{"id":2400,"date":"2017-10-12T16:29:39","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T16:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/?p=2400"},"modified":"2017-10-12T16:29:39","modified_gmt":"2017-10-12T16:29:39","slug":"professor-joao-pina-cabral-gives-seminar-on-metapersonhood-and-transcendence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2017\/10\/12\/professor-joao-pina-cabral-gives-seminar-on-metapersonhood-and-transcendence\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Jo\u00e3o Pina-Cabral gives seminar on metapersonhood and transcendence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The second lecture in this term\u2019s social anthropology seminar series, the theme of which is ethics in the contemporary world, was delivered by\u00a0the school&#8217;s own Professor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/sac\/staff-profiles\/profiles\/social-anthropology\/academic-staff\/pina-cabral_joao.html\" target=\"_blank\">Jo\u00e3o Pina-Cabral<\/a> on 3 October 2017.<\/p>\n<p>Touching on\u00a0his recent (2016) book World: An Anthropological Examination, as well as drawing on a wide array of influences, including L\u00e9vi-Bruhl and contemporary work on \u2018radical embodied cognition\u2019 in cognitive\u00a0science and philosophy, de\u00a0Pina-Cabral provided a formidable analysis of a topic central to many enquiries into ethics: personhood. An overarching message of the presentation was that, in order to\u00a0understand better the ways that people make ethical decisions and moral judgements, it is necessary to account for how humans develop, learn and cultivate ethical sensibilities through constant\u00a0participation in the environing world.<\/p>\n<p>But de Pina Cabral also reminded us of the rich tapestry of cultural understandings of personhood documented in the ethnographic record. Using a snippet of ethnographic film from his own fieldwork at an Afro-Brazlilian temple compound in the coastal mangroves of Bahia (North-East Brazil), de Pina-Cabral elaborated upon Marshall Sahlins\u2019\u00a0concept of \u2018meta-persons\u2019, which refers to how non-human entities and beings are often attributed the status of personhood.<\/p>\n<p>The notion that a non-human can be \u2018a person\u2019 raises important questions\u00a0for the anthropology of ethics: in our notions of ethics and morality, how do we adequately account for instances when cultural traditions perceive non-human entities and beings as having the\u00a0capacities for intentional action and moral judgement? To what extent does the ethnographic record problematise the common position that ethics is a distinctively human capacity? If ethics is not\u00a0limited to humans, what makes an ethical subject?<\/p>\n<p><em>(Report by Tom Bell)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The second lecture in this term\u2019s social anthropology seminar series, the theme of which is ethics in the contemporary world, was delivered by\u00a0the school&#8217;s own &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2017\/10\/12\/professor-joao-pina-cabral-gives-seminar-on-metapersonhood-and-transcendence\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40284,"featured_media":2401,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6598,124,6600],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2402,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions\/2402"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}