Tanya Luhrmann
| Tanya Luhrmann | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1959 |
| Fields | Psychological Anthropology |
| Institutions |
Stanford University University of California, San Diego University of Chicago |
| Alma mater |
Harvard-Radcliffe (B.A.) Cambridge University (Ph.D.) |
| Doctoral advisor | Jack Goody, Ernest Gellner |
| Notable awards |
AAA President's Award (2004) Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture (2006) Guggenheim Fellowship (2007) |
Tanya Marie Luhrmann (born 1959), often cited as T.M. Luhrmann, is an American psychological anthropologist best known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and psychiatrists. She is Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University.
Luhrmann received her AB summa cum laude in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1981, working with Stanley Tambiah. She then studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, working with Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner. In 1986 she received her PhD for work on modern-day witches in England, later published as Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989). In this book, she described the ways in which magic and other esoteric techniques both serve emotional needs and come to seem reasonable through the experience of practice.
Her second research project looked at the situation of contemporary Parsis, a Zoroastrian community in India. The Parsi community enjoyed a privileged position under the British Raj; although by many standards, Parsis have continued to do quite well economically in post-colonial India, they have become politically marginal in comparison to their previous position, and many Parsis speak pessimistically about the future of their community. Luhrmann's book The Good Parsi (1996) explored the contradictions inherent in the social psychology of a post-colonial elite.
Her third book, and the most widely acclaimed, explored the contradictions and tensions between two models of psychiatry, the psychodynamic (psychoanalytic) and the biomedical, through the ethnographic study of the training of American psychiatry residents during the health care transition of the early 1990s.Of Two Minds (2000) received several awards, including the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology (2001).
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