Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

With disappointing results many of my Danish interviewees attempt to understand their strange experiences through rationality and logic, furthermore the Danish land- and cityscape is highly domesticated and spatially out of sync with such sensations which might add to the difficulties.

Paper long abstract

In my fieldwork concerning unexplainable experiences in today’s Denmark, my interviewees are troubled by the lack of plausible explanations. Expecting all occurrences to have natural causes makes it difficult to navigate in contexts beyond the realm of science; as ghosts, spirits, elves, revenants and goblins are not part of modern cosmologies, dilemmas arise concerning their ordinary explanatory practices and the possible disbelief in personal sensations. The incidents are isolated, unexpected, momentary, and seemingly devoid of meaning. Resembling glitches, they seem to occur without pattern and out of sync with time and space.

The incidents have no favourite sceneries, no gothic or romantic taste. They happen everywhere and links between site and occurrence are seldom seen. However, the controlled, domesticated landscapes and the structured cities in nowadays Denmark create a scenery that so to speak denies unexplainability; the surroundings represent rationality, whereas the experiences are of another kind of uncommon sense.

The experiences leave the interviewees in an isolated state, afraid to be ridiculed, they have difficulties telling their stories to others and of imagining what is happening. This challenges moral norms of explanatory logics and gives rise to dilemmas concerning how to act, when experiencing something out of the ordinary. These dilemmas, spatial sceneries, tabooed situations and missing imaginaries are investigated through the concepts other-than-human and other-than-natural. What happens, when other-than-natural experiences are suspected to be also other-than-human, and thereby also other-than-rational and other-than-understandable?