MANA

MANA . A generic Polynesian term for self-effecting or self-transcending efficacy ("power") that is at once personal and impersonal, sacred and secular, contained and containing. In scholarly usage the term exemplifies a vogue, commonplace in the "evolutionist" and "diffusionist" phases of anthropological speculation, for appropriating exotic terminologies and making universalist claims upon them. Mana belongs to a small set of anthropological "markers" for concepts that are very difficult to put into words. Some of the others include the Siouan wakan, Iroquois orenda, Aztec nagual, and Arabic baraka.

If it takes a certain amount of power even to comprehend what power itself might be, then terms of this sort provide an explicit ethnographic contextualization for a sense of power or empowerment that is wellnigh universal. Mana is not merely "power," in the sense of an efficient causality ("energy," "skill," "artisanship") necessary to effect the felicituous outcome of some human task or intention, but rather an exponential (power times power) or second-order derivative of the potency at issue. Electricity, one might say, has mana, but the invention of electricity is mana. So the Maori of New Zealand, who often use electricity or electrical current as an explanatory analogy for mana (for example, one may generate it, apply it, use it, or lose it) would have to face the charge that although electrical energy may be bought or sold (or at least rented) mana itself is nonnegotiable. One cannot buy it or sell it, or take currency for its use, and its only direct analogue in the realm of purchase and exchange would be those priceless "heirloom" valuables that are never circulated.

Hence, although one may specify kinds of mana according to the requirements of certain tasks, such as the mana of woodcarving, of curing, or of deep-sea navigation, mana itself is not specific or specifiable in that way. It is not overspecific but underspecific, like the role of the denominator in a fraction, determining a quotient. John Keats might well have had Shakespeare's mana in mind when he spoke of the Bard's talent as negative capability, "that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

The mana of an American president would have less to do with the job description, the vote count in the election, or the fact of being an elected representative of the people than with personal qualities over and above the demands of the office. So the determination and rhetorical skill of an Abraham Lincoln, the feckless bravado of a Theodore Roosevelt, or the social standing and charisma of a John F. Kennedy would be particular to the mana of those individuals. A woman president might add "gender" to that list, provided she were the first to be elected. The presidency, in no uncertain terms, has mana, but the personality of the president, as a unique reinvention of the office, is mana.

Remarkably, then, a truly omnipotent deity, unless it could transcend itself like the Norse Odin, might have all the power in the universe but no mana. Hence the need for the mediating figure, the prophet, savior, demiurge, the president who is answerable to God but not divine, to serve as a common denominator of divine immanence, dividing it into measurable components of efficacy. Conversely, possessors of heroic mana, like Hercules and Perseus, make the opposite trade-off, losing earthly potency when elevated to the status of constellations, mere "superstars" of the night sky.

Imagine, then, the mana of the black hole, which exhausts the empirical criteria for existence to become, as astronomers have put it, "the most potent source of energy in the known cosmos." "You do not play with mana, " the Maori might want to add, "except that it plays with you." This feature of the concept, its agency in subject-object transformation, may be the secret of ancient Maori sorcery training. A story tells of the veteran Maori sorcerer who calls his young apprentice to him and tells him he must use all the techniques and self-discipline he has learned to kill his own mother. Appalled at the very thought of this, the apprentice has a major crisis, and then marshalls his thoughts and his feelings and eventually accomplishes the deed. Morally demolished, but full of pride, he returns to his mentor to ask whether he has now truly become a sorcerer. "Almost," says the veteran, "but not quite. Now you must kill me." As a legacy, mana is made of very stern stuff.

To what extent can mana be moral? To the extent that the morality in question has mana. Otherwise it becomes a superficial and empty category, like those "politically correct" agendas and protocols of the late twentieth century that were either coldly indifferent to, or cruelly patronizing of, the "minorities" they pretended to justify. Mana has no pathos, and no false empathy either.

Mana is the most practical and "natural," and the least idealistic or "supernatural," force in the world. It could only be called "magical" or "mystical" in cases when it does not work (for then it is not mana either), and someone is obliged to make apologies or excuses for it. Mana never apologizes; the Maori apprentice in the story becomes unimpeachable (not "innocent") by killing all the witnesses to his deadly acts. Conversely, the magical or supernatural must always leave little traces of its cunning lying around to assure the skeptical that some sort of cheating was going on. Mana does not leave clues.

As the prime organizer of human tasks, crafts, rowers, and vocations, mana not only guarantees the social hierarchy but actually substitutes for it, assurring the secrecy and sanctity of social status and position. There is a mana of leadership, closely akin to that of oratory; the king of traditional Tonga was considered to be the actual begetter of his subjects. Otherwise mana does not obey boundaries or limits without, as a liminal quality, transcending them, so that the need to differentiate in some final sense pairs the concept with another indispensable Polynesian original, that of taboo. Mana knows no limits; taboo knows nothing else; together they comprise the form and content of the comprehehnsible world.

The real epistemological challenge, for the outsider as well as the Polynesian subject, would be to authenticate each of them as an objective, independently existing entity. There must be a mana of knowing just exactly what mana is all about, a single, convergent, and perfectly understandable "yes" that controls all the difficult, dangerous, and divergent forms of "no," the quotient of an infinite divisor. Would that be the same thing as the one single and singular taboo that banishes all others? Or would it be totally different? We do not know.

Hence, if an unconditional taboo were placed upon the very existence of mana, that mana inherent in that taboo itself would increase beyond all measure, swallowing the world in a generic potency of its own particulars. The very intransigence of the concept, like that of the Chinese tao, renders it invincible (as it is said of death, that it is "not only educational, but perfectly safe "). If gravity, for instance, were to be reconceptualized as a general taboo placed on straight-line navigation, then the old Polynesian adage that "the sea closes upon itself" would make sport of our terrestrial geometries.

Like the "big bang" theory of modern cosmology, or the notion that the universe came into being through the disintegration of a gigantic proto-atom, mana simplifies the eternal problem of creation ex nihilo by supplementing it with a transformation instead. A quality that increases in direct proportion to the resistance offered it, and does so quite simply by identifying itself as the force behind that resistance, has no necessary relation to the beginnings and endings of things. Polynesians might argue about the relative strengths and weaknesses of their gods or mythic heroes—what parts they played in the creation and even why they may have played them—but there would be no question as to what they used to do it. Mana is inherent in the created things of this world (for example, all natural objects, elements, and processes) for the same reason it inhabits the artifacts of a skilled craftsman.

In one respect mana resembles the concept of the dreaming (formerly "dreamtime") among the Australian Aboriginal peoples. Understood as an alternative "phase" of everyday reality, the dreaming is only incidentally attributable to the past (for the purpose of certain stories or illustrative accounts) and is fully present to its own ritual enactments. In that way mana might be understood as the inceptive energy coefficient of the objects, persons, and actions to which it is attributed. It is nonlinear, and one could no more escape its effectiveness than one could avoid dreaming at night.

Philosophically, then, mana is not only explanatory but self-explanatory and plays a role in Polynesian thought not unlike that of gravity or energy in the physical sciences, evolution in the life sciences, and culture in the social sciences. It is at once the mirror of our artifice, and the artificer of our mirror. Science performs its observations and experiments to discover the truth of things; mana, immanent at one and the same time in both the test and the result, the cause and the effect, the question and the answer, is the thing of the truth. Everyone can know, down to minute particulars, exactly what science has done and wants to do; no one can really know, despite all the energy expended on its definition, what mana may truly be. All we can do is say its name and hope that something really good will come of it.

Mana is the power of the named over the nameless (cf. Laozi: "The named is the mother of the myriad creatures"), the existent over the nonexistent, the creative over the uncreated. It is the divine part of the human and the human part of the divine, the least visible part of the metaphor that controls the visible world. Might it not be the case that the early explorers and anthropologists who named the Polynesians as "savages" or "barbarians" had their categories reversed, that the people did not drift randomly to their remote islands, in fear of some uncertainty, but actively navigated the wave trains to find homes for themselves at the center of infinity? Or so the name of Kapingamarangi, a remote Polynesian outlier, would tell us. Literally translated, it means "The Place That Is Held Together by the Horizon."

If there were a Nobel Prize for the naming of things, the old Polynesians might at least expect an honorable mention. And a niche in navigation's hall of fame: all one has to do is keep to the latitude where the star Arcturus (Hokulea, "The Star of Joy") is on the zenith, and sooner or later one will run into Hawai'i. That is part of the mana of finding Hawai'i, the actuarial value of which has increased exponentially since the days of Captain Cook.

Real mana, of course, does not profit a smile; it eschews negotiability and must pursue a fugitive existence in those islands. It is not begged, borrowed, or stolen. We have superstars whose voices or countenances run into the millions, but all that might be said of the mana of image, including its bizarre narcosis in the modern "global" culture, was said by William Shakespeare in one of his sonnets: "They are the lords and owners of their faces." Real mana is something much more civilized than we could possibly imagine. We have a difficult enough time with aroha (arofa, aloha ), commonly translated as "love."

Like the distinctive face or personality, mana inheres solely in the one who possesses it (or, more properly, is possessed by it), so that "teaching" it or "passing it on" implies qualities of holism and autonomy that are largely incommensurate with those terms. One would not learn it or acquire it but teach onesself to it. Tattooing the skin, a practice favored especially by the Maori, would, if accomplished with the requisite mana, effectively embody the social power of "face." And the mana of the expert woodcarver would transfer the stamp of personality inherent in that transformation to the utensils, objects, houses, and canoes of the surrounding world. Mana is only the specific, Polynesian version of a conceptual motif found widespread in the Pacific region. "Now you see me as I am," a lavishly decorated dancer at Mount Hagen, in New Guinea, once told the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, meaning that he had turned himself inside out, showing the beautiful intentions of his soul (numan ) in the befeathered lineaments of his outer body, that he had taught himself to the dance.

Mana is not the self, but the artistry of the self. It has no other ego. Examples of this sort suggest that although the total effect of mana resembles that of abstraction in many ways, its power is actually opposite to what we know by that term. Scientific abstractions depend for their explanatory power upon known and testable qualities, which are then extended over the range of phenomenal experience. Mana, which is noumenal rather than phenomenal in Kant's terminology, does not so much explain as it transforms, and the result is always something that is very concrete and specific. To abstract is to derive, generalize, render a subject remote and incorporeal, control the mind with intellectual fictions. Mana, which controls by nonfictions, makes its sense, or makes sense of the world, in a totally different way: the cold eroticism of the long, dark Pacific. There might be a mana of logic, but never a logic of mana.

See Also

Atua; Polynesian Religions, overview article; Power; Taboo.

Bibliography

Best, Elsdon. Maori Religion and Mythology. Wellington, N.Z., 1976. A classic ethnographic sourcebook, including many evocations of basic cultural concepts by Maori people in their own words.

Caro, Niki. Whale Rider. New Zealand Film Commission, 2003. Film. The dramatic understatement of mana in this film of contemporary Maori life makes it the most powerful representation of the concept ever produced.

Handy, E. S. G. Polynesian Religion. Honolulu, 1927. A synthesis of one of the world's most dispersed religiosities.

Hiroa, Te Rangi (Sir Peter Buck). The Coming of the Maori. Whitcoulls, N.Z., 1949. Romantic account of Maori history and concept.

Schwimmer, Eric. The World of the Maori. Wellington, N.Z., 1966. A distinguished contemporary analysis of the working concepts in Maori life and thought.

Roy Wagner (2005)