Tanya Luhrmann

Tanya Luhrmann interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 13th June 2022

0:19:01 Born 1959 in Dayton, Ohio, on the edge of an air force base where my dad was serving in ROTC - an organisation that would pay for your college education if you signed up for some years with the air force afterwards.
1:09:02 My maternal grandparents were Baptists. They were Missionaries in what was then Burma. My mother was born, the accidental child, after they returned. My grandfather was a very intellectually capable man, very good with languages. Loved riding on the backs of elephants. Went into villages, and he was the dentist and the doctor. He loved doing that. He wasn’t very interested in converting people; he had a capacious understanding of God. Unlike my grandmother, he did not believe that if one of his villagers did not choose Christ, that villager would go to Hell. My grandmother did, and she was more difficult than my grandfather. One of my earliest memories, I think I was six, was of being in Staten Island where my dad was a psychiatrist, doing his internship. My grandfather took me around the park, holding me on his shoulders. Something that really fascinated me was the story of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston, I think she was English. She tells a story of St Christopher who carried the child, Jesus. Somehow the memory of my grandfather carrying me was precious. He carried me round the park while it was raining.
3:26:16 My father’s father was very brilliant, but probably mad. My father hospitalised him twice when my father was just in medical school. It’s not clear exactly what was going on. It sounds as if he was psychotic. I’m interested in voices and I interpret the story that my father told about his mother to mean that my grandfather at one point became very paranoid. He developed a method for canning and then a different method became the industry standard. At the end of his life my grandfather had this elaborate set of ideas which you could call paranoid, that he would earn millions of dollars. In the process he began to behave a little oddly. At one point he drove with my grandmother into oncoming traffic as if directed. That was when my father went to hospitalise him. He adored my father & just agreed to be hospitalised. My grandmother was not frightened of him after that. That grandmother had a huge garden and I remember this image of my slow-moving grandmother in acres of beautiful flowers. I also would have sworn at the age of three or four that I saw the Easter Rabbit in her garden. I remember looking out, and it was a big rabbit, and it was Easter. They lived in a lovely old house that had been the stop for the stage coach in rural New Jersey. Of course, when I knew it, it was much closer to the turnpike
6:16:18 My father for most of my academic life has been my first reader. The third book was about psychiatry and he was intimately involved with that. He really cared about the sentences. In everything subsequent…it’s a little rocky now as he’s older…but he would tell me when he got bored and what he didn’t understand, and that was immensely useful. He was also the person with whom I tried out my first ideas. He is also a very anxious man. He collects, also he doesn’t throw things out…and so he was always worried about the evidential base of any claim. I think that became crucial for me because when I thought I saw something in the ethnography, my father would want to know why? Then he would want to know how it worked. So more than many people I have tried to explain things, and haven’t been satisfied with saying that I just thought that something was true, I wanted to show it was true with other methods as well. That probably came from dealing with a dissatisfied dad.
8:18:23 My mother was a writer and wrote over 40 novels but published only one of them. I hadn’t realised until she died just how many novels she published. There is a wall in the house where my father now lives, in the bedroom where I sleep when I visit, which is a wall of manuscripts. Some of them are pretty good, some not so good. She wasn’t a reviser so much, she felt as if she took dictation as she wrote. Sometimes I would remember driving with her and she would fall silent. I’d ask what she was thinking and she said she was writing in her mind. She sent me a lovely card when she was eighty or older, and she said “Whatever the age, magic happens. Grab it!’
9:29:11 On schooling. I remember an incident in Nursery School when I said something that was true to my teacher, that my father was going to pick me up at a certain hour that was not at the end of school, and my teacher did not believe me. I remember sitting there with my little plastic birds playing with them, and I was put in a separate place because I was lying. My father came to pick me up at the time I said, and that really stuck. The teacher did apologise. There was a real sense that truth mattered, and that stuck with me. I remember being desperately determined to figure out how euglena worked at one point in High School, and watching for hours & hours these little single-cell organisms in the microscope. I was persuaded for a long time that I was going to study the communication system of wolves, because they worked in a group and I thought that was fascinating. I was quite taken with Konrad Lorenz, Ernest Thompson Seton, and the world of the naturalist.
11:27:18 I grew up in a world of many different faith commitments. My grandfather was Baptist, spoke words that suggested that there was a God. He was a Pastor. My grandmother was a Pastor’s wife. He had the sense that there was an external Christian God who interacted with people. My father’s parents were Christian Scientists, that is a religious commitment where you are not supposed to visit a doctor. My father went to medical school. My mother remembers being horrified when her mother, having taken over the church when her father went to be a Chaplain in the Second World War, thought that those Baptists who hadn’t accepted Christ would die. My mother was horrified by this at a very young age. So I grew up in a household in which my father went to church reluctantly to accompany my mother. My mother went to church although she didn’t believe in God. She loved Sam Harris (a famous atheist), and died surrounded by books on faith. My own experience at the Piagetian age of sixteen when logic becomes really important to the developing mind, I decided that God could not exist because of the conundrum of the loving, all powerful God who had created this kind of universe. So I became known at school as an atheist…the school’s famous atheist.
14:34:17 Over time…I always say that I have a lot of room for the value of going to church. The way I describe it, I think this is Matthew 18:11 [actually 18:20], there is a point in the Gospels where Jesus turns to his disciples and says “..after I’m gone…where two or three of you are gathered together, there I will be”. I have studied for many years a kind of Christian to whom that sentence meant if two or three of you are gathered together, Jesus will be there as the third or fourth invisible person. But there is another way of understanding that sentence which is if two or three of you are gathered together in an intentional community, committed towards creating a better world, you could call that God, and I’m sort of comfortable with that. I have a pretty weak supernatural commitment but I’m also pretty strongly committed to the view that we understand just a little bit of the world around us.
16:19:08 When I was sixteen I thought I was going to be an ethologist, a Konrad Lorentzian studier of animal communication. When I was eighteen I thought I would be a philosopher. We don’t choose a subject in American universities so when I arrived at Harvard I thought I was going to be a student of philosophy, and I had the kind of experience that you can only have at the age of eighteen which is that I read ‘The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics’. I thought that Kant had cheated. Kant presupposes that there is a kind of constraint in the way that humans understand what is real. As a young person I thought he was pulling this out of the air. That he didn’t have evidence for this but was just saying that he thought that this was the way people worked. Somewhere round this time I came across this short book on Godel’s incompleteness theorem that moved me, and persuaded me that there was something complicated to say about human cognition and the way in which humans grasped the world. I came across a book by Piaget about the way that cognition is structured in certain ways but is changed by the environment. For some reason this propelled me into folklore and mythology. So I became persuaded that the stories we tell each other about the world, which are different in each social domain, really shape how we think but that we really didn’t understand how this worked. So that’s what I ended up doing in college, taking a lot of anthropology courses, a lot of courses on mythology….Albert Lord of ‘The Singer of Tales’ was in residence when I was a student….and I've always been interested in this mixture of the kind of human constraint on how we think and feel, and the cultural variability, the way in which that is tweaked, manipulated and altered by culture. I don’t think of culture as a cookie-cutter, and I don’t think the ideas people have in cultures is trained by geography, but knew at the time that these stories, accounts, explanations that were shared within a group shaped the way in which individuals kind of made sense of their world. I think that also gave to me a distinctive question which is how the world becomes real for people. When I was young, I had these grandparents who had these very different views about what was ultimately real, and my mother’s sisters would have been called fundamentalist Christians with a very unvarnished understanding of God. I was also at the time living in an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood because that’s where the best school was outside of New York. All my friends were Jewish and I was what was called a “Shabbas Goy”. If you are an Orthodox Jew you can’t touch electricity, money, or go to the movies between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday, but its perfectly acceptable to the faith to have a little Goyishe girl come over, turn on and off the lights, give her a lovely dinner, and so I did that and I could tell that all these smart, good people had very different understandings on what was real, and that really grabbed me.
21:59:12 At Harvard, among the anthropologists was Stanley Tambiah, Evon Vogt, Albert Lord, David Maybury-Lewis was there but I never took a class with him. I did take Tambi’s course on ‘Magic, Science and Religion’. I thought he stopped short, but that has been an enduring interest of mine. Then when I came to Cambridge I became friendly with Geoffrey Lloyd and Tambi was a good friend to him, and that continued his influence on my life. Daniel Bell as a powerful influence. I ended up taking care of his house for five or six summers. He was a little bit like you [Alan Macfarlane] and was very comfortable with generalization. He liked strong views about what happened in a certain world, and was impatient with quibbling with the details, and he was proud of that. There’s a film about him, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol called ‘Arguing the World’, and that’s what he did. He was also a really good "Dad" kind of character. So he argued the world with young people but he also kind of wanted you to win, so he was a good mentor.
24:07:01 I played the violin for twelve years, also the guitar, piano and recorder. I do remember arriving a college and thinking, O.K, there are people that take these very seriously & this is taking too much time. I think as time has gone on….when I was young I was always fascinated by herbariums and herbalists, and I used to collect plants and think about their meaning and what they were used for medicinally. I am now a pretty active gardener, we have an acre plot and much of that is gardened. It’s California gardening which means it is increasingly succulents. Before I discovered gardening I discovered orchids and succulents. When I moved from the University of California San Diego to the University of Chicago, I mailed 400 succulents and 200 orchids. I loved the way that the roots of the orchids moved and they were so extraordinary, so unexpected. I loved the weirdness of brassias and succulents that shouldn’t be as they are. At some point in my social life I remember turning to collecting plants. I would have what felt like a little green light at the back of my eyes come on. I would go into a nursery and feel that something came over me and I must have one of these brassias…I would collect them and keep them, tend to them and nurse them. I became utterly fascinated. Then when I acquired land, the plants I had collected, many are still there, but what is so lovely about a garden is that it changes time. Penelope Lively thinks that gardening can overcome time. I don’t think that is true. I think that gardens make time for you because they are always changing. I remember one year digging up the lawn in California, and planting a drought-tolerant grass, really working to plant that grass. There was a beautiful first season, and then the next season, terrible. So I pulled it all out and planted succulents. Then it froze that year, which it never did, and they all died. There are years then that patch looks beautiful and the rain has been perfect, so that the roses and California poppies and grasses come to their fullness at the same time, and it is gorgeous. Then there are other years when it looks terrible. I’d lost a sister at this point who was a children’s book writer and fantastically successful. It was a real loss to me as she was always at her desk and we could talk every day. And having a garden really helped me to manage that loss because pieces of the garden die and they change with different plants, and that is important.
29.55.24 At Cambridge, Ernest Gellner was my supervisor. Stanley Tambiah had said to me that there was a bright young man at Cambridge who I should work with, so I signed up to work with Stephen Hugh-Jones. Then Stephen went on leave, and also I had this interest not only in witchcraft and magic but in rationality. Stephen was always a good friend and advisor, but he said that he was going on leave and that Ernest would be my supervisor, he does rationality. At the time the rationality debate was very active. It was completely swept out of the way by cognitive science which was a different way of thinking about cognition, but Ernest became my supervisor. He was wonderful. He was quite idiosyncratic and he was also very blunt…this must have been 1985. There are three memories that really stick out. One memory is arriving at Cambridge having written 50,000 words on my thesis, and Ernest said to me, having just met me, “Your will do our student colloquium because you have something to say”. I said I didn’t have anything to say, but he said that with 50,000 words I could lead this discussion. Another memory is that I would write a chapter and then I would give it to him, and I would meet with him. Young people are so foolish, and we write in such crabbed, awkward ways, so attracted to theoretical debates here and there. So I gave him my chapter. He sat me down and said “Tell me what the point of this chapter is”, and I explained it. He looked at me and said “Good. Why didn’t I get that out of your chapter?” The third really strong memory is giving the department seminar after I had finished my thesis because we used to do that then. I was a very anxious young anthropologist, and I gave the talk, and in retrospect I could see it was a success from what people were saying. But at the time I was convinced it was just of tissue of supposition. I remember Ernest walking me home, pounding his stick into the ground, saying “That was a very good talk. You should be proud”.
34:00:08 [Why choose witchcraft] I had taken this class with Stanley Tambiah. He was delivering the received wisdom in the field, that people had magic if they didn’t have science, or the magic was purely symbolic and they didn’t really believe in magic. Somewhere around this time I came across a book that told you how to be a witch, written by an American, published by a serious press, and had all sorts of instructions on how to practise magic. That didn’t seem to fit in either of the two theories. I loved Evans-Pritchard. ‘Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic’ is still one of the best ethnographies that we have. I had arrived at Cambridge. I had come with this book and was intrigued by this puzzle. I was here in a culture that was quite different to the country of my origin. Having talked about my interest in witchcraft, perhaps with you, I was given the address of a woman living out in the fens. She lived in an old cottage with twelve cats, and an altar with a knife stained with her own blood, but she was a story, she wasn’t a culture. She introduced me to somebody else who sent me off to this lecture, which turned out to be a conference with all these people in a hall in London. There were clearly 1000 or more people who talked about magic & witchcraft and spells, and this was their world. I thought that this would be totally cool as you could not give the kind of explanation that Tambi had given for magic about this world. These were very sophisticated people, educated, practising magic. What happened was that I became part of this world, was initiated as a witch, a high-magician, a cabbalist, goodness knows what. That was fun. But I had also gone into that world with ideas about narrative, the idea that stories, models, shared understandings, cognitive stuff, would explain how you could start as a non-magician and end up as a magician. I thought that was true, but what I also found was that if you hung out in this world you would feel magic, magic running through your body, see things that other people didn’t see. I didn’t understand how to make sense of it at the time but it was really important.
38:40:04 I really did feel magic. One of the first examples was that in Cambridge in the ‘80’s, you had a bicycle. These people were in London and I was living in Cambridge. I would ride to the station and I had two bicycle lights which at that time were pretty heavy things. You would snap them onto your bike, then take them off to get on the train because they were worth £5 and people would steal them. On the train I was reading the book of an adept who I was going to meet. It was called ‘The Experience of Inner Worlds’, and the book is about magical this and cabbalistic that and the power that moves through you. There am I really trying to wrap my head around this book, to really try and understand from inside what this book is about. And I started to feel fabulous, that there was an electric current running through me. I felt completely alive, my senses were exquisitely attuned. I felt fully present, it felt really different, it felt like something, there was a substance. The startling thing was that in this process, smoke started coming out of my bag. It turned out that one of the batteries was melting. I have no explanation for the battery but it was liquefying. The experience was real as other people have had this experience. It’s not so well described. In the Christian world it is sometimes called the Holy Spirit experience. People talk about it as a bolt of lightning or electricity that runs through you, and it’s a real experience.
40:51:03 There is another experience I write about in the book, that in this world you were really meant to read literature as if you were living inside. You were not meant to be sitting back and thinking “How does George Eliot paint the protagonist of 'Middlemarch', how does she portray this woman?” You are meant to live the story. So I had been reading the novels appropriate for this experience at the time. I had been reading this book called ‘The Myths of Avalon’, a retelling of the Arthurian legend by a member of this community, a witch. I went to sleep and I woke up in the morning and saw six druids standing by the window. The technical name for this experience is a hypnopompic experience, and these are not so rare. For me, I had the phenomenal experience. I felt that this was not my dream but something that I saw in the world and it felt like an empirical sight, using my senses. I remember snapping out of bed, then everything changing. I wrote it down in my fieldwork journal and then I went back to sleep. I forgot about it until later in the day and then thought, great, I really had this experience. And other people in that world also had experiences like that. So that became a rabbit that I’ve really tried to follow. What is the relationship between the ideas that you have, your cognitions, your propositions, and your felt, experiential awareness of the world? Can you train those? It seemed to me that I hung out in this magical world and I learnt to have these experiences, even though I felt that the experiences were spontaneous and unchosen. I didn’t decide to have a hallucination, to feel the power came into me, but there was some relationship between living in the social world, learning to pay attention as I had done, and having these vivid experiences. So this question about belief, training, experience, really has stayed with me.
44:41:13 I read a book about India when I was trying to study religion, but got side-tracked by the community. I wrote a book about psychiatry which is worth mentioning briefly. What happened is that I became a little more alert to the fact that you can study how people can have odd experiences. That there are methods and ways of thinking about this. So after I finished the psychiatry book I started to do two things at the same time. The psychiatry book was about the training of young psychiatrists and somebody said to me that it was the patients who count, and I should study them. When I arrived at the University of Chicago, Richard Taube drove me to a neighbourhood with the densest concentration of persons with psychosis in the entire state of Illinois and told me I should study this. At the same time it had sort of dawned on me that what my magicians were doing in London was also at the heart of this big movement in Christianity, that is global and a big deal in America, charismatic Christianity. I started searching for a church where people said that God would talk back. So here I am on the streets of Chicago, dressed in a hoody trying to blend in with homo-psychotic women. Also, I find a church, The New Christian Fellowship, where it was pretty clear that most people weren’t psychotic. It was a very dull church on the surface. We met in a community hall, there was no churchy stuff, there’s a power point, the Pastor is not giving theatrical sermons, he’s teaching from the text, trying to explain it. But he is also saying things like “you should get to know God the way you get to know anyone”, “have a cup of coffee with God. Put out a second cup in the morning. You have your cup and he has his. Pour an actual cup of coffee and talk to God and listen to what he has to say”. People were very sophisticated and subtle about that, but it was also clear that they would learn to experience God as speaking. So I became quite fascinated. People are doing something like hearing voices which the women on the street are doing, but it is a different kind of experience. At the advice of the Pastor, and there are hundreds of manuals that teach you how to do this, they start to describe God’s voice sounding like the flow…you just have to pick out what are God’s words. So people would learn to look for the texture of thought and pick out the words that stood out, that felt louder or stronger. It seemed to me that as they learnt to do this, that inner experience became more and more different from them, more loud, more strong. There were variations. Sometimes that voice was super-clear and it really did not feel like them. They might joke about this, maybe it’s God, maybe it’s the burrito I ate for lunch. They knew that there was all this human stuff which would intervene between what they took to be the creator…there was all this subtle thinking. But people would get better at picking out God’s voice, recognising God’s voice, and about a third of them said that at least once God had spoken to them in a way they could hear with their ears. That was really interesting to me. Also interesting was that some people could do this and some could not. There was a young man who was my prayer partner and we prayed once that he would hear God speak in a booming voice because God just never spoke to him. There was another woman who loved this, she was what was called a “prayer warrior”. Everyone knew she prayed really well and she heard God really easily. That became something I really wanted to understand. That is when I started adding other methods to the work because when I said this to people who weren’t anthropologists they didn’t believe me. They didn’t think that what I had was really data. What anthropologists could do was understand what a group of people would talk about together, the ideas that they shared, but I couldn’t pull out real differences in the way that would persuade people. I gave a talk to an interdisciplinary group, and people were sympathetic but said it was not really evidence. That affronted me and I said I would prove that it happens, what would persuade you? Then I talked to my dad about what questionnaires people would use when they were interested in this. I also talked to a psychologist who suggested giving all the subjects questionnaires; some of the questionnaires made people feel that I thought them crazy, some questionnaires they answered all the same way so that wasn’t very interesting. There was one that was really interesting. It was called the Absorption Scale, with items like “Sometime I experience the world as I did as a child”, or “I can turn noise into music by the way that I listen to it”, or “sometimes I can sense the presence of somebody", or "I know that they are there”, things like that. So I gave this scale to people, and the guy who had said “God doesn’t talk to me”, reads the scale, and said it was true in 4 out of 34 items, and asked me if there were people like this, and the “Prayer Warrior” said "yes" to almost everything. She said “the man who wrote this scale lives in my head. He knows who I am”. That was really interesting to me, so I continued to work with that scale, and what does it pick up? It turns out now, the absorption no matter what religious faith, on the basis of this large project that I did in five countries with people who were charismatic Christians and non-Christians, the way somebody answered the Absorption Scale was related to how vividly they experienced God. So I think that’s really cool. And the other thing that I did, pushed by my non-anthropology friends, was to do a training study. I was pretty persuaded that you join these groups and you change. Something about the way you pay attention changes. Over a hundred charismatic Evangelical Christians, the kind who want an intimate back and forth relationship with God, one by one came to my office and I gave them these computer exercises, and gave them a set of surveys, and talked to them for hours. Then I gave them a brown paper envelope which had a spiritual discipline, immersive, imagination-rich prayers, which was a lot like what the witches were doing, but also a lot like people were praying. I was structuring them so you had half an hour of recorded stuff. In one of them you would listen to the 23rd Psalm, they never met me but my voice would say “ …see the shepherd before you, look at the slope of his shoulders, look at his hair. Now he turns, and you follow him”. Another envelope had these pretty fabulous lectures on the Gospels from a teaching company. Then there was another condition, a more centring prayer condition. People would go off for a month and do this for half an hour a day. They would come back in and we redid all those measures. It turned out the people in the prayer condition looked different, they came back with more vivid experiences of God, a few more unusual experiences. Then absorption also worked in that setting to also predict these experiences. That became really important. Later, it turns out that there is this deep puzzle between the relation of psychosis and what’s called absorption or imagination, whatever the skills being trained in the Charismatic church, or witches, Zoroastrians, the human skill to become caught up in your senses and to suspend disbelief. There is a puzzle how that related to psychosis and I’m still in the midst of trying to understand this but I think there is a real answer to be given. I think there is something about the way people imagine their minds that’s really important here, and that culture invites you to think about your mind differently in different social worlds. It’s hard to be an anthropologist and do a really definitive study of training because these days that really happens in the neuroscience world. I am now partnering with people and we are doing some of these fMRI’s and looking at the relationship between different experiences. I knew that if I was going to be true to my anthropological roots I could anthropologically look at different cultural understanding of the mind and get some traction with that. So this big project came around because I was interested in the way people thought about their mind was also connected with these spiritual experiences, and maybe that would speak to the puzzle of psychosis. So the most recent thing I have done is this five country study in which we’ve got a language-competent, seasoned ethnographer in each site. Then they have a small team of people. So the ethnographer really knows the area well. So we use different methods in this site, the ethnographer is sitting with sixty people of deep faith, very committed, asks questions about how they think about the mind, also questions on how they experience whatever god or spirit is at the centre of their faith. Then we did another version of those questions where they train research assistants to ask short versions of these questions to the general population, and we gave undergraduates these surveys which they filled out. What we found was that in each of these settings absorption was associated with spiritual experience. We also discovered that if you imagined your mind as porous, open to the world, the more you have these intense experiences. So I feel that I am in your tradition, in Ernest Gellner’s tradition, and contributing to the conversation.