Download talks back

2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98
BOOK SYMPOSIUM
Talking back about When God
talks back
Tanya LUHRMANN, Stanford University
Response to HAU Book Symposium on LUHRMANN, Tanya. 2012.
When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical
relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf.
These responses are terrific and fascinating—not least because two of them
contradict each other directly, and on a matter of considerable importance. Pascal
Boyer argues that my observations about American charismatic Evangelicals are
generalizable: that everywhere in the world, the intuition that gods or spirits are
present takes work. In this sense, they are conjectures. Anthropologists, he writes,
tend not to recognize this because their subjects present belief statements as
assertions and then the anthropologists describe them in turn as indirect reported
speech: “among the Fang, only the ancestors can make one sick.” After reading all
those ethnographies it is startling to encounter the claim that the existence of these
invisible agents is not matter of fact. But Boyer points out that there is no other
good way to make sense of all the work people do in ritual.
It is indeed a lot of work. Victor Turner’s (1969) account of the isoma ritual
among the Ndembu takes him some forty pages to explain briefly. The ritual is
performed when a married woman does not bear living children, and demands of
the Ndembu that they search out a range of plants, dig a tunnel under the earth
large enough that their subjects can crawl through it, build a seclusion hut, and then
gather the community together to perform a set of actions so complicated that the
reader comes to conclude that Turner’s ethnography is in fact truncated, not
stretched out at length. Pascal’s own example is the Cuna shamanic healing, made
famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963), which recounts the elaborate chanting
through which a shaman maps an analogy between a woman’s body and a series of
mythical landscapes and describes the noisy battle through which warriors fight the
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Tanya Luhrmann.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online)
Tanya LUHRMANN
390
army of a goddess to recoup the soul that has been stolen from the woman, and so
enable her baby to be born. Anyone who goes to a lowly Sunday morning gathering like the ones I attended cannot fail to be impressed by the sheer labor involved
in putting the service together (just putting out enough chairs is demanding
enough). Boyer writes,
Many religious practices seem exceedingly odd if we see them as based
on preexisting unproblematic beliefs. Once we realize that belief is a
conjecture, these activities make more cognitive (and existential) sense.
Initially, spirits may or may not be around. But after the whole night of
ritual and the 10,000 verses, to some people at some junctures this
conjectural representation becomes more vivid, more accessible, is
associated with actual experience, is given some explanatory power—in
other words is potentially turned into what we commonly call a belief.
All that effort: it helps to make God or the gods real because it provides an actual
experience of God’s presence.
But then there is Aparecida Vilaça’s essay, which seems to flatly contradict this
account. She describes the start of her fieldwork among the Amazonian Wari’ in
1986, when the Wari’ were not yet Christian and shamans would work in pairs to
cure people and to make sure that hunted game was safe to eat. “Unlike the
Vineyard Christians, the Wari’ shamans did not undergo perceptual training.” She
writes that one day in 2003, she asked a shaman if she could film a conversation
with him about jaguars and their world. As they sat talking, other Wari’ joined
them to listen. After a while, the shaman began to look to his left and talk in a low
voice, and immediately everyone on that side scattered and shooed their children
away. Vilaça inferred that invisible jaguars were present and arriving from that
direction. Then the shaman reported the contents of his conversation with the
invisible jaguars to Vilaça. “No one, as far as I could tell, doubted the presence of
the jaguars.” She writes,
It seems to me, then, that questions of the kind posed by Luhrmann visà-vis her material only make sense within a cultural frame informed by a
very specific notion of personhood, as in the case of the American
middle-class youths and adults making up the Vineyard’s membership.
Only the self-contained individual as a starting point enables us to ask
questions such as: is the intimate relation with God a hallucination (God
is just mind) or a real dialogue (God is a real exterior being)?
I side with Boyer in suspecting that there must be something more complicated
than Vilaça is describing—that the presence of these invisible spirits is neither as
straightforward nor as unquestioning as she suggests. At the least, I suspect that
there are rules that shape whether someone can identify the jaguar. The shaman’s
assertion that the jaguar is present is surely such a rule. (If he indicates it, it is more
likely to be true than if he does not.) I also suspect that there are cases of jaguar
identification that are considered to be violations of the rules and are rejected by
the community, perhaps as signs that the person who sees the jaguar is mad. And I
also suspect that there is indeed some degree of training of the imagination,
sensory and otherwise. The shaman surely undergoes such training. Training is
reported by other ethnographers of the Amazon (e.g., Crocker 1985) and at the
least, the society is investing quite heavily, from an economic perspective, in this
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98
391
TALKING BACK ABOUT WHEN GOD TALKS BACK
religious expert whose judgments about the invisible they trust. Indeed, the moment where Vilaça describes a Wari’ man who told her that they had to clear out
because of the changed expression on the shaman’s face meant that he was becoming a dangerous jaguar is perhaps like the Vineyard congregant, sitting down over
two steaming cups of coffee in order to help convince himself that God is there
and listening. Both can be seen as acts that help to persuade the actor that God is
there.
Paul Stoller also seems to be on the side of the importance and commonality of
the practice of inner sensory training and the need to use the imagination to
experience the supernatural. He, too, seems to think that training the sensory
imagination is important, even among non-Western people. After all, that is what
his Songhay teacher told him. “You need to learn how to listen before you can
hear the voices of the ancestors.” Stoller clearly thinks that the need to transform
the impossible into the possible is as important and as difficult for Songhay
sorcerers as it is for Evangelical Christians—and for that matter, for anthropologists.
Moreover, he implicitly makes the argument here (and makes it more explicitly in
his forthcoming work) that this training of the senses is entwined with the quest for
well-being:
Adepts of many religious persuasions dedicate much of their time to a
program of prayer and practice that might empower them to eventually
hear the voice of God [and] attempt to develop their inner senses in
search of short-lived ecstatic moments that profoundly enrich the
meaning of their lives.
Stoller makes a specific point here that unusual experiences enhance well-being,
but his aim is broader. We might use it to introduce a new hypothesis into the
discussion: that religious practices—particularly these practices of training the inner
imagination—promote well-being in a variety of ways by transforming the world, as
it is, into the world as it should be or could be. To a limited extent, to be sure—but
recognizably so nonetheless.
And yet Vilaça has a point, which is that there surely must be something
different about the experience of God in a highly self-aware and secular society,
pluralistic and scientifically minded, like the United States and in a small, isolated
one in which all people more or less share a common faith. Karl Popper (and
Robin Horton and Ernest Gellner, among others) famously contrasted these two
types of societies as “open” and “closed.” Horton (1993: 222) summarizes their
differences thus: “In traditional societies there is no developed awareness of
alternatives in the established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically
oriented societies, such awareness is highly developed.” It was the difference
E. E. Evans-Pritchard used to explain why the Azande did not notice the contradictions or evident shortcomings of their witchcraft beliefs:
In this web of belief every strand depends upon every other strand, and a
Zande cannot get out of its meshes because it is the only world he knows.
The web is not an external structure in which he is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought and he cannot think that his thought is wrong. (1937: 195)
The Azande can question whether a man is a good diviner but not whether divination works; they can challenge the accuracy of the definition of a witch but not
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98
Tanya LUHRMANN
392
whether witchcraft itself is real. Of course the witchcraft is real. They have no way
of imagining it to be other. This would seem to be Vilaça’s position.
In the past year, I have begun to do comparative work to shed light on some of
these important questions of social context, belief commitment, and God. I have
been in and out of Ghana and Chennai (India), spending time at new charismatic
churches to understand the way the experience of God is shaped by local
understanding. My work continues: for the purpose of this short discussion I will
focus on my interviews with pastoral students now training at a school attached to
one of the new charismatic churches. The church is in many ways like the
Vineyard—a big, media-savvy, middle-class church that emerged in recent decades
as an alternative to the mainstream churches, a church in which people seek close
personal relationships with God and hope to encounter his supernatural presence
in their daily lives. Indeed, in many ways, these new charismatic churches that now
dot the Accra landscape are local responses to American Evangelicals (like
Kenneth Hagin and Oral Roberts) whose ideas swept the local churches in the
1980s. The sermons, like most schooling in the city, are conducted in English.
Much of the worship music is American—“Breathe” and “Trading My Sorrows”
were only two of the American songs I heard in church—and American Evangelical
writing floods the bookstores. When the pastoral students spoke about God, in
many ways they sounded just like the Chicago Vineyard congregants, most of
whom were about the same age. In fact, the pastoral students had been given a
series of Vineyard-style lectures on how to be in a conversational relationship with
God and how to hear God speak intimately.
And yet the differences were striking. Accra is halfway between the “open”
secular, scientific society in which the Vineyard flourishes and the “closed” world
of Wari’ shamanism. Anyone who joins a Christian church in Accra—and most of
its citizens are Christian—has encountered the pluralism that comes with the acute
awareness of other faiths. The traditional religion is very much alive in the local
imagination, either as a source of demons or of healing, or both. But Ghana is
what we might call, following Joel Robbins, a “never-secular” society. Atheism is
rare. I systematically asked the pastoral students whether they had even met anyone who didn’t believe in God at all, and most of them said no. Those that had
said they had met only one or two, and they clearly regarded them as aberrant.
Still, there was plenty of doubt. Almost every student said that there had been
moments when he or she doubted that God was real. They said things like this
(each comment comes from a different speaker):
It was some few years back. I used to. It was because of a difficulty.
Sometimes I go through a lot of difficulties and I don’t seem to have
provision, and so I become mad and I’m like, “God, you are selective.
You’ve not blessed me, my family.” And when I do that I lose faith, and
when I lose faith I can’t pray. And I become dry and become so
unhappy. But it does not stay for long.
Sure. I ask questions. “Does God really exist?” You know. I’ve asked
myself those questions. Yeah, sometimes I just have to dispose those
thoughts from my mind and then just hold on to my faith. [But he has
them once a week.]
I’ve had thoughts like that, but I have not seriously get into that.
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98
393
TALKING BACK ABOUT WHEN GOD TALKS BACK
I used to have that [doubt about whether God even exists] a lot. Maybe
when, like, I’ve had a problem, some issue, and I feel afraid about it
enough, or upset enough about it, and I didn’t see anything changing,
like, well, maybe he is not even there in the first place. And then I cry,
and then after that, just leave it. Somehow, it works on its own. Or somehow you don’t even see it again. It dies off, that feeling just goes away.
I used to. I used to. [How did you get out of them?] By the same word of
God. You know, as you read the Bible, you listen to the word, you gain
faith. You just—the faith comes ‘cause the word of God says it. The Bible
says, “Faith comes by hearing and hearing the word of God.” So in those
moments where you doubt, you listen to the word of God and you gain
faith.
This is Evans-Pritchard doubt, although there is more doubt present than EvansPritchard allowed. When these pastoral students talk about doubt, they talk about
struggling within those webs of their own commitments. They are embarrassed by
these moments of doubts. “I just tell myself,” one man remarked, “look, you can’t
doubt God.” They do not show off their doubts like Americans who are clear that
they have thought long, hard, and logically about God before accepting that God is
real. Far less often than Americans do they use belief hedges like “crazy,” which
signal that their audience might think their views are mad. The hedges are not
absent. One woman in Accra remarked:
I believe in the power of healing and I don’t like people to suffer. When
I see someone, even a cripple, I feel I should go pray for the person to
start walking. That’s the craziest thing that I’m praying about.
But neither are the hedges as rich as plums in plum pudding, as they are in the
American narratives. Here is a Chicago Vineyard man on the Holy Spirit and on
God:
I mean that sounds crazy in itself, it’s like the fact that there is somebody
in you, when you’re with somebody you have a sense of security, you
have a sense of like, um, not being alone, but like there’s somebody
there for you, and you feel that when you’re talking to him. And I guess
once you reach a certain point it just becomes a [way to] think about it.
I’m walking down the street talking to God, like, out loud. People must
think that I’m so wacky.
“Crazy” and “wacky” twice in three sentences: that signals a degree of expected
skepticism about God that the Accra pastoral students do not display.
From the perspective of this data, Vilaça is right—in part. In this non-Western
setting, nonclosed as it is, people do not doubt the system within which they think.
They doubt their immediate judgment of whether God was there. “So sometimes I
ask myself, ‘Am I really hearing [God’s] voice? Or is this an inner urge?’ It’s not so
clear.” They doubt specifics and they doubt at moments of apparent failure. They
do not want to doubt the whole.
Mostly when I have doubts, I immediately fall out—not fall out—I
immediately stop doubting. Why do I do that? I do that because you
can’t fathom the nature of God. His origin. If you put your mind to it,
you will stretch your mind to the extreme of your mind. Yes, that is what
I do when I begin having doubts.
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98
Tanya LUHRMANN
394
This man has doubts, but he cannot bear them. He will stretch his mind to the
extreme to make them go away.
Yet they do doubt, and my interviews also make it abundantly clear that Boyer
is right, and that just as among my Vineyard congregants God must be made real
when it matters for my pastoral students in Accra—and that making God real
requires work.
You’re kneeling down, you’re wailing and crying and all of that. Nobody
knows what is going through you. Nobody knows how you are feeling.
Nobody knows—people just look at you—you know. But the experience
makes God real to you.
This Accra woman hedges. She knows that what she is doing to experience God is
odd to her audience: “people just look at you.” But the result of what she does
then when she prays is important, because “the experience makes God real to
you.” The man I quoted above makes a similar point:
He speaks to me in a still small voice. At first I was doubting. I used to
doubt when I heard him speak. But the first time he audibly spoke to
me, I had rededicated my life to Christ. And I vowed to live my life in
such a way that it would be pleasing to Him and men. Then I got
tempted. In the middle of being tempted, I just felt the Holy Spirit
descend on me. I felt His presence all around me. My body temperature
changed. It was suddenly so cold around me. Then He spoke to me. He
said, “Stay with me.”
This is a man who insists that you should immediately stop doubting—and yet also
asserts that the direct experience of God resolved his doubts.
I saw among the Accra pastoral students the same practices and techniques to
experience God as I saw among the Vineyard Christians. I saw that they learned to
identify—to discern—thoughts they took to be not their thoughts but God’s
thoughts, and they did so in similar ways. I saw that they learned to imagine that
God was present and that they used prayer practices to generate the intense
emotional and bodily experiences they associated with God’s presence. And it was
hands down obvious that their prayer practice—often for upward of an hour at a
time—mattered to their sense that God was real in the moment for them. They
believed in God in general, but it was when they were praying that they felt his
presence vividly and powerfully.
Sometimes I will be praying. I can literally feel there’s a presence there.
I’m not the only person there. When I devote time with God, I do
mostly get that kind of feeling.
When I pray in tongues it builds up my faith personally. Any time I pray
in tongues [my faith gets] stronger.
All this work, all this prayer: and sometimes God seems real and present.
And yet it is hard to avoid the sense that the capacity of these practices to make
God’s presence real in some sense matter more to the Americans, precisely
because their doubt is sharper and their sense of alternatives to faith more acute.
At least, Americans are more likely to tie a belief-assertion to a sense of God’s
presence than the Accra pastoral students, who in general do not need to discover,
in the face of their skepticism, that God is truly real. Here for example is an
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98
395
TALKING BACK ABOUT WHEN GOD TALKS BACK
American who became a Christian but with some hesitation (his girlfriend wanted
him to convert) and attributes his deep awareness of God’s reality to the sensory
experience of God when other people prayed for him:
So they started praying for me, and I had this, it feels like, it doesn’t feel
necessarily like electricity, but it feels like your body would be, like,
touched by some kind of extreme power and you’re just shaking, like
you just can’t handle all this stuff that’s being poured into you, and all
they’re saying is come on Holy Spirit and fill him up to overflowing. . . . And, like, in that I felt, I felt like there was somebody else in
me, like, dwelling trying to get out to this extreme degree, and I was just
overwhelmed in it. . . . I was just overcome with everything. . . . Things
just kept piling up to verification that God does exist, like I knew after I
got prayed for that God exists, like, in power, and He still is here today.
There is a theoretically important observation here that speaks to the question
Annelin Eriksen and Ruy Blanes raise: what is American about this Vineyard
church? My work suggests that there is a direct relationship between the explicit
importance given to the practices that make God real and the vulnerability of the
belief stance within the larger social world. Even in a social world with an apparently unquestioned belief in invisible spirits, a society goes to considerable effort to
persuade people that the spirits are real enough in the moment to intervene for the
one who prays. One society will create shamans who are carefully chosen and
apprenticed, shamans who are supported by others in the society and recognized
as experts who can draw the spirits out and make them active. Another society will
create priests who are trained and tested and supported by the full weight of the
church institution, with buildings built to draw God’s presence and make God care
so that when you pay the priest to pray to release your father’s soul from purgatory,
God will respond. But when belief is weak or threatened—when there are many
sensible others who believe differently or not at all—then the need for the intense
work to make God real will be more marked, more recognized, and more articulated as a means to know that God is real. That is what I see already in the comparison with the Ghanaian pastoral students. The Americans are more excited by the
practices through which they feel God’s presence directly and hear his voice, and
what enthralls them is the eye-widening recognition that God is real. The Ghanaians love to pray, to be sure, and they talk about how God feels real to them
(sometimes) during prayer. But the Americans assert more clearly, more explicitly,
and more defiantly that they believe because they have felt.
It is also true that the Accra pastoral students experience God somewhat
differently than do the Vineyard congregants. Again, I am at early stages of the
research, but I raise the issue because it speaks to the puzzle posed by Timothy
Jenkins about the stability of experience.
There are real difficulties with any empirical reliance on the notion of
experience, despite its accepted status in so much psychology of religion,
because experience is a thoroughly elusive notion, not least in the puzzle
of whether experience is ever present to the person who claims to have
it: what is experienced is constructed prospectively and retrospectively
using shared categories.
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98
Tanya LUHRMANN
396
Let me suggest here—and really, this is the ultimate point of my current work—that
even when theology is more or less shared, different assumptions about experience
itself (in particular, different assumptions about mind, self, and mental action) will
shape the way people remember and report an experience of God and, arguably,
the way someone responds in the moment in the first place. Spiritual experience is
largely a metacognitive experience: a reflection on reflection. People pay attention
to certain mental events and code them as significant, and dis-attend to others,
partly as a result local cultural invitations. Probably, those attributional patterns
shift responsiveness in the moment as well as reports about what may have
occurred.
Here, for example, is an account of the back and forth dialogue as prayer as
reported by one of the pastoral students:
So I was lying on my bed, and then I started talking to Him. It’s
awesome. I can talk to God like I’m talking to you, and as you are
responding, even though I don’t hear your voice, it comes. It follows a
train. A train of conversation, what you are talking about. So, like, I tried
to find out if it is true. And I’ll ask a question, and then He’ll point me to
a scripture I’ve not thought about. So he leads me to a scripture I’ve not
thought about, I wasn’t thinking about a scripture, it wasn’t in my mind. I
go, and then it answers what I was asking. I was just lying on my bed and
I was laughing and I heard everything. [And was it back and forth, back
and forth, back and forth?] Yes. [So many times back and forth?] Yes.
Here, as reported by a member of the Chicago Vineyard around the same age:
I would, um, get some food, go out and sit by the lake and, um, eat my
food and just, um, God and I would have conversations about I, like, to
say, like, his children. Like, if we were dating and he had children and I
didn’t I’d want to know how his children were doing. And so, you know,
like, you know, I’d ask him how is such and such going with Drew? How
is such and such going with, you know, Christy? You know, those sort of
things. I really, I really hope that you’re saving up for their college tuition
kind of idea, you know, I really hope that you’re doing this in their lives.
And then, you know, we would get to his relationship with me as his
child, you know, like, you know, how are we doing with this, how are we
doing with that?
Both describe an inner voice conversation. But the pastoral student reports less of
the back and forth, with less indirect reported speech; God is less person-like; the
imagined frame of the conversation (“like if we were dating”) is less marked. The
Chicago congregant relishes the impractical let’s pretend; for the Ghanaian,
although it is less evident in this quotation, the imagination is crucial for its practical implications. The pastor at the Ghanaian church tells his congregation that you
must imagine in order to be a different person: wealthier, more powerful, a man of
greater standing in public space. The Vineyard pastor encourages his congregation
to use their imagination so that they experience God as real, and so assuage their
doubt. These differences draw from different understandings of imagination; of
words and dialogue; of how one knows that a thought is real.
Eventually, I will mount an argument that the differences arise, in part, from
different local theories of mind. “Theory of mind” is of course the term used to
describe the acquisition of the awareness that human behavior is motivated by
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98
397
TALKING BACK ABOUT WHEN GOD TALKS BACK
mental states, and that those mental states depend upon that person’s experiences.
Some scholars (myself among them) have begun to ask about the psychological
consequences of the culturally variable features of the way minds are imagined
(Luhrmann et al. 2012). In this comparative work, I am looking at three dimensions of the imagined mind that we know vary across cultural boundaries:
1. the degree to which the mind is bounded or porous
2. the degree to internal feelings are thought to be causal
3. the degree to which thought itself (and imagination in particular) is real
Note that these are emphases, not absolutes. All societies posit a difference
between the mind and the world. But only some societies (Western ones) make
this distinction of supreme importance.
My answer to Jenkins is that even if we cannot know what experience is, we can
tell whether experiences vary to some extent—and those variations teach us something. He is of course right: experience is an intensely complicated concept. At the
same time, there are human phenomena sufficiently specific that one can ask
whether a group of people seem to report it more often than others: among them,
hallucinations, uncontrollable bodily sensations during prayer (weeping, falling
down, feeling a flush of adrenaline), out-of-body experiences, and sleep paralysis.
These are events in the body that have been reported in many different settings,
and to some extent they can be identified by follow-up probes. And in my work, it
looks as if there are different patterns in Ghana—and that they do reflect
differences in the ways people imagine their minds. So in some sense this future
work should make Jenkins even more anxious: and yet, it begins by taking his
central concern as a starting point: that what people identify as experience is
shaped by their cultural and theological expectations, and if we attend to those
expectations in detail, we can see that they shape fundamental features of psychological experience.
Where does this leave the cognitive science of religion in relation to
anthropology? That is the question Maya Mayblin asks in her delightful contribution. The striking achievement of the anthropologists (and psychologists) who
have reframed our understanding of religion in this way (Boyer, of course, but also
Stuart Guthrie, Justin Barrett and others) has been to demonstrate that the differences between intuition and reflective (or deliberate) beliefs—which scholars like
Daniel Kahneman were beginning to identify—had significant implications for
understanding religion. They have shown that the wide range of theologies we find
across the world are undergirded by intuitions that have evolved to help us live in
our everyday world. Our need to be alert to predators probably led to an intuitive
hyper-awareness of possible agents. The automatic way you listen intently when
you enter a dark and unknown place is probably not unconnected from the very
plausibility of the idea of intuitive agents. The surprising sameness of gods around
the world (there is no god who exists only on Tuesday) is probably not unconnected to the way we remember—that we attend to novelty, but too much of it.
Toddlers’ expectation that others can read their minds will fade as they grow, but
the sense that God knows what we are thinking is probably reinforced. This ability
to distinguish between types of cognitive commitments and the ability to identify
their associated mental “tools” feels reductive to Mayblin, and perhaps rightfully
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98
Tanya LUHRMANN
398
so, but it is the most important theory of religion to have emerged from the social
sciences in decades.
But the sheer fact that there is thinking that is fast and slow is not enough to
explain all religion gives ethnography a powerful role to play. I think that When
God talks back demonstrates that practices that create specific experiences deemed
religious, to use Ann Taves (2009) useful term, enable people to have moments
when they sense God’s presence. There are psychological aspects to those
practices, and some of my work has been focused on identifying them. But local
culture makes a difference to which experiences are produced (or at least remembered and reported) and—I would argue—to the relationship between intuition,
religious beliefs, and how and when practices are prized. That is something we can
explore in particular and in general and—as Boyer demonstrates—it is an active area
of research. I think that the success of the cognitive science of religion shows us
that the anthropology of religion is an enormously exciting place to be.
References
Crocker, Christopher. 1985. Vital souls. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Horton, Robin. 1993. Patterns of thought in Africa and the West. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Luhrmann, Tanya Marie, Rita Astuti, Luke Butler, Julia Cassaniti, Eve Danziger,
Suzanne Gaskins, Dedre Gentner, Kathyrn Geurts, Alexa Hagerty, Douglas
Hollan, Graham Jones, Michelle Karnes, John Lucy, Ellen Markman, Jocelyn
Marrow, Giulia Mazza, Sonya Pritzker, Joel Robbins, Barbara Rogoff, Danilyn
Rutherford, Bambi Schieffelin, Rupert Stasch, Jason Throop, Allen Tran,
Aparecida Vilaça. 2012: “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Mind:
Position papers from the Lemelson Conference. Includes introduction,
individual essays and edited collection.” Journal of the Finnish Anthropological
Association 36 (4): 5–69.
Stoller, Paul. Forthcoming. Yaya’s quest: The quest for wellbeing in the world.
Taves, Anne. 2009. Religious experienced reconsidered. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Turner, Victor. 1969. Ritual process. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann
Department of Anthropology
Stanford University
Building 50
Stanford, CA 94305 USA
650-723-3421
[email protected]
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 389–98