ABSTRACT
As life forces go, mana does not animate anthropological debate like it used to. After Lévi-Strauss performed his disappearing-act on the concept, comparing the semantic ‘emptiness’ of the Polynesian term ‘mana’ to that of the French term for ‘thing’ (and more of this below), few anthropologists have ventured to draw theoretical mileage from it.1 Of course, if part of the original attraction of mana-terms to anthropologists was their peculiarly double universality – their semantic breadth (‘mana is everywhere’, said the native) coupled with their geographical diffusion (‘mana-terms are everywhere’, replied the anthropologist) – it is hardly surprising that these concepts should still feature in diverse ethnographic accounts of indigenous cosmologies (e.g. Empson’s and Henare’s contributions to this volume).2
Mana is ethnographically unavoidable. That this should be embarrassing, as it seems, to theoretical sensibilities today is also unsurprising. Lévi-Strauss’ majestic marriage of universal theory with meticulously documented ethnographic variability has ended with a divorce of sorts. The mantle of universalism has been taken up by cognitive theorists, whose interest in ethnography is limited mainly to illustration, so that mana features theoretically only sub specie, as an example of wider psychological processes (e.g. Boyer 1986, cf. Severi 2004). On the other hand, the anthropological commitment to ethnography has increasingly been interpreted as a credo for working relativism, so that anthropological theory has tended to disappear down the hatch of ethnographic particularism. So ‘mana’ and all the other indigenous terms that early ethnographers glossed as ‘life force’, ‘sacred power’ and so forth (‘orenda’, ‘wakan’, ‘brahman’, etc.), now appear as just bit players in varied stories about how people in different places see and do things differently. And if theory, on this account, is to be sought not in the analyst’s unavoidably essentialist supra-cultural imagination, but at most in concrete and historically contingent infra-cultural diffusions (such as modernity, globalisation, or empire), then one can see why the spot for mana should be left blind. Impressive though it may have been to earlier generations of anthropologists, still then interested in conceptual rather than political
