February 24, 1959

T. M. Luhrmann (born February 24, 1959) is an exceptional presence on the American academic scene. To me her methodology is innovative and sod-busting: she merges with her study subjecets, trying to understand their viewpoints, motivations, and experiences. That she can maintain her scholarly detachment while sympathetically sharing and learning is a testament to unused potentials of human learning. She is currently at Stanford and some of her titles include

Of two minds: The growing disorder in American psychiatry (2000)

When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012)

The New York Times publishes her essays and that is probably where I got this biographical sketch:

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is a professor of anthropology at Stanford University and a contributing opinion writer. Her books include ... “The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society,” ... She received her Ph.D. the University of Cambridge, and taught at the University of California, San Diego, and then at the University of Chicago before arriving at Stanford. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. Her work focuses on the way people experience God and the supernatural in the United States and abroad. She also studies psychiatric illness. She is interested in the way that different ways of understanding the mind alter these profound mental experiences.

Her first book was based on her research at Cambridge University is titled
Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989). Here she
relates her experiences with people who profess belief in witchcraft and she joined their role-playing, to learn more. She at one point played the part of Bast, the Egyptian goddess associated with the feline.