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.
“Born from decades of ethnographic engagement and theorizing, this is a signature contribution to current efforts to rethink the philosophical foundations of our discipline. Its argument is that personhood is neither innate nor bestowed but the result of a capacity for transcendence that humans acquire from infancy as they are linguistically scaffolded and keyed into the affordances and constraints of social worlds. What is more, this species-specific capacity is the bedrock for the ubiquitous presence of metapersons in our midst—whether they be deities, chatbots, ancestors, or avatars. This book is full of fresh and striking insights for advancing what Pina-Cabral correctly sees as the need for a new anthropological synthesis.”
— Stephan Palmié, author of, most recently, Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa
“A life in anthropology underpins this remarkable collection of essays by João Pina-Cabral. At once informative, highly readable, and provocative, its challenging perspective on contemporary anthropology confronts and throws into question the reader’s analytical assumptions. Particularly valuable is the discussion throughout of issues of personhood and transcendence that are bound to emerge from anthropological fieldwork and indeed in everyday life. It follows that the central value of these essays is their insistence on the unique and continuing contribution that ethnography makes to our knowledge of humankind. We are able to appreciate how the analyst’s theoretical perspective changes and develops over time to arrive at the overarching idea of metapersons that gives the collection its title. Likewise, and this is crucial for the student of anthropology, Pina-Cabral shows how fundamental are the historical underpinnings of our discipline and how profound their continuing significance.”
— Christina Toren, author of Mind, Materiality, and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography
João Pina-Cabral is Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences. He is the author of many works of ethnography and ethnographic theory, including World: An Anthropological Examination.