Extracted, reshaped to fit a foreign framework, and returned in a form its own speakers do not recognise.
Mana
Efficacy that shows itself in results - a Māori and wider Pacific concept badly served by its English career as a magical force.
- Theme
- Cosmos, the sacred and ultimate reality
- Tradition
- Pacific
- Term
- mana
In plain terms
Mana is usually explained in English as a supernatural power that things and people possess. Pacific scholars have spent decades arguing that this is close to backwards.
On their account mana is not a substance anyone holds. It is efficacy shown in what happens: a leader whose decisions work, a fishing ground that yields, a speaker whose words carry, a project that comes off. It is evidenced rather than stored, and it can be increased, damaged or lost through conduct and relationship.
Which makes it closer to standing or authority-in-effect than to a force. It is also inseparable from genealogy and from the group - mana attaches to people through their connections and their ancestors, not to individuals as isolated holders.
And it is not the same concept in every Pacific society, which is the first thing to say about it.
As a philosopher would put it
R. H. Codrington's 1891 description of mana as a supernatural power or influence, transmitted through the missionary literature, became the basis for an entire comparative category: Marett built a theory of pre-animistic religion on it, and Durkheim and Mauss used it as evidence for an impersonal sacred force underlying religion generally.
Pacific scholars have systematically dismantled that reading. Shore, Keesing and later Māori and Pacific writers argue that mana in its own languages is predominantly a stative or verbal notion - things are mana or have mana in the sense of being effective - rather than a noun naming a substance, and that the substantive reading is an artefact of translation into a European metaphysics.
In Māori thought mana is bound to whakapapa, genealogy, and interacts with tapu and utu; the categories mana whenua, mana moana and mana tangata are legal and political terms in contemporary New Zealand, appearing in legislation and in Waitangi Tribunal findings.
Where you meet it
The word has had a second life entirely disconnected from the Pacific.
From Codrington's account it entered comparative religion as the standard example of an impersonal sacred force. Larry Niven's 1969 story Not Long Before the End borrowed it as a depletable resource for magic; Dungeons and Dragons and then a very large number of video games adopted it as the blue bar that empties when a spell is cast.
So a Māori and wider Pacific concept concerning efficacy, authority and genealogical standing now denotes, for hundreds of millions of people, a quantity of stored magical fuel.
The route from one to the other runs through a nineteenth-century missionary's description, a comparative theory built on it, and a science-fiction writer reading the anthropology. Every step is documented. It is the clearest available case of a concept being extracted from a living tradition, reshaped to fit a foreign framework, and returned to global circulation in a form its own speakers do not recognise.
What is actually disputed
Whether the anthropological category ever named anything.
The revisionist argument is that mana as an impersonal force is a scholarly construction: the Oceanic languages use the term in ways that do not support a substance reading, and the theories built on it - Marett's pre-animism, and the use Durkheim and Mauss made of it - rest on a translation error compounded across a century.
The more cautious position is that the correction is right about the grammar and that something was nonetheless being described, since the term does mark efficacy understood as more than ordinary competence.
Underlying both is a question this entry cannot escape. Mana is used differently across Aotearoa, Hawaiʻi, Tonga, Samoa and Melanesia, and a single English account is a convenience of the coloniser's language - which is exactly the condition that produced the original error.
Commonly confused with
- magical energy The video game sense is a twentieth-century invention with no basis in the Pacific concept.
- a supernatural force The substance reading is the nineteenth-century translation Pacific scholars have spent decades correcting.
- one Pacific concept It is used differently across many distinct societies, and treating it as a single thing is the error that produced the original distortion.
Defined against
- Alterity Mana is the standing example of a difference that was absorbed into a foreign framework rather than met on its own terms
Philosophers
- Achille Mbembe The colonial production of knowledge about colonised peoples
Works
- African Religions and Philosophy Relational personhood in another tradition, and the same translation problem
- Bantu Philosophy The text that shows how a worldview gets constructed for a people
- African Philosophy: Myth and Reality The critique of exactly that construction
- Discourse on Colonialism The colonial framing of other peoples' categories
- Sage Philosophy The insistence on named thinkers against collective worldview
Schools
- Ethnophilosophy Where the risks of representing a tradition are sharpest
- Philosophic Sagacity The alternative insisting on individual thinkers
- Modernity-Coloniality School Where the extraction of concepts is analysed
- Ubuntu Philosophy Where a comparable relational concept is defended philosophically
Related concepts
Tapu · The sacred c. 400 · De c. 500 BC · Power 1532 · Relationality c. 150
Mana is used across many distinct Pacific societies with substantial differences between them; the nineteenth-century missionary and anthropological description of it as an impersonal supernatural force is widely regarded by Pacific scholars as a mistranslation, and this entry follows their correction.