Bringing Manawithintheory

Chapter 3 Bringing Mana Within Theory

It is hard to bring the Melanesians within any theory. Lang1898,214 ∵

Andrew Lang was wrong. If the Melanesians, synecdochically represented by their mana, did prove difficult, it was not because they did not fit into any theory but rather because they did not fit into the dominant theory of religion of Lang’s days, namely Edward Burnett Tylor’s animism. But that very intractabil- ity made them a welcome addition to any and all theories of religion seeking to challenge the hegemony of Tylor’s paradigm. Indeed, in the thirty years that followed the introduction of mana by Max Müller into the recently formed study of religion, it was mobilized in support of competing diffusionist and evolutionist, psychological and sociological theories, not to mention Lang’s own High Gods hypothesis. How mana came to play such a protean role in theorizing religion and eventually achieved the status of “category of world- wide application” (Marett 1916, 375) will be the object of this chapter. But to tell this story we must first return to Müller and his Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (1878). Before introducing mana in the second lecture, Müller had begun by ac- knowledging the various challenges raised against his theory of religion. Ac- cordingly, he construed the Hibbert Lectures not only as an exposition of his theory but also as a reply to his detractors. In the opening lecture, Müller de- fended his postulation of a human faculty for faith, different from sense and reason, which enabled the perception of the Infinite, against philosophical (Müller 1878, 23–25, 44) and positivist critiques (26–27; see Stocking 1996, 53). At the end of the first Lecture, Müller announced that he would turn to Indian religion in order to document his theory but, defying expectations, his second lecture consists in the short discussion of mana analyzed in the previous chapter followed by a lengthy discussion of fetishism.1

1 “I shall confine myself to one race only, the ancient Aryans of India … The growth of their religion is very different from the growth of other religions; but though each religion has its

Max Müller and Edward Tylor: Paradigms Clash

For Müller, fetishism represented a rival theory on the origin and development of religion. He thus takes to task its founder, the President Charles de Brosses (1709–1777) and his book Du culte des dieux fétiches; ou, Parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (1760). In that text, de Brosses makes two critical claims. First, he postulates that contemporary “fetishism,” by which he means the religion of Western Africans,2 is closely comparable to the archaic religions of the ancient world and so rep- resents the very beginnings of religion. Second, de Brosses argues that religions develop through a fixed schema: from fetishism, on to polytheism, and finally monotheism. To counter these theses, Müller criticized the tools (the categories and the method) used by de Brosses. On the one hand, Müller de- nounces the equation of ancient religions with the religion of contemporary “savages,” and so their comparability: “the savage of to-day … is probably not a day younger than we ourselves” (Müller 1878, 68). For Müller, in no way do “savages” represent an anterior state of humanity. “Savages” are not “primi- tives,” they have a history just as long as that of Europeans, and if their religion may appear primitive, it is most likely due to degeneration of the purity of primitive perceptions of the Infinite (68–69).3 On the other hand, Müller at- tacks the use made by the science of religion of ethnographic data, data the philologist rejected on the grounds of their orality and deficiency. Müller, in attacking a theory more than a century old, seems to be flog- ging a dead horse, but the fact that he was willing to spend seventy-four pages on “fetishism” suggests that it represented a real and actual threat. While de Brosses’s “fetishism” was indeed a dead horse, the method he had used to re- construct the original state of religion and its ulterior development was in fact very much alive in 1878. In this Lecture, Müller was in fact attacking a cen- tral tenet of the newly created discipline of anthropology: the comparative method championed by such scholars as John McLennan (1865, 8–9), John

own peculiar growth, the seed from which they spring is everywhere the same” (Müller 1878, 51). Note also the Lectures’ subtitle: As Illustrated by the Religions of India. 2 De Brosses glossed fetishism as the “worship to animals, or to inanimate things which are changed into gods” (Müller 1878, 61). Note the use of the term “gods” which suggests person- ality. 3 Müller himself adhered to the degenerationist paradigm, whose origin can be traced to the presentation of religious change in the biblical book of Genesis. This view, which could be applied to human physical diversity as well, admits an original state of purity and perfection from which mankind (or portions thereof) falls.