afterwards. And I said along the way, oh, you know, Joan of archetypes, it's really hard to find Joan of archetypes. People who aren't, who clearly aren't mad, but have many audible experiences.
And it turned out that I had come to the right location to locate Joan of arcs. And like I was swarmed at the end of the, at the end of my talk, there are all these people came up to me and gave me their phone number. And I am talking my way through the people who came up.
Robles-Anderson: Do you want to say a little bit about maybe what that next project involves and, you know, where you're going with the Voices?”
Luhrmann: “Well, the project, so the Voices project is, what do people hear? Are they mad? Is this just really just a thing in the body or is it shaped by social environment, shaped by culture?
Yes, it's shaped by culture. Also, I can tell you that it's, you can learn how to have these experiences and you're not mad. And let me talk to you about people who do this.
I interviewed a bunch of Olympic-level athletes who have these very intense relationships with their coach and hear their coach's voice when their coach is not present. I talked to, I spent a lot of time talking to evangelicals. I talked to people called Tulpamasters who are a little corner of the Internet, but it's 30,000 usernames.”
“There are a lot, it's a big corner, a little corner and a very big Internet, but it has a lot of people in it. And they create relationships, they use these bullet point lists of practices they set out to use to create invisible others, and the invisible others come to feel as if they're autonomous and independent, talking on their own. And then I returned to the question of whether it's possible that maybe some people who are religious and don't seem to meet criteria for psychosis might still be psychotic.
But that's really a story about consciousness, about the way that humans experience their own thoughts, and the contradictions and the paradoxes, and how they come to do that. And the project that's, the next one that's emergent now, is the ways in which people in different cultural worlds imagine their minds and the consequences for those differences. So, for example, one of the things I think I've come to know, and this actually comes out of Charles Taylor.”
“So Charles Taylor, this great philosopher of secularism, argued that in the modern world people imagine their cells, but I would substitute the word mind or their thoughts as bounded from the world. So there is this kind of big old concrete wall between you and your body, other people, the everyday material world.
He calls it the buffered self, right?
The buffered self, the bounded self. So if you look at, turns out you could imagine the mind-world boundary as permeable, as porous. And one of the things that we've been doing, and trying to understand spiritual experiences and voices and whatnot, is asking people about whether they imagine the mind-world boundaries being porous.”
“And when they do, they have more vivid experiences of invisible others. And so, I think I've been working on a lot of these ideas with a young psychologist called Cara Weissman. We think that people have sort of a default, humans, all humans, kind of have a default model of how thoughts work, that mostly thoughts are kind of inside of you.
When you die, your thoughts kind of disappear. Nobody can read your thoughts. And your thoughts don't slip out and affect other people by themselves.
But in fact, a lot of ordinary human experience seems to violate those ideas, right? Your dreams, your dreams don't really feel like you made them up. They don't feel like, I mean, particularly some of those dreams, they don't feel like your dreams.”
“They feel like they contain important information that somebody is giving you. Sometimes when you get really angry, it doesn't feel like all the anger is yours, it just came to you and it just, and when you curse somebody and they're not there, it can feel like an action. Or sometimes, it feels like the words come to you, then somehow they're a gift, it sort of came from outside.
And so even secular people have those intuitions. And I think different cultures build them up in particular ways, like witchcraft is the rizande, build up the idea that thoughts can be potent and they can leave your mind and do something in the world. Or you can be vulnerable to somebody else's thought that can come into your mind with a kind of force.
It can bewitch you and change what you think. So that's the next project.”
Robles-Anderson: “It's such a great turn, right? Lands very cleanly in the American context of prosperity. You know, in abundance and the sense that there's maybe something in the wish to let the world be a little bit more porous to the way we think, as if that could do, right?
Luhrmann: Right. It's the idea of the secret.
Robles-Anderson: Yeah.
Luhrmann: If you really want it, you can make it happen.
Robles-Anderson: Yeah. And I don't mean that in a sort of cynical sense, but really that that's something that's present in the water here, too.
Luhrmann: Right.
Robles-Anderson: Yeah. That's beautiful. When you think about that new work, there's two touchstones, both that are, I would say, complex with their own reception histories, that that makes me think about.”
“And I wonder if they're on your mind, there's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which seems to undergird a lot of the arguments about categories and experience and language groups as shaping the habits of our thought world. And I wonder if you're in a place where to take that on in a more public way. And the other piece that I'm wondering about is the return to Julian Jane's work and the bicameral mind, which would have been in vogue at some point in the past and then out of fashion.
What comes of those pieces?
Luhrmann: So I love Julian Jane's. He's mad, but he's so productively mad. Julian Jane's argued that in a very different cultural world, in the world of the archaic Greeks, people had this slightly mad theory about the brain being split in two and not integrated with it.”
“I think of the Corpus Colossum. He argued that in this world where the two halves of the brain were not quite integrated, when people had strong, powerful thoughts, they thought of them as not their own, and from this comes the idea of gods. So that's a very interesting idea.
And I think it's true that if you have strong, powerful thoughts, you are more likely to attribute them as being not your own. We have data that finds that this is true. I think that this is deeply human.
This is not published work. All our data aren't collected. But I think that there's a basic story that when a thought is strong, when it is emotionally, particularly when it's angry or envious, when a thought feels spontaneous, that's a different kind of thought.”
“When a thought is spoken out loud, even if nobody else can hear it, those thoughts, to many, many people, come feel as if they are a little bit more likely to come from God for some other source. I think that's basic. And then I think that gets developed by different cultures in different ways and no culture ever, you know, cultures are complicated.
People in all cultures, people have contradictory ways of thinking about their inner worlds. The piece of this that I would love to do, and I'm trying to figure out whether we can get this funded, is that I really do think that social context and categories does shape inner experience more powerfully than we imagine. And it is so hard to study inner experience.
There is this very brilliant, marginal, powerful psychologist in Nevada called Russell Hurlbut. And he has a way of studying inner experience that appalls most psychologists, but is so interesting. So he trains people to describe their inner worlds and to look for objects in their inner worlds.”
“And of course, this makes psychologists so anxious because you're not supposed to do this. But it's very hard to describe the inner world. And so he then gives people a beeper.
And he beeps them five times a day. And after he's trained them to talk about their inner worlds, he trains them, he gets them to write down some notes. And then he interviews them on their experience.
And he observes how people talk differently about their inner experience. And he persuades me that there are different kinds of people, which we already know, right? So we already know from, actually worked on, I think Shepard and Cosselin were here at some point.
So these, well, Cosselin, Steven Cosselin was the director of CASBS at one point. We know from these hyper-sciency, neuroscientific experiments, that people, some people are, have many images, inner images, and some people don't. Some people use a lot of words, and some people don't.”
“So people have different textures of their inner worlds. I would dearly love to figure out how to capture the difference that culture makes to the structure of the inner world. One of the ways that I fantasized about doing this is to look at the way that musicians change over time.
So as musicians, first of all, are musicians different from different kinds of people? I mean, obviously yes and obviously no, but musicians talk as if they're... Sometimes the music has a more autonomous development, particularly jazz musicians.
Some people have talked to me about musical notes feeling different. People have talked to me about mathematicians being averse to the idea that you could use spatial structure to organize your mathematical thinking. But they also do.”
“And so I was talking with a very capable mathematician about his interviews of different mathematicians who talk about being secretly interested in allowing spatial structure to organize their understanding of proofs. You can also see that something a little odd happens in the inner world for philosophers. So young philosophers come to understand a world, an inner world inhabited by analytic positions which have their own internal structure.
And as philosophers talk, these analytical arguments figure in inner space in a way that is quite striking to me. You'd never find an anthropologist talking like that. People often use philosophers, often use acronyms.
I'm part of the interdisciplinary grant now in which we were talking about this. We have a bunch of philosophers and psychologists and anthropologists and historians. And it is just clear that the philosophers talk in different ways about the world that reflects some kind of inner world.”
Robles-Anderson: “Do you have anything that you would wish to say that I have not asked, that I should ask about?
Luhrmann: I just think that CASBS is a really special place. And I think that there are opportunities here for people to learn from other fields. And if they have not been exposed to interdisciplinary spaces before they come here, it can make a profound difference to their intellectual lives.
Robles-Anderson: Thank you.
Luhrmann: Great.
Narrator: That was Tanya Luhrmann in Conversation with Erica Robles-Anderson. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects, and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBUS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.”