Summary The article briefly introduces a path, that starts from the Franz Boas’ anthropological field research in British Columbia about sound, dance and motion among the Indians until the 1930s to the practice of dance and sound as a therapeutic issue in Franziska Boas’ work in New York.

Summary During his prolific career, the German Jewish scientist Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 - New York, 1942) recognized as the founding father of American Cultural Anthropology – maintained assiduous contacts with the European scientific community, in a privileged way with that of the German area. The contribution addresses the Boasian correspondence with the two directors of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, and the ethnomusicolo-gist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. All three were united by a common scientific experimental (...) training and a solid musical education, typical of their Bildungsbu ü rgertum. With them, Boas consistently shared his fieldwork findings regarding music, sound, and language among the Indians of British Columbia: indeed, their epistolary exchanges intertwine epistemological reflections centered on the study of «exotische Musik» in context with technical problems, derived from the use of phonographic recordings and the relative shipments of wax cylinders by Boas to the Phonographic Archive. So far, the critical literature has not paid particular attention to their correspondence, that offer instead a privileged look in observing the birth of Ethnomusicology, at the time still defined as comparative Musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). Starting from a biographical contextualization and following the micro-history of the scientific and personal relationship of these scientists, the contribution aims to explore the hypothesis that the emerging Ethnomusicology significantly contributed to the definition of Cultural Anthropology as a discipline. In his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian sounds and languages, Boas observed indeed what happens if a mind is exposed to a new sound, musical or linguistic context; he had therefore to rigorously deal with the phenomena of mishearing, sound-blindness and biasing filter related to the perception of «new sounds». Thanks to his fieldwork, Boas would endorse a relativistic and “in context” approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about a broaden antiracist theory of human mental functions. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, new therapeutic practices, involving the interaction between humans and dolphins - Tursiops truncatus in particular, have developed. Such practices are known as dolphin-assisted therapies (DAT), a specific case of a more heterogeneous set of experiences with dolphins called dolphin-assisted activities (DAA): these include programmes of dolphin watching and swimming in high seas, as well as shows in dolphinariums and marine parks. DAT has grown rapidly as a highly attractive form of therapy, due to the well-liked animals used (...) in an aquatic, and often exotic, environment. This kind of co-therapy seems to testify the enchantement that dolphins - in myths and chronicles often reported in rescue at sea, perceived as especially charismatic - exert on people; the human attempt of bonding with them, possibly in response to the need of building a human-animal bodily intersubjectivity. (shrink)