Enchanting gods and dolphins. A cross cultural analysis of uncanny encounters

Drawing on first–hand accounts of possession experiences in an Afro–Brazilian
cult and Dolphin encounters at sea, we compare the two settings in order to
identify the common features in people’s experiences, but also in the
technologies of enchantment that make them possible. By “technology of
enchantment”, we mean a space of practice, neither totally material, nor totally
subjective, that supports “revelation”–like encounters with real or imagined
intentional entities. Our analysis suggests that both types of experiences share at
least five common traits: the presence of a prolific imagination marked by
ontological and epistemological uncertainty; uncanny feelings; attentional focus
on inner bodily and mental states; trance–like states; and an intentional shift
from active to passive. The immersion of the individual in a sensorily organized
environment (sensescape), made of distributed perceptual saliences, is found to
play a central role in the merging of unusual body states with the imagination,
which in turn enables the production of “new” embodied meanings belonging to
enchantment.