Tanya Luhrmann

In the anthropology of Christianity, and more broadly in the anthropology of religion, methodological atheism has foreclosed ethnographic description of God as a social actor. This prohibition is the product of certain ontological presumptions regarding agency, an absence of autonomy of human creations, and a truncated conception of what can be said to exist. Reading Tanya Luhrmann’s recent ethnography, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, in light of both the postulates of “Object-Oriented Ontology” and the work of Bruno Latour, this article proposes an ontological framework that makes it possible to ethnographically describe God as a social actor without adopting methodological theism; this article also notes, however, that the ethnographic description of religious practice found in both Luhrmann’s work, and in other ethnographic descriptions of the Vineyard, the denomination that Luhrmann focused on in her monograph, challenges Latour’s own account of the difference between science and religions as distinguishable enterprises.

In this article on Tulpamancy, I attempt to answer three questions: what do Tulpamancers experience,  how did these experiences originate, and how can the similarities between the experience of Tulpamancy and experiences of neo-evangelical Christianity be explained?  By extending the theories of Tanya Luhrmann, I argue that the proclivity towards training in Tulpamancy becomes more understandable when taking into account that some people whose brain already works in specific ways react more positively towards training that aims at making a person be able to have those specific kinds of experiences.

Dans cet article, nous discutons la pertinence d’une interprétation psychosociale de la notion de « perspectivisme ». Nous nous focalisons sur l’hypothèse, formulée par Aparecida Vilaça dans le cadre d’un projet dirigé par Tanya Luhrmann, selon laquelle le perspectivisme peut être entendu comme une « théorie de l’esprit locale ». Nous évaluons ainsi l’idée qu’il existerait des variations socioculturelles de la capacité à endosser le point de vue d’autrui (ou perspective-taking). Dans une première partie, nous comparons trois approches distinctes : la définition du perspectivisme comme « métaphysique » développée par Eduardo Viveiros de Castro ; l’approche du perspective-taking entendue comme une capacité universellement partagée dans le cadre de la psychologie cognitive ; la thèse avancée par Shali Wu et Boaz Keysar, pour lesquels il existe un effet de la culture sur la prise de perspective. Dans une seconde partie, nous postulons qu’une redéfinition du perspective-taking comme une compétence socialement structurée (et non comme une métaphysique locale ou une capacité universelle) permet une articulation prometteuse entre psychologie et anthropologie en faisant du perspectivisme un cadre ethnopsychologique global. Nous exemplifions alors cette idée en la confrontant à certains modèles récents dans le champ de l’ethnologie (comme la théorie de l’opacité de l’esprit d’autrui).

click on the Somatosphere.net link above for a copy of the paper
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This article presents a summary and discussion of key findings from ten months of experimental cyberethnography among tulpamancers . Tulpas, a term reportedly borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, are imaginary companions who are said to have achieved full sentience after being conjured through ‘thought-form’ meditative practice. Human ‘hosts’, or tulpamancers, mediate their practice through open-ended how-to guides and discussion forums on the Internet and experience their Tulpas as semi-permanent auditory and somatic hallucinations.
Studying Tulpas and their hosts is fascinating on many counts, not least because it provides an opportunity to observe an emerging culture and the mediation of new kinds of persons – in this case, that of multiple humanoid and non-human persons ‘hosted’ in single bodies and a large-scale sociocultural matrix of ‘healing’ generated without physical interaction between members. As an anthropologist who underwent retraining in cognitive science, however, I am less concerned with the seemingly ‘strange’ and ‘exotic’ aspects of Tulpamancy and am most interested in what the practice can reveal about fundamentally human mechanisms and processes. Thus, I seek to investigate (but in no pre-determined order) how neurocognitive, attentional, and narrative processes invariably shape all forms of sociality and experiences of personhood on the one hand, but also how social, political, and technological processes invariably shape mechanisms of attention, cognition, and perception. I gravitate toward sociocognitive, enactive models of hypnosis as ways of mediating sociality and personhood.

Written in memory of Paul Lachance, OFM, this essay compares the techniques and pedagogies of prayer employed by the late 13th-century nuns of Helfta with those of American evangelicals, as investigated by anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann in her book, "When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).