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Chapter 4 The of Mana

While spirit is rapidly giving way before the disillusioned gaze of the sophisticated mind, mana will live as long as the conceptual power of man reacts to the religious thrill. Goldenweiser1915,636 ∵

By 1905, mana had acceded to the status of a general theoretical category and for much of a quarter of a century it was to provide a major instrument for the study of the nature and origin of , so much so that a paradigm, dy- namism, was built around it. But mana—which proved highly fashionable— soon outgrew the scholarly aims of those who had universalized it. In less than a decade, mana was to appear in works of sociology, psychology, history, and even . In so doing, mana underwent another major conceptual shift. Initially constructed to deal with “primitive” or prehistoric religion, it was increasingly used to discuss “civilized” . This shift had important consequences for the outlook on religion as mana had been constructed to challenge a theory that happened to be thoroughly atheistic. As we shall see in this chapter, mana came to provide scholars a means to not only analyze reli- gion as something other than a misguided error but also as a socially effective and deeply meaningful part of Western culture. But this came with a price— namely an ever greater disparity between second-order mana and what an increasing number of professional ethnographers were finding in the Oceanic field. A price that eventually proved to be unbearable. By the 1940s, voices be- gan to call for the end of mana understood as a universal category. It is to this tenure of more than thirty years that this chapter is devoted.

Marett’s Paradigm

While Hubert, Mauss, and Lang moved on to other topics, Marett—presum- ably heartened by the spectacular success of his pre-animistic theory— published further theoretical texts clarifying the meaning of his new scholarly

© KoninklijkeBrillNV,Leiden,2017 | DOI10.1163/9789004349247_005 72 Chapter 4 category and the issues it was meant to address. In his 1908 essay “The Con- ception of Mana” (Marett 1909, 115–41), Marett provided a first formalization of mana as a second-order category. Situating the category within a recognizably Tylorian epistemological framework—he mobilized both the “comparative method” and the psychic unity of mankind to justify its world-wide applica- bility (115)—Marett then defined it as or more generally extraor- dinary power, rejecting as ethnocentric any instances where mana was used in a “secular sense,” i.e. where it was not mystified (see Chapter 2). Marett’s aim being to define religion through the opposition between natural and su- pernatural, one would look in vain for a definition of power itself; at most he resorted to the physicists’ idioms of “energy” and “voltage,” existing outside of man but susceptible of being harnessed by him (128, 138). Marett further de- clared mana free from any moral dimension in an explicit bid to attack the “antithesis between and religion” (131), with the consequence of further moving away from the political considerations inherent in all accusations of magic. But perhaps the most pregnant idea in “The Conception of Mana” lay in its concluding sentence: “all religions, low and high, rudimentary and ad- vanced, can join in saying with the Psalmist that ‘power belongeth unto ”’ (141). Explicitly meant to show the adequacy of mana as the minimum defini- tion of religion, the essay implicitly introduced the idea that mana could be useful in accounting for contemporary (see Kippenberg 1999, 245). While Marett never followed through on this idea, others, as will be readily apparent, would seize upon it. With his theoretical texts, Marett had done much to set the agenda for the scholarly use of mana, which was congealing as the “dynamist” paradigm.1 The name dynamism, however, is somewhat misleading, for if mana was power it was but barely so. Grounded as it was in individual experiences of the ex- traordinary, Marett’s mana, unlike Codrington’s, was properly supernatural, i.e. religious, which by his definition excluded natural power, that is social and po- litical power (Styers 2012). As such, it is hardly surprising that much of the discussion on mana in the years after 1905 remained centered on the adjec- tives rather than the noun.

1 On dynamism, often used interchangeably with pre-, see, for example, Pinard de la Boullaye (1922, 367–70), Alles (1987), Kippenberg (1999, 237–57). Marett wrote a general synthesis on mana for the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Marett 1916). In addition to reviewing the usual ethnographic documents, Marett spelt out the theoretical issues his second-order category was designed to solve. First, to show the fundamental unity of ; second, to provide their common definition; third, to account for the transmis- sibility of magico-religious quality (effectively accounting for sympathetic influence); finally mana offered a unifying theory of efficacy (Marett 1916, 379).