Gods and Dolphins: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Enchanting Encounters

Positive psychologists often see their work as fostering an emotional learning process that will prompt people to live a better, happier life. Positive psychology is supposed to feel gratifying, motivating, and inspiring. This paper will investigate two ethnographic situations where similar processes of gratification and transformation are in evidence, but without the presence of a formal psychological intervention. By comparing religious possession in an Afro-Brazilian cult and encounters with dolphins at sea, we suggest that both phenomena are “revelation-like” encounters built through the same kind of “enchanting device” (dispositifs d’enchantement). Drawing on first hand ethnographic accounts, we compare both settings in an attempt to identify common features in people’s experience, but also in how such experience is organized through imaginative and bodily commitment in “enchanting devices”. By “enchanting device”, we mean social and material environments that support spiritual encounters with real or imagined intentional entities. A deep involvement, a very focused attention (absorption), uncanny perceptions and emotions and trance-like states are found in each case. Phantasmagorical and/or religious imagination would play a central role in connecting such uncanny body states and perceptions with a set of cultural expectations and beliefs. In order to sustain this theoretical framework, our analysis will focus on a pragmatic analysis of the environmental features leading to an experience of enchantment. Our account of enchantment aims to broaden our understanding of psychologies of the positive and promises to enrich our understanding of well-being in relation to (deemed) religious and/or spiritual practices and experiences.