My mother or father: person, metaperson, and transcendence in ethnographic theory

Abstract

How do humans, who are materially composed biological constructs, come to transcend, that is, to see themselves as present in the world? This paper 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. Personal ontogeny is what explains the relation between essence and existence in the case of metapersons (ghosts, deities, ancestors, some animals, etc.). In order to explore this problem, I discuss a minor 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 (NE Brazil) in July 2011