Invisible humans and their gods

Abstract

In her new book, Tanya Luhrmann (2020) offers a theory of religion of universal scope: effort is required to contact and sustain the presence of an invisible other, which is why people regularly pray and engage in rituals. Focusing one’s attention, through thoughts and behaviours, on the invisible kindles—like a small fire—the presence of the supernatural. The concept of kindling, like most of the other ideas and mechanisms cited to support her theory of religion, derives from a wide corpus of psychological science, from learning theory to the cognitive science of religion. The writing of this book is clear; it steers away from jargon or strips it to the bear essentials; in that sense, it is a joy to read and widely accessible to a large audience. Something exciting about it is that one can easily think of applications of Luhrman’s theory of religion well beyond the scope of the book. Take the example of secular rites surrounding nationalism, the efforts people are willing to undertake to feel that their nation is a real entity; or consider the success of mindfulness meditation as a secular religion, where individuals go through the effort of meditating twice a day to reach a pure state of awareness that changes their wellbeing and perception of the world (Kabat-Zinn, 2017). The list of examples can easily go on. It is precisely the ease with which one can—rather intuitively—think of applications of Luhrman’s theory that made us stop and ask: what does this theory exactly explain about which religions? There is a growing sense of discomfort within psychological science about universal claims; this is due to a greater awareness of significant cultural variations of how the mind works and of difficulties in replicating key findings, and also an acknowledgement of the biased samples used in psychological research (Henrich et al., 2010; Open Science Collaboration, 2015). If psychology, which has the ambition of generalizing its theories to all of humankind, is undergoing a more subdued phase, when it comes to the anthropological study of religion, the path towards universal claims has, for a long time, been a rocky one (to put it mildly). There are very good reasons for this distrust, as universal theories of religion tend to be inextricably associated with a difficulty in acknowledging other perspectives of experiencing the world that do not fit with our own categories. Luhrmann acknowledges the challenge of religious diversity in chapter 1, when she writes “... there is something quite culturally specific about the way that people in the modern West think about what is real” (p. 4), but she then very quickly evades the question by claiming that other people also differentiate between what is natural and supernatural. There is a wide range of nonWestern otherness that could be explored, but her examples focus mainly on the works of Viveiro de Castro and Aparecida Vilaça, who have studied indigenous peoples from the Amazon region. Luhrmann appears to be in a hurry to summarize the religious experience of the peoples we usually