A01=Joao Pina-Cabral
animism
Author_Joao Pina-Cabral
Category=JBSR
Category=JHB
Category=JHM
Category=JHMC
Category=NK
Category=QRYM2
Category=VXPH
Devil
eq_bestseller
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eq_mind-body-spirit
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic theory
life
metapersons
objectification
paganism
personhood
prayer
primitivism
transcendence
Product details
- ISBN 9781914363382
- Weight: 540g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 Apr 2026
- Publisher: HAU
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
João Pina-Cabral is research professor emeritus at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon in Portugal and emeritus professor of social anthropology at the University of Kent in the UK.
