Tanya M. Luhrman, "Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity "

Though we often assume that our core beliefs remain constant over time, Tanya M. Luhrmann demonstrates repeatedly through her research that this is not the case. Director of the Clinical Ethnography project for the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago, Luhrmann has a particular interest in irrational beliefs and in understanding the ways that social practices and psychological states mutually influence one another.  For her work, Luhrmann has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology.

In her first book, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (1989), Luhrmann shows how a belief in magic comes to seem perfectly reasonable by satisfying the emotional needs of believers and by providing an explanation for the believers’ common experience. In her second book, The Good Parsi (1996), Luhrmann explores how beliefs are shaped by the reigning political and economic climate, chronicling the growing pessimism of the Parsis in postcolonial India, who continue to thrive economically but no longer enjoy the privileged political position they held during British colonial rule. In Of Two Minds (2000), her most recent book, Luhrmann identifies two different cultures within the field of American psychiatry and the elaborates on the two different ways of understanding patients and their mental illnesses that result from this cultural divergence.

Since her last book, Luhrmann has turned her attention to the role that visual and aural experiences play in both psychiatric and religious contexts. “Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity,” pursues the latter of these two lines of thought. Through her ethnographic research, Luhrmann discovers that contemporary evangelical American religious experiences “are giving us a God more private, more personal, and in some ways more tangibly real than the god of our fathers.” Even in the realm of religious experience, which is often interpreted as a timeless link to tradition, social context determines both practical habits and psychological understanding. By drawing our attention repeatedly to this fact, Luhrmann invites us to pay closer and closer attention to the environments that frame our beliefs and to the role that the irrational plays in human experience.

Luhrmann, Tanya M. “Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity.” American Anthropologist. Vol. 6, Issue 3. 518-528.

Biographical information is drawn from http://humdev.uchicago.edu/luhrmann.htm.
Digital image drawn from The University of Chicago Chronicle.

Link to Explore:

The Art of Hearing God: an additional article by Tanya Luhrmann.

Esoteric Masters: a transcript of a radio show that includes an interview with Tanya Luhrmann.

Question for Connecting:

• We might say that in “Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eight Street Shul,” Jonathan Boyarin also tackles the question of how one establishes an intimate relationship with God. But Boyarin is concerned with a rather different community of believers. As he recalls, the religious community of his childhood is today “as obliterated as any shtetl in Eastern Europe.” In seeking the renewal of such communities, is Boyarin caught up in the same socio-religious dynamic that Luhrmann describes? Are the developments Boyarin describes parallel to the ones that concern Luhrmann or are the two communities destined to intersect at some point?

For additional connecting suggestions, please go to assignments.

Explore some more:

Search for other links using Google: