Metapersons

Transcendence and Life

By João Pina-Cabral

Metapersons is the fruit of the observation that, just about everywhere, one meets with people for whom divinities matter; who pray with unmistakable intensity to ancestors, trees, mountains, or statues; who experience the presence of ghosts; who actually live in the company of such entities. Based on his own fieldwork in Portugal, China, and Brazil, Pina-Cabral demonstrates here that humans prove to be capable of moving beyond their presently embodied condition.

Revisiting the old anthropological debates about prayer and the sacred, the book argues that, over the past decades, a “new anthropological synthesis” has emerged concerning the relation between humanity and its surroundings: a synthesis which points to transcendence as being a feature of life. As such, old categories, such as “superstition,” are calling to be revived, albeit in utterly new terms. Pina-Cabral proposes a scalar model that sees life as emerging at different levels in its all-embracing plurality, and personhood as the dynamic source of all transcendence.