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My mother or father: person, metaperson, and transcendence in ethnographic theory
Author(s) -
PinaCabral João
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.13027
Subject(s) - transcendence (philosophy) , personhood , ethnography , relation (database) , order (exchange) , sociology , epistemology , product (mathematics) , anthropology , philosophy , mathematics , finance , database , computer science , economics , geometry
How do humans, who are materially composed biological constructs, come to transcend – that is, to see themselves as present in – the world? This article sustains that, in order to understand transcendence in personhood, we have to see the latter as a product of dividual not individual participation, as initially proposed by Lévy‐Bruhl and recently developed by a number of phenomenologically inspired cognitive scientists. This being the case, it becomes necessary to account for the relation between essence and existence in the case of metapersons (ghosts, deities, ancestors, some animals, etc.). In this essay, I suggest that this, too, must be explained by reference to the ontogeny of persons‐who‐wakingly‐live‐in‐the‐world. In order to explore this issue, I discuss an occurrence that took place in my presence without my noticing it at the time when I was visiting an Afro‐Brazilian temple compound in coastal Bahia (Northeast Brazil) in July 2011.