[1] Luhrmann received her A.B., summa cum laude, in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1981, working with Stanley Tambiah.
In this book, she described the ways in which magic and other esoteric techniques both serve emotional needs and come to seem reasonable through the experience of practice.
Luhrmann's book The Good Parsi (1996) explored the contradictions inherent in the social psychology of a post-colonial elite.
[6] Her other projects include a NIMH-funded study of how chronical or periodic homelessness contributes to the experience and morbidity of schizophrenia.
From 2000 to 2007, she was Max Palevsky Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, where she was also a director of the program in clinical ethnography.