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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Metapersons: Transcendence and Life

Metapersons: Transcendence and Life

Pina-Cabral, João

Paperback

OccultAnthropologyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1914363388
ISBN13: 9781914363382
Publisher: Hau
Published: Apr 27 2026
Pages: 350
Weight: 1.30
Height: 0.81 Width: 5.91 Depth: 8.91
Language: English
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.

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