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In today’s episode, we talk to Tom Bratrud about his ongoing, long-term work with city-dwellers who migrate to rural parts of Norway. This research forms the basis of Tom’s forthcoming book project, which has the working title Rurality 2.0: Redefining Urban-Rural Divides in the Mountains of Norway. Tom Bratrud is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His research investigates social life, political dynamics, value(es), religion/worldviews, emerging technologies, environmental issues and rural-urban relations. Prior to his work in his home valley of Valdres in southern Norway, he conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Vanuatu in the South-Pacific—resulting in his first monograph Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (Berghahn 2022). Tom is the co-convenor of European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA)’s Future Anthropologies Network. Just after we spoke, Tom was also awarded the inaugural Thomas Hylland Eriksen Memorial Prize, presented during the Norwegian Anthropological Association’s Conference in Oslo at the end of October 2025. In explaining their decision, the jury commented that Bratrud “unites global and local perspectives and shows how social anthropological approach and methodology become a key to understanding ongoing change.” Tom Bratrud is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Tom Bratrud receives the Thomas Hylland Eriksen Memorial Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we speak with Alessandro Rippa about amber – a fossilised resin that not only allow us a glimpse into prehistoric lifeforms and climatic conditions millions of years ago but also works as an entry point into understanding current political, scientific, and commercial frictions.   Alessandro is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, at the University of Oslo, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project called “Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene”. He has conducted extensive fieldwork along China’s borderlands, and more recently in his home region in the Italian Alps, and he has published on themes such as infrastructure development, borders, ‘road animism’, human-environment relations, re-wilding, hunting, and heritage.His award-winning book, titled “Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China”, came out in 2020 and explores the interplay between developmental processes, various forms of state power, and local experiences and perceptions of transboundary connections in China. Emerging from this fieldwork, the object of amber caught Alessandro’s interest, and in this podcast, we speak with him about the many aspects and actors that are part of its history and global circulation. The conversation will take us from China and Burma to Italy, Poland and Ukraine, as amber burst out in unpredictable places, and we discuss how amber links the past, present, and future in human lives, visions, and politics.    You will find links to the discussed publications and to Alessandro’s work in the show notes. The podcast was recorded in September 2025, when Alessandro visited Bergen to give a presentation as part of the BSAS seminars.     Resources:Research profile: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/people/aca/alessrip/   Book: Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China (2020): https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463725606/borderland-infrastructures   Articles on re-wilding in the Italian Alps: -       https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2021.1939398?tab=permissions&scroll=top#abstract -       https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397.2024.2309310#abstract   ERC project page for Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene -       https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/AMBER/index.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we are in company with Hans Lucht to talk about ethnographic poetry. Hans is a senior researcher, and the head of migration research at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen. He has worked with migration for 20 years, with a special focus on undocumented labour-related migration from West Africa to Europe. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Ghana, Niger, Libya, Italy, and Greece, and his prize-winning monograph ‘Darkness before Daybreak’ chronicles the lives of a group of migrants who travels from Ghana to Italy in search of work. Apart from his numerous academic contributions of articles and policy reports, Lucht is a writer, and poet, I should say. He has published two novels titled Onko-Mus and Lysene på den anden side and two collections of poems, all in his mother-tongue Danish. The first poetry collection, called Feltarbejde (Fieldwork) from 2022 is a poetic reflection on both the experiences of his interlocutors and the experience as a fieldworker. The second, Vores liv ryster (Our lives are shaking), came out in 2024 and consists of what Hans has called documentary poems. This means that all text of the poems is direct quotes from conversations and interviews with his interlocutors that Hans has then curated by following a few self-imposed dogmas. In today’s episode, Hans will read out loud five poems from this collection, all titled with a name of the one speaking and where the conversation took place. In between the readings, we ask Hans about what impressions inspired the poems, the dynamic of working between anthropology and art, and how each domain can inform and expand the insights of the other. We discuss the concept of ‘existential reciprocity’ in relation to his work, and how doing fieldwork engenders impressions and transformations that exceed academic analysis and extend into the lives of both interlocutors and fieldworkers. Resources: -       Hans Lucht’s academic profile -       Feltarbejde (2022) -       Vores liv ryster (2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a special two-episode series of Anthropology on Air!   In this and the previous podcast, you will listen to selected parts of a lecture series on the subject of slavery and freedom with professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Orlando Patterson. The lectures were held in December 2023 at various locations in London and were recorded by our colleague, Rolf Scott.   This episode features the second lecture given by Patterson titled ‘Slavery and Genocide: Jamaica, the US South and the Historical Sociology of Evil’ at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. After this introduction, the episode jumps straight into the lecture which examines the connection between genocide and slavery with a case focus on Jamaica. Patterson begins by describing slavery through the concept of ‘natal alienation’ before connecting slavery with common definitions of genocide.  He then provides a comparative history of slavery in Jamaica and the United States, in order to argue that what happened in Jamaica between 1655 and 1838 was not only slavery but also an elongated genocide of ethnocultural destruction, physical killing and brutalisation on a large scale, and the denial of existence of millions of people. Finally, Patterson touches upon how the traumatic memory affects Jamaicans today. During the lecture, Patterson refers to some statistics and figures which can be found by following the video-link in the show notes.    If you are interested in learning more about Patterson’s work, you can also listen to his first lecture on the paradox of freedom here on the Anthropology on Air podcast channel, and you can find videos of both lectures in full length including an open conversation session on YouTube. Links are provided in the show notes. We hope you enjoy the episode.   Resources: -       Lecture series: https://therai.org.uk/events/lecture-professor-orlando-patterson-the-paradox-of-freedom-a-socio-historical-approach/ -       Video of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vurr2AwIu0M -       Video of the second lecture on slavery and genocide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW7Nw5aFAgE&t=8s -       Video of open conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHZsNu62mas&t=4085s   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this and the following podcast, you will listen to selected parts of a lecture series on the subject of slavery and freedom with professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Orlando Patterson. The lectures were held in December 2023 at various locations in London and were recorded by our colleague, Rolf Scott.   This episode features the first lecture given by Patterson titled ‘The Paradox of Freedom: a Socio-Historical Approach’, held at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. The episode begins with an introduction by David Scott, professor at Colombia University, who summarises the line of thought going through three of Patterson’s most treasured monographs: ‘The Sociology of Slavery’ from 1967, ‘Slavery and Social Death’ from 1982, and ‘Freedom in the Making of Western Culture’ from 1991. Patterson then proceeds with unfolding the deeply contested value and concept of freedom with regards to its intimate connection with slavery. The first 40 minutes of the lecture, Patterson supports his claim that freedom is a socially constructed value and a cultural product of the West made possible by relations of slavery. In the last 50 minutes, Patterson then relates this dialectic of freedom and slavery to its historical development through Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and Christianity.   If you are interested in learning more about Patterson’s work, you can listen to his second lecture on slavery and genocide here on the Anthropology on Air podcast channel, and you can find videos of both lectures in full length including an open conversation session on YouTube. Links are provided in the show notes. We hope you enjoy the episode.   Resources: -       Lecture series: https://therai.org.uk/events/lecture-professor-orlando-patterson-the-paradox-of-freedom-a-socio-historical-approach/ -       Video of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vurr2AwIu0M -       Video of the second lecture on slavery and genocide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW7Nw5aFAgE&t=8s -       Video of open conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHZsNu62mas&t=4085s     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a special episode of Anthropology on Air.In this episode you will hear the recordings of the 2024 Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture, held by Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern. The episode begins with an introduction by Synnøve Bendixen who is head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Strathern then takes us on a historical and global tour through various ethnographic signposts from the Melanesian Baktaman to current activism, on this tour, inviting us to think about “Journeying anew, with or without knowledge” in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss.About the lecture, 'Journeying anew, with or without knowledge'Global consciousness of climate change and biodiversity loss endures in the face of what we know to be inadequate responses.  For all the attempts to act on knowledge, failure to scale up reactions – by citizens, by governments - makes one wonder where the power of knowledge has gone.  Not dealing very well with relations and connections is one widely acknowledged short-coming; it is of course a shortcoming to which many anthropologists would point (speaker included), in promoting the relational insights of their interlocuters.  This makes Fredrik Barth’s 1975 monograph on the Melanesian Baktaman, then an unusual voice against the easy making of connections, now appear rather intriguing.  His own search was for places new.  Starting a twenty-first century journey there brings one to a point where the power of knowledge – when it is tied to action -  is not quite what it promises. About the lecturer, Professor Dame Marilyn StrathernProfessor Marilyn Strathern studied Social Anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge (PhD 1968). She held posts in Canberra (ANU), Port Moresby and UC Berkeley (visiting) before returning to the UK in the 1970s. In 1985 she took up the chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, followed by the William Wyse Professorship of Social Anthropology in Cambridge in 1993-2008. Professor Strathern was elected to the British Academy of Sciences in 1987 and made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2001. She was the Presidential Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, Trustee of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College and is now Honorary Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK. Strathern’s work has focused on Melanesian and British ethnography. Papua New Guinea was her principal area of fieldwork, from 1964 to most recently in 2015. Her research has explored developments in knowledge practices in the UK and Europe. She developed her work on gender relations in two main directions: feminist scholarship and new reproductive technologies (1980s-1990s), which led to her groundbreaking books “The gender of the gift” (1988) and “After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century” (1992), and legal systems and intellectual and cultural property (1970s, 1990-00s). Her subsequent work on regimes of audit and accountability, including the edited volume “Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy” (2000) has attracted broad interdisciplinary attention. The Strathern Annual Lecture was established at Cambridge University in 2011 to honor her significant achievements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we speak with Karin Lillevold, a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies, and Religion at the University of Bergen. As part of the research project Gardening the Globe, Karin traces relations between three species that are increasingly coming into contact with each another: muskoxen, wild reindeer, and humans. Karin’s interest is in how these relations are managed, as well as the aesthetics and performance of wilderness, in Dovrefjell National Park in Norway. Dovrefjell is a place of great significance for Norwegian national identity, and these days is a site of contested notions of belonging, wilderness, and the right to roam (“allemannsretten”) – a much cherished and legally inscribed norm in the country. Karin also holds a master’s degree in social anthropology from the University of Bergen where she wrote about visions of nature and national identity in Iceland. Her research interests include rewilding, imaginaries of wilderness, sense of place, tourism, national identity, cultural heritage, human-animal relations, posthumanism, and ethnographic methodologies. Karin has also studied art history, and worked with cultural heritage at various museums. Before embarking on her PhD, she worked as a research assistant at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation at UiB where she published on sustainable urban development in relation to cultural heritage. She is part of the Environmental Humanities research group at UiB. We hope you enjoy the conversation! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we speak with Martjin Oosterbaan. Martjin is professor at the department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, with a chair in the Anthropology of Religion and Security. He has done more than two decades of research in Brazil, focusing on topics such as urban and religious transformation, security and citizenship, and the role of mass media and popular culture in identity formation. He currently leads the ERC Consolidator research project: Sacralizing Security in Mega-Cities of the Global South. In the podcast, Martjin presents some of his research findings on the theopolitical constellations of contemporary rule in Rio de Jainero. He begins by describing the hybrid forms of governance in the city and how the religious landscape has changed within recent decades. We then talk about the peculiar and recently emerged phenomenon of evangelic gangs in Rio, and how religion is used as part of territorialization and legitimization of the rule and workings of these gangs. Finally, Martjin shares some comparative insights about how mega cities across the globe display similar developments of new forms of politics and rule infused with religious aspects.    We hope you enjoy the conversation! The podcast was recorded in October 2024 when Martjin was in Bergen to present at the BSAS series.   Resources -       Academic profile -       Oosterbaan, M. (2017). Transmitting the spirit: religious conversion, media, and urban violence in Brazil. Penn State University Press. -       More information on the project, Sacralizing Security in Mega-Cities of the Global South Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to season 4 of Anthropology on Air! With autumn on the way in Bergen, we kick off a new season with a resident of another North Sea city: dr. Andrew Whitehouse. Andrew is a multispecies, environmental anthropologist and a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Aberdeen with a lifelong interest in birdwatching, the main topic of our conversation today. We begin with how Andrew’s own bird-watching – mostly carried out at his local ‘patch’ of Girdle Ness, a promontory next to Aberdeen harbour – informs the kind of anthropology he practices. We also discuss the role of bird sounds in people’s perceptions of environmental changes; how watching birds can give people a strong sense of place; the legacy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962); the benefit for anthropologists of drawing on multispecies approaches, and much more. Andrew Whitehouse is co-editor of the book Landscapes Beyond Land (Berghahn Books, 2012) and the forthcoming volume More than Human Aging (Rutgers UP, 2024), and he has published extensively on various aspects of human-bird relations. Andrew’s articles have appeared in journals such as Environmental Humanities, Conservation and Society, Social Anthropology, The Swiss Journal of Musicology, and Sociological Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, the finale to season 3, we speak with Atreyee Sen, Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Our topic of discussion is a talk Atreyee gave at our department entitled, ‘No city for lovers: Urban poverty, public romance and violent moral policing of lower-class female youth in Mumbai’, which is based on her award-winning article in the interdisciplinary journal Critical Asian Studies. In it, Atreyee explores the aggressive spatial marginalisation of and violence against lower-class, young lovers in Mumbai. Over the course of her academic career in India, the UK and Denmark, Atreyee Sen has published extensively, and brought critical insights to studies of gender, childhoods, poverty, urban politics and South Asian cities. She is author of the critically acclaimed monograph, Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (Indiana University Press, 2007), which challenged feminist and development critiques of right-wing women, and reviewed representations of ‘the bad poor’ in South Asia. She is also co-editor of Global Vigilantes (Hurst, 2008) and Who’s Cashing in? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (Berghahn Books, 2020). Some of her more recent publications include ‘An Economy of Lies: Informal Income, Phone-Banking and Female Migrant Workers in Kolkata, India’ in Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies (2022), and ‘Religious Spaces, Urban Poverty, and Interfaith Relations in India’ in Current History (2022). In 2023, Dr Sen won the inaugural prize for best journal article from the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Asian Studies, for her article ‘“No city for lovers”: anti-Romeo squads, resistance, and the micro-politics of moral policing in an Indian city’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we speak with Martin Eggen Mogseth and Fartein Hauan Nilsen about their first edited volume, Limits of Life: Reflections on Life, Death, and the Body in the Age of Technoscience (Berghahn Books, 2024). The book explores how fundamental concepts such as life, birth, selfhood, religion, death, and ancestry are being reshaped in an era of rapid technological changes, from a transhumanist movement seeking to disrupt death, to digital avatars ‘replicating’ deceased loved ones and widely accessible DNA tests revealing hitherto unknown genetic relatives. We discuss the book’s genesis in a smoky pub in Denmark; different ways of understanding ‘life’ and ‘limits’; how advancements in artificial intelligence and genetic testing have led to a revival of interest in ancestry in Euroamerican contexts; sperm ‘superdonors’; why California is such fertile ground for exploring topics at the intersection of scientific imagination, technology, and the self; and more.   Martin Eggen Mogseth is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, where he works with the experiences of people involved with assisted conception in the US, primarily in California. His research begins with the moment a person learns that they are donor conceived, what might be called "reconception", and expands to consider the various actors somehow affected by and affecting the trajectories that thus ensue, be they temporal, "non-human", or relational. The project is concerned with topics such as identity, kinship, technology, and biology, and deals intimately with phenomena such as personal misrecognition in the mirror, familial secrecy, familial disruption and connection, and the shifting of fundamental sense-making elements.  Martin is also interested in the limits and possibilties of language in conveying ethnographic occurences, thus he tinkers as well with poetry and "the literary" and the idea that "language is technology".    Fartein Hauan Nilsen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has previously conducted ethnographic research in Iceland for his MA where he explored the impact of modernity and technological advancements on religious revivalism, particularly pagan revivalism, in Iceland and the broader Euro-American context. Currently, Fartein is part of the RCN-funded project "Human Futures: A study of Technoscientific Immortality" led by professor Annelin Eriksen at the University of Bergen. As part of this project, Fartein has conducted 13 months of fieldwork in California focusing on how Generative Artificial Intelligence, mainly in the form of chatbots, is being used for memorial purposes. Initially, his research centered on death, but fieldwork revealed that the current AI boom is equally about life, both in representing a new form of life and in facilitating a specific way of life. Fartein's research interests span a wide range, including the Anthropology of Technology, the Anthropology of Religion, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Digital Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, New Religious Movements, and the interplay between Science and Religion.   More about the book, released 1 June 2024, here: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MogsethLimits Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Anthropology on Air, we speak with Penny Harvey, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester in the UK. Penny is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Academia Europaea. Penny is a highly influential thinker on the topic of infrastructures. She is well known for her 2015 book about highway-building in South America, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Cornell UP), which she co-wrote with Hannah Knox. The book addresses the deceptively simple question of how roads matter to people – an interest in the social life of infrastructure projects that still broadly animates Penny’s work today. Penny’s long-term ethnographic research in Peru originally looked at Spanish/Quechua bilingualism, language, and power. It grew to include the study of civic infrastructure projects including road construction, sanitation, and waste management systems.  We talk about Penny’s current ethnographic study of nuclear decommissioning infrastructures in the UK, which includes her spending time at nuclear sites like Sellafield, which you will hear about in this conversation. She is involved in many projects relating to nuclear waste management, having co-founded the Beam network for social research on nuclear topics within the Dalton Nuclear Institute at the University of Manchester. She also serves as the Deputy Chair of the UK Government Committee on Radioactive Waste Management. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Penny Harvey - The Beam nuclear and social research network (manchester.ac.uk) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special episode, we speak with Tomas Salem, a PhD fellow in our own department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. We do a deep dive on some of the themes covered in Tomas’s first book, Policing the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro: Cosmologies of War and the Far-Right (Palgrave Macmillian, 2024), which is released this week. Based on fieldwork Tomas conducted in 2015 when he was a Master’s student here, the book explores the links between militarized policing and far-right ideologies. We talk about the social and political conditions that preceded the rise of the man who became the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, forms of everyday violence in the favelas of Rio, masculinity and hierarchy in the police force, doing ethnography with those you might disagree with, and how Tomas’s thoughts about the political and analytical value of anthropology have evolved in the years since he carried out the original research. More broadly, Tomas’ research focuses on the intersection of inequality and the environment as the two overarching and co-constituting crises of the 21st century. He approaches these crises and their effects by zooming in on emergent social, political, cosmological and economic tensions, exploring the links between non-dualist ontologies and the re-enchantment of the world in politics and science, the material and symbolic conditions for the growth of illiberal ideologies, and technological change—particularly related to technologies of governance, datafication, and AI. Tomas has carried out ethnographic research in diverse contexts, including Rio de Janeiro's Military Police Forces, and wilderness areas in the Norwegian High-Arctic and in Southern Argentina. In his PhD project he explore romantic pursuits of happiness and the good life in the outdoors and the changing meanings of nature in the Anthropocene. We hope you enjoy the conversation.   Tomas Salem’s UiB profile: https://www.uib.no/en/persons/Tomas.SalemLink to book: https://link.springer.com/book/9783031490262 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To kick off season three of Anthropology on Air, we speak with Andrea Muehlebach. Andrea is Professor of Maritime Anthropology and Cultures of Water at the University of Bremen in Germany, where she also leads the Bremen NatureCultureLab. She was visiting Bergen to deliver a talk entitled, “Do Waves Have Rights?” The Rights of Nature movement insists that “nature has a dignity, outside and in excess of its use to humans,” Andrea explains. In this conversation, we discuss Andrea’s current research into this movement, its origins in Indigenous philosophy, and what shape it is taking in different European countries today. We also discuss the difference between privatisation and financialisation of public utilities; collective actions against such moves in Italy and beyond; how to do ethnographic work with such a “slippery substance” as water; responses to water scarcity in Europe at a time of climate change; doing multi-sited ethnographies; and much more. Andrea’s most recent book, A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe (Duke University Press, 2023) is a multi-sited ethnography with activists across Europe, specifically Italy, Ireland and Germany, as they struggle to preserve water as a commons and a public good in the face of privatisation efforts. She is also the author of The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy (Chicago University Press, 2012), which explored neoliberal welfare “reforms” and the moral authoritarianisms (and struggles, tensions, contradictions) that often accompany them. In addition to her two books, Andrea is the author of a great many articles on a variety of other subjects including poverty and race in Italy, economic despair, and the concept of citizenship. We hope you enjoy the conversation. https://www.andreamuehlebach.com/ http://naturenkulturen.de/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 Tanya Luhrmann is Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology, and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has conducted ethnographic work among groups such as evangelic Christians, American Santerians, Zoroastrians in India, magicians in England, and people hearing voices across cultural contexts. Apart from being the author of lots of academic articles and opinion pieces in the New York Times, her award-winning books include ‘Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft’, ‘Of Two Minds’, ‘When God talks Back’, and ‘How God Becomes Real’.   In this podcast we talk with Tanya about how people make God and Spirits real through various forms of practice and ideas. Tanya shares stories of world- and self-transformation from her fieldwork among magicians in England and evangelic Christians in the United States and unfolds some of the factors influencing such changes. We talk about the world-building effects of prayer, and how faith changes the person of faith. Finally, Tanya describes how cultural theories of mind also have an impact on the manifestation of anomalous, sensory experiences across contexts.   The podcast was recorded in early December 2023, when Tanya was in Bergen to be a panellist of the annual Holberg Debate.   Resources: Academic Profile: https://anthropology.stanford.edu/people/tanya-marie-luhrmann Personal website: https://www.tanyaluhrmann.com -       When God talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012) -       Of Two Minds: An anthropologist looks at American Psychiatry (2001) -       Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989) -       How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (2020) -       Special issue: ‘Mind and Spirit: a Comparative Theory’ (2020) -       Article mentioned: ‘Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths’ (2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices