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Full Description
Why do humans live with gods, spirits, and ancestors? Metapersons reveals how transcendence is not an exception, but a fundamental feature of life.
Metapersons begins from a simple yet striking observation: across the world, people live in the company of divinities, ancestors, spirits, sacred mountains, or enlivened statues. They pray with intensity, sense the presence of ghosts, and experience forms of coexistence with beings beyond the human. Drawing on fieldwork in Portugal, China, Mozambique, and Brazil, João Pina-Cabral shows how humans continually move beyond their embodied condition through lived relations with such entities.
Revisiting classic anthropological debates—from Durkheim and Mauss on prayer and the sacred to later critiques of religion—this book argues that a "new anthropological synthesis" has emerged in recent decades: one that understands transcendence as a fundamental feature of life itself. In this light, familiar categories such as "superstition" require reconsideration in new terms. Pina-Cabral develops a scalar model of life's plurality, seeing personhood as the dynamic source of transcendence.
Engaging with contemporary debates across the life sciences, social sciences, and philosophy, Metapersons offers a groundbreaking, person-centered perspective on transcendence, animism, and spirituality. It challenges disciplinary boundaries while providing an innovative framework for rethinking prayer, religion, and the very conditions of human coexistence with the more-than-human world.
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Part One: Leaps of Faith
Chapter 2. Pagan Survivals
Chapter 3. On the Resilience of Superstition
Chapter 4. Prayer Revisited
Part Two: Ethnographic Encounters
Chapter 5. Metapersons in Macau
Chapter 6. Pacts with the Devil(s)
Chapter 7. Things and Objects
Chapter 8. My Father is Calling You
Part Three: Anthropological Returns
Chapter 9. Transcendent Persons
Chapter 10. Turning to Life
Chapter 11. Gods Exist
Chapter 12. Polydivinism
Epilogue
References
Index
