Name: Metapersons. Transcendence and Life
SKU: 64928544
Price: 56.98 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Joao Pina-Cabral
ISBN: 9781914363382

portada Metapersons. Transcendence and Life

Type

Physical Book

Publisher

HAU

Author

Joao Pina-Cabral

Year

2026

Pages

350

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9x15.2 cm

ISBN13

9781914363382

Metapersons. Transcendence and Life

Joao Pina-Cabral (Author) · HAU · Paperback

New Book Imported to Austria

Delivery: 11 Nov - 13 Nov

56,98 €

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56,98 €

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Synopsis "Metapersons. Transcendence and Life"

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.