*Hearing Voices

Hearing Voices in Accra and Chennai from Constance Cummings on Vimeo.

Her arguments and position are summarized here at Neuroanthropology.

Luhrmann contrasts the phenomena of 'hearing voices' in Santa Monica and Chicago of the U.S., Chennai in India and Accra in Ghana. Most have been diagnosed or considered to be under the messy auspice of schizophrenia. More specifically she looks at the different kinds of voices that are heard: positive, negative, playful and so forth and who the voices are identified with: demons, gods, ancestors, family members etc. She points towards the influence of culture on the way these voices are interpreted, framed, looked at from the medical profession, and in turn how these hallucinations are dealt with as normative or abnormal psychology. She explains further here and here


The following is a reading of an excerpt from renown neurologist Oliver Sack's coming book 'Hallucinations'. Here the excerpt talks about the categorical assumption of hearing voices and schizophrenia. This is a false presumption and hearing voices is actually a normal phenomenon and happens quite often across cultures and periods of history. Voices may be negative but what often goes without critical attention are the positive voices that help us in times of hardship. Not the voices that we recognize as our own internal dialogues of self but something experienced as distinctly external. There is a good connection here with Oliver Sacks and Tanya Luhrmann.

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/24/163271304/exclusive-first-read-hallucinations-by-oliver-sacks





With respect to religious experience, Tanya Luhrmann's new book 'When God Talks Back' discusses cultural training and the interactions some evangelical christians have with god in some hallucinatory capacity. An article about such visions discussing Luhrmann's work is here
NPR also did a segment on her new book here

Here Luhrmann talks much more about the training and practices of the imagination for prayer. This does not mean that they perceive this as their imagination but as something that is real and represented to them as a distinct experience of god.

The range of religious experience is quite broad and can begin with what Luhrmann talks about in prayer and interactive with god as presented in her study to Dostoevsky epileptic seizures, drug experiences with LSD, to cases of stigmata, visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as near death experiences. But these experiences seem rare and Luhrmann, with her study of this evangelical community, brings a kind of everyday religious experience into the range of religious experience, which is interesting.