Mana, Tapu and a Religious Vocabulary Carried by Canoe

Two words that anthropology took from this family have had careers far outside it. Mana, a term for potency or efficacy attaching to persons, objects and places, entered European scholarship through Pacific ethnography in the nineteenth century and became a general theoretical concept, in ways that practitioners in the Pacific have not always recognised.

Tapu, meaning set apart and restricted, entered English as taboo by way of Cook's voyages and has had a similar afterlife. Both descend within Austronesian and are cognate across enormous distances, which is the evidence that a related religious vocabulary travelled with the voyages rather than developing separately in each island group. Around them sit related terms for the ancestors, for genealogical descent and for the enclosure or marked ground where ritual is performed. The atlas notes two things about this. The first is that the reconstruction is real: these are inherited words with regular correspondences, not loose resemblances. The second is that the concepts they name belong to living traditions with their own custodians, and that the scholarly career of mana as a comparative term is a separate matter from what the word means to the communities that use it, which is a distinction the earlier literature very often failed to make.