Mana

Across Polynesian cultures, from Hawaii to Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Tonga and Samoa, mana names an efficacious, supernatural power understood to inhere in chiefs (ali'i, ariki), priests, ancestors, certain objects and even words spoken with authority, and to manifest practically as success, healing power, fertility of land, or victory in battle. A chief's mana was understood as inherited through genealogy (whakapapa in Maori), tracing back toward the gods, and as needing to be actively maintained; it could be increased through right conduct, successful leadership and ritual observance, or diminished through defeat, transgression or violation of tapu.

Tapu, sacred restriction, and mana operate as a paired system: a person or object of great mana is correspondingly tapu, requiring ritual protocols to approach safely, since ordinary or lesser-mana people risked harm from careless contact with something powerfully sacred, a dynamic recorded in detail in early ethnographic sources such as George Grey's nineteenth century collection of Maori traditions. Mana was never confined to religious specialists alone; it operated as the basic currency of political and social legitimacy throughout Polynesian societies, so that a chief's authority to rule and a priest's authority to mediate with the gods rested on the same underlying concept, not on two separate grounds.

Mana entered Western scholarship largely through nineteenth century missionaries, notably Robert Henry Codrington, working in Melanesia, whose descriptions were then generalized by comparative religion scholars such as Marcel Mauss and R. R. Marett into a supposed universal category, an impersonal mana-type power said to underlie taboo and magic across unrelated cultures worldwide; this generalizing move, sometimes called "pre-animism," treated Polynesian and Melanesian mana as evidence for a hypothesized primitive stage of religious development common to all humanity. Later anthropologists, including Claude Levi-Strauss, criticized this generalization sharply, arguing that mana had been turned into an all-purpose theoretical placeholder detached from its specific ethnographic contexts, and that Polynesian and Melanesian concepts, while related, are not identical to each other or reducible to one universal primitive category.

The word has also entered popular Western culture at a considerable remove from its religious sense, most visibly as a generic term for a magical resource or power-point in video games and fantasy fiction, a usage with essentially no connection to the specific Polynesian religious, genealogical and political concept described above. As a category internal to Polynesian religious and social life, mana has not been the subject of any scientific test; the debate around it in the history of religion has been about how the concept has been used and generalized by scholars, not about whether the power it names can be measured.