Page |111 invisible and immaterial, as God is =:people~ Jy. within the Christian tradition? This is not a @ “ g 1 SoBe lee = an the question of whether God is real, but SAA Bil can | wan rather how people learn to make the “Ze nmty te telationshipsm really“ OD Ese Way E omar A ‘ om See h 5 NEY Pett cr @ judgment that God is present. Such a EXperlenCe racers 2 God is not accessible to the senses. “ geJust When you talk to that God, you can “ neither see his face nor hear his voice. Chapter 12” You cannot touch him. How can you be nfident that he is there? How Does God Become Real confident that he 1s there ew daca (let beseme 22a] te Anthropology cannot answer the le when God is und anes question of whether God is real. But the people when God is understood to be 7 er traditional method of the discipline, — participant observation, can use the * The lead author is Tanya Luhrmann, Ph.D., a slow, careful method of fieldwork to professor in the Stanford Anthropology explore the way that people learn to ; ; p x peop Department. Her interests include the social . . 4: hani experience God as present in their lives. shaping of psychological experience, and the And what th hod hus is th way that social practice may affect even the most i Ww. at t € metho can teach us 1s that concrete ways in which people experience their this often intensely private and personal world, particularly in the domain of what some relationship between a creature and its would call the “irrational”. Her first project was creator is built through a profoundly a detailed study of the way apparently reasonable . ; social process. people come to believe apparently unreasonable beliefs (“Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft’, In fact, one of anthropology’s Harvard, 1989). Her second project explored the ar ae Fes most useful contributions to apparently irrational self-criticism of a derstanding th : £ God j postcolonial India elite, the result of colonial Qaeecstan img e CxpeLienge Ot 9G tS identification w