The “dolphin Experience”: Technologies of Enchantment Promoting Self-Transformation

This presentation will be grounded on fieldwork that has been conducted with people that experienced an uncanny encounter with dolphins. In their reports, these persons talk about an “interspecies connection”, “telepathic communication” and about experiencing “pure love” coming from the dolphin. This very intense and nearly mystical experience often changes how they perceive themselves and sometimes it changes the course of their life. How can such an event happen? What are the properties of the situation, of the human mind, of the dolphins and the human-dolphin communication that makes this possible? As an anthropologist, I’d be inclined to describe the real life situation in its complexity. In this case, I shall suggest that the appearance and the behavior of a friendly dolphin that comes to you and looks at you right into the eyes affords for deep, intense and positive emotional responses (“pure love”). These emotions are so overwhelming and so uncommon that they cannot be easily processed by the human mind: the person is not able to explain herself what is happening (the anthropologist of art Alfred Gell called this “cognitive opacity”). At this point a change occurs in her “activity range” (Billeter): she becomes both fully aware of her own sensations and aware of previously unnoticed aspects of the dolphin’s behavior, which assemble themselves in new meanings, and create a feeling of mutual understanding. The talk will present and discuss the main elements of the enchanting experience and its potential for individual change, as we currently understand it.