228 WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2012) © 2012 by Randall Styers. All rights reserved.

The modern study of comparative religion emerged as a field of academic inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as European intellectuals began to analyze the mass of new data about ritual and belief from around the globe arriving in the metropole through circuits of trade, conquest, and empire. The founding figures of this new scholarly enter-prise listed among their ranks a number of strong, vivid personalities—even some armchair anthropologists constituted minor forces of nature. One of the more overlooked figures in this era, but one who proved quite formidable to her peers, was Lady Frazer, the wife of Sir James George. Sir James was prominent in British intellectual life through the early decades of the twentieth century as one of the important systematizers and popu-larizers of the new world of human religious diversity. While the specifics of Frazer’s theories were challenged even early in his career, up to his death he was lauded by his peers for an encyclopedic knowledge of ethnographic data and affable good cheer.

Lady Frazer was another matter. Like many unsung late-Victorian women, she played a major role in her husband’s career, managing impor-tant aspects of his speaking schedule, regulating much of his contact with other scholars, even playing an assertive role in supervising the planning and outfitting of various expeditions to collect new ethnographic data (see Fraser 1990; Talbot 1915). Lady Frazer was preoccupied with ensuring that the young ethnographers she and her husband supported took with them the precise sorts of recording equipment that she favored, and she pressed budding anthropologists to make the pilgrimage to Cambridge so that she could personally train them to use the equipment exactly as

Mana and Mystification: Magic and Religion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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she preferred.1 This was no idle preoccupation—control of the equipment meant control over the evidentiary record produced by the equipment, and control of that evidentiary record was essential, in turn, for confirm-ing what Lady Frazer considered to be a proper understanding of primitive culture.

Given her strong personality and the trepidation with which she was commonly greeted, it is little wonder that Lady Frazer and others like her during these decades were greeted with regular comments concerning their personal mana. The notion of mana came into circulation among European intellectuals from ethnographic reports concerning beliefs in impersonal supernatural power among the Melanesians, but the con-cept quickly made its way into correspondence, toasts, even obituaries, as a jocular commentary on the power of personality.2 This essay explores a basic question: What exactly might we learn about Lady Frazer and her peers—about the scope of their personal power and how this sense of potency was conceived—when we hear of their mana? In answer, I hope to show that while the term serves to mystify many crucial aspects of the operations of social power, this fascination with mana ultimately reveals important fundamental tendencies among early twentieth century scholars of comparative religion, and many of those tendencies continue to shape contemporary understandings of enchantment. Like many of their peers, these early scholars were fascinated—and perturbed—by the workings of power, particularly when that power appeared to exceed the orderly bounds of the natural. The cultural logic of modernity seemed to require that the potency of religion be channeled into very narrow straits, but religion—in both its licit and illicit forms—rarely complied. Scholars searched for a vocabulary to help them recognize this excessive and perva-sive potency, and mana materialized as an idiom for comprehending mys-terious supernatural powers. Yet the early discussions of mana are marked by an ambiguous reluctance to confront power directly, and that same ambiguity is reflected in our current difficulties in accessing the potency and valence of contemporary enchantment. Mana thus offered an occa-sion to acknowledge the confluence of agency, power, and enchantment, but it also served as a vehicle for further mystification.

Since the Enlightenment, one of the principal preoccupations of West-ern political and social theory has been the production of a distinctive type of individual subjectivity—a moral, political, and economic agent conforming to the needs of the liberal social order. This concern has been

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manifest in a number of different registers, from the differentiation of pub-lic and private spheres, to the development of compulsory education, to the formulation of legal codes outlining a broad host of individual rights and obligations. Liberal social theory has been a potent ideological tool for the production of agents suited for the capitalist economy.

In this context, modern social theorists have demonstrated a great deal of ambivalence with regard to religion. On the one hand, religion has appeared to be an unavoidably entrenched aspect of human culture, one that can have useful socializing effects and that—under the proper constraints—can serve various socially adaptive functions (producing industrious workers, assuaging various types of psychological and emo-tional conflict, etc.). On the other hand, though, religion has posed one of the most visible threats to modern liberalism. Unbridled religious passion seems to be a prime source of irrationality and intolerance, factionalism and priestcraft, and even more moderate forms of religious piety challenge the hegemony of capitalist markets and the national state by demanding competing loyalties. Modern social and political theorists have pursued a number of competing strategies in their efforts to harness the power of reli-gion on behalf of the political and economic order. Many have denounced religion as an anachronistic and irrational survival; others have worked to demarcate serviceable boundaries between church, state, and market; still others have sought to articulate idealized norms for religion that limits its disruptive potential while fostering its most adaptive features.

One of the common sites for rehearsing these strategies has been the effort by social theorists to define the proper bounds for religion, and debates over enchantment and disenchantment have been a central fea-ture of these discussions. Since the nineteenth century there has been a lengthy scholarly tradition across a broad range of academic disciplines devoted to the task of seeking to define the nature or essence of religion. The modern concept of “religion” has proved remarkably amorphous, but the search for its origins or essence seemed crucial to many modern schol-ars eager to comprehend this phenomenon and to stabilize its position on the cultural landscape. One of the most common strategies in the effort to formulate a definition for religion has been to contrast it to alternative modes of thought—most often magic or science.

There is voluminous scholarly literature from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries on magic, and throughout this literature magic has commonly been configured as religion’s foil, marking either religion’s out-

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ermost boundary or the next adjoining region of the social and conceptual landscape. With magic attributed primarily to groups on the periphery of social power (primitives, women, children, the disenfranchised), scholarly debates concerning magic have provided a rich opportunity for articulat-ing modern ideals for appropriate modern religious piety (Styers 2004). Questions of agency—the appropriate scope of individual desire and autonomy—have featured prominently in modern Western debates con-cerning the nature of magic and its relation to religion. In rhetoric that is often preoccupied with issues of gender and sexuality, magic has been blamed for a broad and contradictory assortment of social ills. The practice of magic is regularly portrayed as a selfish and antisocial preoccupation of those on the fringes of society, with its rebellious practitioners violating a host of natural and societal laws as they seek to disrupt the orderly flow of natural causation for petty, materialistic gain. At the same time, the practice of magic is also portrayed as a potent tool for authoritarian and charismatic leaders as they seek to bewitch the masses and exert coercive and reactionary power. Magicians can thus be accused of both anarchy and authoritarianism.

With magic positioned as religion’s foil, debates over magic have offered scholars the ready opportunity for articulating an idealized—and strikingly disenchanted—notion of religion. The major voices in this intel-lectual tradition have portrayed religion as a humble and interior terrain in which human agency conforms to the appropriate divine, natural, and social order. A range of important nineteenth- and twentieth-century social scientists and philosophers—Max Weber, Bronisław Malinowski, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and many others—explain that religion is prop-erly focused on purely “ultimate,” or “transcendent,” or “supraempirical” ends and in a properly rational and intellectualized manner. Any effort to achieve effects in the material world, any fixation on particular objects, locations, or ritual behavior, is designated magical and superstitious. Reli-gion, in turn, is configured as a thoroughly spiritualized and otherworldly endeavor. And in this logic, as religion is interiorized, it is also rendered effectually impotent.

This dominant scholarly configuration of the relation between magic and religion produces a number of complementary rhetorical and ideo-logical effects. On the most immediate level, religion’s potential for politi-cal or economic potency is undercut. Magic—not religion—is socially disruptive; magic—not religion—seeks practical effects in the material

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world. Religion is properly private and spiritual, and it conforms quite seamlessly with the social status quo. At the same time, this configuration also serves to mask the actual forms of social power that religious insti-tutions and agents exercise—all that power can be portrayed as alien to religion’s rarified essence.

But this modern configuration of religion also serves the agenda of dis-enchantment. With the proper scope of religion restricted to rationalized, transcendent, otherworldly concerns, the supernatural is cordoned away from the actual world of human desires and needs. And in this process, the containment of the supernatural serves to foster the rational manipula-tion of the material world by modern science and capitalism. Max Weber offered famous sociological diagnoses of this cultural logic, as he explored the ways in which ascetic Protestantism produced new forms of rational religious systematization and disenchantment (Weber 1958, 1964). And the long modern scholarly tradition seeking to define the relation between magic and religion demonstrates that the push to disenchant the world (entzaubergung, or “getting the magic out”) left religion with an exceed-ingly ethereal terrain. Notions of disenchantment always turn on issues of social power—what forms that power should take, who has authority to exercise it, what its proper bounds might be. The dominant modern theories of religion sought to project enchantment securely onto a primi-tive magical mentality, but that projection was decidedly unstable, as the moderns proved to be just as captivated by mysterious power as were their unenlightened neighbors.

This brings us back to mana. The rise of this concept and its broad popularity through the early decades of the twentieth century provide a valuable window onto what modern social theorists could—and could not—say about basic notions of agency, power, and enchantment. Mana was a site at which these issues intersected, and the scholarly discussion of mana illuminates both how this confluence could be acknowledged and how it could be mystified.

By the late nineteenth century, mana was much in the air. The notion had first come to Europe in the accounts of missionaries and travelers to the Pacific (Smith 2004, 125). Particularly in correspondence from the 1870s, R. H. Codrington, head of the Anglican Melanesian Mission, had offered an expansive account of the notion. In his 1878 Hibbert Lectures on the origin and growth of religion, Max Müller quoted a letter from Codring-ton concerning mana to intervene in the important ongoing debate about

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the origin of religion. While a number of his contemporaries argued that fetishism was the most primitive stage of religious development, Müller cited Codrington as establishing that mana, this primitive notion of super-natural power, was itself more fundamental (Müller 1878, 53–54; and see Smith 2004,138n18).

In 1891 Codrington published an influential study of Melanesian cul-ture, featuring mana as a central theme. Codrington there defined mana as “a supernatural power or influence .  .  . that works to effect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common pro-cesses of nature; it is present in the atmosphere of life, attaches itself to per-sons and to things, and is manifested by results which can only be ascribed to its operation” (1891, 118–19). As Codrington explained, mana is “a force altogether distinct from physical power, which acts in all kinds of ways for good and evil, and which it is of greatest advantage to possess or control”; while mana is nonphysical, it is manifest “in physical force, or in any kind of power or excellence which a man possesses” (118–19). Indeed, mana lies at the heart of any human efficacy: “all conspicuous suc-cess is a proof that a man has mana; his influence depends on the impres-sion made on the people’s mind that he has it; he becomes a chief by virtue of it. Hence a man’s power, though political or social in its character, is his mana; the word is naturally used in accordance with the native conception of the character of all power and influence as supernatural” (120). This notion of the supernatural power of mana, Codrington concluded, serves as the foundation both for the magical and witchcraft practices among the Melanesians and for all their religious rites and practices (192).

The most striking feature of Codrington’s formulation of mana is how thoroughly amorphous and vague his description of the notion appears; mana would seem to encompass everything and nothing. But despite—or because of—this feature, mana quickly took hold within the European scholarly imagination. The year 1891 also saw the publication of Edward Tregear’s dictionary of Pacific Island languages, which indicated that the notion of mana was pan-Oceanic and again emphasized the sense of extraordinary power underlying the concept (“supernatural power; divine authority; having qualities which ordinary persons or things do not pos-sess”) (Tregear 1891, 203). New ethnographic reports appeared during the following decade identifying comparably amorphous notions of super-natural power in cultures ranging from the Iroquois, Sioux, and Algonquin (orenda, wakan, manitou) to Madagascar (hasina) (Marett 1916, 377–79).

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On the basis of this new data, in 1904 two near-simultaneous scholarly expositions of mana appeared in Europe, one from the French sociolo-gists Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss and another slightly earlier version from the British anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett (Mauss 1972; Marett 1904).

This amorphous notion of impersonal supernatural power quickly became a central tool for a range of scholars seeking to understand reli-gion in a comparative frame: Émile Durkheim, Jane Harrison, Bronisław Malinowski, Nathan Söderblom, and many others. Max Weber explicitly adapted the notion as the core of his concept “charisma” (1964, 2). Only in the 1930s would scholars begin to question both the precise grammati-cal use of the term in the Oceanic cultures from which it was derived and its value as a coherent cross-cultural concept (Firth 1940; Keesing 1984; Smith 2004, 127). But as Jonathan Z. Smith (2004) has recently explored, the notion has remained a pliable (and prevalent) tool for thinking about religion—and thinking about thinking about religion—up to the present day (see also Wagner 2005). For purposes of this essay, I focus on R. R. Marett’s configuration of mana. Marett was extremely influential in trans-mitting mana to a broad English-speaking audience, and his efforts to use the concept to uncover the nature of enchanting, supernatural power is particularly illustrative of the difficulties modern social theorists have encountered in attempting to address issues of religion and social power.

Marett’s career marks a significant era in the development of com-parative religious scholarship in the English-speaking world. He stands at the end of the British intellectualist tradition of social theory, bridging between E. B. Tylor and E. E. Evans-Pritchard in teaching social anthropol-ogy at Oxford. He was the first British scholar of comparative religion to utilize French sociological theory and the last major armchair anthropolo-gist. In this context, Marett challenged a number of assumptions central to the late-Victorian study of religion; he critiqued deterministic and reduc-tionistic theories of religion, the preoccupation with religion’s origin, the fundamental notion of evolutionary progress, the individualistic intellec-tualism of Tylor and Frazer, and Durkheim’s reductive social morphology.

Most relevant for the consideration of the place of enchantment in modern understandings of religion, Marett was one of the earliest critics of the scholarly effort to demarcate a firm distinction between religion and magic. He launched his career in the late 1890s by challenging E. B. Tylor’s

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theory that animism—the belief in spirits and ghosts—is the initial stage in the development of religion. Tylor’s theory was intellectualist in a double sense—he framed religion primarily as a matter of belief, and he offered a purely intellectual account of how primitive thinkers could arrive at that belief. Until Marett, Tylor’s version of animism had predominated the anthropological study of primitive religion for thirty years, suffering only relatively minor challenge.

Marett rejected both Tylor’s intellectualism and his mode of evolution-ary theory, pointing instead toward an amorphous emotive and behavioral stew as the “raw material of religion” previously unacknowledged in the search for religion’s origins (1914, xxxi). Marett asserted that magic and religion should properly be understood not as successive stages in a path of cultural evolution, but as comparable subsets of a broader category, one he loosely dubbed “supernaturalism” (1900, 11). Magic and religion both arise from “a common plasm of crude beliefs about the awful and occult,” a fundamental emotional sense of supernaturalism or awe (1900; 1914, xi). As he explained, this zone of human development is largely indeci-pherable; in offering surmises concerning human prehistory, he stated, “I am supremely conscious that I am merely feeling my way, merely groping in the dark” (1914, viii, xxiii). In refusing any firm distinction between religion and magic, Marett was able to frame religion in far less idealized terms than many of his contemporaries and to place it more fully within its material and emotional context.

Through the first decade of the twentieth century Marett seized upon mana as his primary metaphor for the undifferentiated and impersonal preanimistic force field from which both religion and magic arose. While the notion of mana had its specific origins in the Pacific, he argued, it was “a category of world-wide application” for the scientific study of religion, one that could serve as “a general name for the power attributed to sacred persons and things” (1916, 375, 377). The early stage of religion should be understood, Marett asserts, not through conjecture concerning some indi-vidual primitive philosopher (as in the theories of Tylor and Frazer), but rather through recourse to more fundamental human emotional states, to communal feelings and experiences derived from basic “emotional and motor processes” (1914, xxxi). As he states in his most famous aphorism, “Savage religion is something not so much thought out as danced out” (xxxi). Magic and religion are thus essentially joined in the amorphous

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notion of mana, a broad term offering “the bare designation of that posi-tive emotional value which is the raw material of religion” (xxxi; see also 1900, 10–15; 1908, 99–121).

Marett asserts that the essence of rudimentary religion is to be sought principally in the primitive differentiation between the sacred and the profane. Religion develops within a distinctive sphere of human experi-ence, “a wonder-world, from which the workaday world is parted by a suf-ficiently well-marked frontier” (1914, xxvii). This sacred sphere is marked by an emotive awareness of the extraordinary, an instinctive emotional and physical response to the unexpected or the uncanny.

Marett acknowledges that the notion of the “supernatural” is a mod-ern concept (“The savage has no word for ‘nature.’ He does not abstractly distinguish between an order of uniform happenings and a higher order of miraculous happenings”) (1908, 109). Still, he argues, primitive culture is structured around the practical and concrete manipulation of this latent differentiation, and even among primitives we can find “the germs of our formal antithesis between the natural and the supernatural” (109–10). Supernaturalism consists of two basic aspects, tabu (which represents its predominantly negative features) and mana (which represents its positive aspect, “something transcending the ordinary world, something wonder-ful and awful”) (xxviii).

Marett acknowledges that the difference between “the ordinary and the extraordinary, the work-a-day and the wonderful is a difference, if you will, of degree rather than of kind. The sphere of the miraculous is, subjec-tively, just the sphere of a startled experience, and clearly there are end-less degrees in the intensity of felt surprise; though society tends to fix hard-and-fast limits within which surprise is, so to speak, expected of one” (1907, 86–87). In this light, then, the notion of mana takes shape when a socially conditioned sense of mysterious or surprising power emerges in distinction to the ordinary, with the core of the notion first coalescing in relation to the feats of human magicians and then gradually expanding to cover wonder-working animals, natural powers, and spirits through pro-cesses of anthropomorphism (87–88). As Marett explains, “There exists, deep-engrained in the rudimentary thought of the world, a conception of a specific aspect common to all sorts of things and living beings, under which they appear at once as needing insulation and as endowed with an energy of high, since extraordinary, potential” (1908, 115). Mana thus designates a mode of extraordinary power or energy.

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Marett’s view of this amorphous magico-religious realm differed sharply from his contemporaries such as Frazer who sought to demarcate clearly between magic (operating through a mechanistic exercise of the magician’s will) and religion (functioning through a submissive recourse to spirits and deities). Marett rejects this differentiation and argues that mana is at work equally within the rites of magic and the rites of religion; both are aimed to augment and direct the deployment of mana (1904, 62).

Marett insists that while mana involves the projection of the individ-ual will, this act should always be understood as essentially social. The workings of mana must be viewed as “an inter-personal, inter-subjective transaction, an affair between wills” (71). This community includes both operator and victim, and as supernatural powers are gradually objectified and personified into external divine agents, spirits and gods also come to participate. The most fundamental expectations concerning what consti-tutes the wondrous or surprising—and therefore the supernatural—are shaped by culture (1907, 86–87), and mana must thus be understood through recourse to social psychology (1904, 51, 61, 70). In this connec-tion, Marett also points out that mana denotes “the ‘divine right’ of the aristocratic class to wield authority and to enforce religious prohibitions; the sanction behind the taboo being the mana of the governing class” (1929, 770). But while Marett acknowledges that mana can be understood only by recourse to its social environment, the notion of the social that he invokes is one with almost no meaningful content. Other than these per-functory gestures toward social context, he never offers any further expla-nation of how the power differentials that shape the operations of mana emerge or what the implications of those power relations might be for our understanding of religion.

Marett argues that scholarly recognition of the centrality of mana to the human religious imagination serves a number of important functions. First, the concept calls attention to the commonality between religion and magic. Mana marks simply an amorphous notion of the miraculous, and this very generality compels theorists to recognize “the magico-religious as a unity in difference, the unity consisting in wonder-working power and the difference in the social or anti-social use to which it is put by the rival systems” (1916, 379). Only as society comes to judge particular rites beneficial or disruptive does a provisional differentiation between religion and magic begin to take shape. Second, when mana is conjoined with the notion of tabu, the concept provides “a minimum definition of the magico-

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religious” by comprehensively designating the realm of the extraordi-nary (379; see also 1909). Third, far better than other concepts such as “spirit,” mana usefully underscores the transmissible nature of the magico- religious or the sacred, “the passing on of sacredness between one person and another, one thing and another, or a person and a thing in either direc-tion” (379). This notion of the sacred as mobile, he explains, is a promi-nent feature of primitive belief, particularly since primitive thought is prone both to form uncritical associations and to fall prey to emotional excitement. Finally, Marett explains, the notion of mana foregrounds the importance of ritual within the magico-religious realm: “The ideas of mana and of ritualistic control go very closely together, the former being little else than a projection of the latter into the world of objects” (379). A number of interrelated and overlapping concepts—animatism, preani-mism, dynamism, numinism, the mana-taboo formula—all point toward “a phase of the religious life in which the need of coming to terms with the mysteries that beset life at once from within and without is satisfied mainly by ritual action, running ahead of articulate and reasoned doctrine, but none the less [sic] powerfully moving” (1929, 771).

Marett saw the preanimistic stage of religious development as char-acterized by emotion and instinctive motor response, a magico-religious stew best accounted for by recourse to this amorphous notion of mana. This view of the supernatural was widely accepted in the early years of the twentieth century by other prominent theorists, including Sidney Hart-land, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Wundt, and K. T. Preuss. Marett’s French contemporaries Hubert and Mauss echoed his conclusion that mana con-stitutes the rudimentary data of both magic and religion. But while reli-gion is a secondary concern for Hubert and Mauss in their “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,” and while they remain committed to formu-lating a clear demarcation between religion and magic, Marett works to stress the commonality between religion and magic as they emerge from this single wellspring, and he thus places religion much closer to the heart of his discussions of mana (1914, xxx).

Two aspects of Marett’s configuration of mana emerge as particularly relevant to this consideration of the confluence of agency, power, and enchantment. First, as discussed above, numerous theorists in the social scientific traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have worked diligently to insulate religion from questions of power. But in contrast, Marett’s account of mana serves to foreground issues of personal potency

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in the operations of religion. Like Hubert and Mauss, he marks the terrain of religion as a landscape of differential power (see Mauss 1972, 28–32, 40, 120–21, 138–39). As Marett states in discussing another cognate of mana, orenda, “everybody and everything would seem to have orenda in some degree, the world being regarded as a sort of battle-ground where unequal forces are matched against each other, and the strongest obtains his desire” (1916, 377).

In the rudimentary stage of religion, Marett explains, the deployment of mana is understood by “the savage” as a “projection of will, a psychic force, a manifestation of personal agency” (1904, 50). Mana is a display of “psychic energy, almost . . . what we would call ‘will-power’” (1907, 86). Mana is “an adjective as well as a noun, expressing a possession which is likewise a permanent quality” (1908, 112). While mana may reside in either human beings and objects, “for a man to have mana and to be great are convertible terms” (1916, 376). So, Marett explains, in various Polyne-sian dialects mana and its cognate terms supply an exhaustive psychologi-cal vocabulary encompassing desires, wishes, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, conscience, and soul; “mana thus in certain contexts almost amounts to what we term ‘personality’” (376–77).

This formulation of mana thematizes power and power differentials as central to the operations of religion. This is a realm, in Marett’s words, of “a conditionality and relativity of will-power” (1904, 54). The use of mana is “the very type of a spiritual projectile,” an “exertion of will-power” (54, 56). As he states, “The inwardness of such mana or magical power we have seen reason to regard as derived by the magician from a more or less intuitive perception of his projective act of will as the force which occultly transmutes his pretense into ulterior reality. . . . The essence of his super-normal power lie[s] in precisely this. . . . All manifestations of the super-natural are likely to appear as in some sense manifestations of power, and as in some sense personally controlled” (59). While supernatural power can sometimes assume an impersonal form (such as luck), it tends pre-dominantly to denote “psychic energy” or “will-power” (1907, 86).

With mana thus configured as the transmissible and projective exercise of the will, Marett adopts a metaphor that would become common among his scholarly peers to illustrate the movement of this currency. Mana, he explains, is a form of energy, “energy of high, since extraordinary, potential” best captured as “voltage” or as “a contagion, or such a force as electricity” (1908, 114, 119; 1916, 376). In Marett’s account, primitive religion con-

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sists of the practical mechanisms for attaining and deploying mana. Thus, as he states, “all traffickings with the unseen and occult, whether licit or illicit, involve mana; and, just as electrical energy may be exploited alike in the public service and with criminal intent, so mana lends itself to the manipulation of the expert, be his motive moral or the reverse” (1916, 377). The deployment of this voltage can either “electrify or electrocute according to the will of the operator” (1929, 771).

I highlight Marett’s stress on the exertion of will inherent in mana pri-marily because, in his foregrounding of the role of personal power and agency in relation to religion, he differs markedly from so many of his peers. His notion of mana explicitly thematizes religion as a terrain of dif-ferential human power—an insight that would seem to go without say-ing, but one that many modern theorists have worked diligently not to say. Marett shifts the focus of the analysis of religion away from interior mat-ters of cognition and belief into the realms of affect and behavior. As the philosopher D. Z. Phillips (1986) has argued, this shift anticipated Ludwig Wittgenstein’s refocusing of scholarly attention onto the context and use of religious symbols and behavior. The language of mana provided Marett and his peers with a benign idiom in which they could acknowledge the role of human agency in relation to the religious realm.

Yet this leads to the second significant aspect of Marett’s configuration of mana. Again like Wittgenstein’s approach to religion, Marett’s amor-phous invocation of mana afforded him few substantive resources for ana-lyzing the power relations of this terrain. Instead, mana serves to mystify those power relations by cloaking religious potency in an aura of primeval inevitability. Mana is a domain of mysterious, enchanting power, but it remains potent as mana only so long as it remains a mystery.

As Marett states this theme, “ambiguity . . . lies sleeping in mana” (1908, 121). It is “of the very essence of mana that it should be indefinite and mys-terious in its effects”; only an act or entity that is “normally abnormal in its effects” can display supernatural power (1907, 91). This is the reason that women, strangers, even divine chiefs are seen as filled with mana (93–97). Mana serves to designate “something lying more or less beyond the reach of the senses—something verging on what we are wont to describe as the immaterial or unseen” (1908, 103). Any effort to account for mana leads to its dissipation. And this bind would appear to include not only the naïve practitioner, but also the modern scholar.

Hubert and Mauss offered a similarly amorphous account of mana in

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their General Theory of Magic: “It involves the notion of automatic effi-cacy. At the same time as being a material substance which can be local-ized, it is also spiritual. It works at a distance and also through a direct connexion, if not by contact. It is mobile and fluid without having to stir itself. It is impersonal and at the same time clothed in personal forms. It is divisible yet whole” (Mauss 1972, 144).

In response to this paradoxical and vague configuration of mana, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss came to conclude that notions of the mana type are pure symbols, “floating signifiers” or “zero phonemes,” rep-resenting simply “an indeterminate value of signification, in itself devoid of meaning and thus susceptible of receiving any meaning at all” ( [1950] 1987, 55, 63–64,72n18). On the basis of his reading of Mauss’s amor-phous account of mana and Mauss’s futile efforts to account for mana through recourse to such factors as sentiments, volitions, and beliefs that were themselves “epiphenomena, or else mysteries” (Lévi-Strauss [1950] 1987, 56), Lévi-Stauss reached his famous conclusion on the concept: “So we can see that in one case, at least, the notion of mana does present those characteristics of a secret power, a mysterious force, which Durkheim and Mauss attributed to it: for such is the role it plays in their own system. Mana really is mana there. But at the same time, one wonders whether their theory of mana is anything other than a device for imputing proper-ties to indigenous thought which are implied by the very peculiar place that the idea of mana is called on to occupy in their own thinking” (57).

Lévi-Strauss’s assessment of the scholarly use of mana as a tool for mys-tification is both damning and particularly relevant for the consideration of religion, agency, and enchantment—while these scholarly formulations are of questionable value in helping us understand the cultures from which mana was derived, they surely illuminate the interests of the modern schol-ars who deploy the notion so freely. Marett foregrounds the implications of mana for the analysis of religion even more strongly than Hubert and Mauss. And the incoherence and mystification inherent in the term is even more pronounced in Marett’s overt insistence on its essential and funda-mental mystery. Both in the work of Hubert and Mauss and that of Marett, the invocation of mana serves to place the power operating within magic and religion beyond any conceptual clarity.

Yet Lévi-Strauss moves too quickly in labeling mana a zero phoneme.3 Marett explicitly invokes the concept as a conceptual tool to destabilize any firm differentiation between religion and magic and to thematize reli-

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gious ritual as a mechanism for deploying social power. In that gesture he places questions of agency and social power at the center of the scholarly formulation of religion. Religion is not, for him, a private and spiritualized matter of belief, but instead an active terrain of conflict and differential power. Ritual is not merely aimed at reflecting distant symbolic truths, but at accomplishing tangible human ends.

But even in the very gesture with which he identifies religion as a site of power, Marett forecloses any meaningful assessment of that power. The fundamental mystery that is installed as the defining feature of mana clouds any substantive assessment of the mechanisms through which it operates. This seems to be a consequence of any model that would locate the core of religion in the zone of sentiment or affect (a move that became quite common among scholars of religion in the mid-twentieth century). But it demonstrates once again the deep level at which modern theorizing about religion has faltered at the question of power. Unlike so many other modern theorists of religion, Marett explicitly acknowledges religion as a site of power, and yet even with that insight, he frames that site in a way that precludes any meaningful analysis.

The potency of mana to mystify is particularly apparent with regard to issues of agency, since agency is so near the concept’s core. Mana marks supernaturalism both as deeply consequential and as deeply impenetra-ble—a phenomenon that functions only because it can mystify. The con-cept is deployed in a manner that seems aimed structurally to foreclose meaningful assessments of agency. Mana might appear to serve the inter-ests of disenchanting, rational analysis, but it quickly becomes a vehicle for more mystification.

Commending the mana of Lady Frazer and her peers at the turn of the twentieth century was a jovial means of signaling the force of personal-ity, the potency of interpersonal charisma. But whatever other objectives might be served by such comments, this rather trivial compliment also functioned to naturalize a differential of personal power and to mystify the concrete mechanisms—social, psychological, and economic—through which such personal power took shape and was maintained, a mystifica-tion that seems inevitably to serve the social status quo. Many modern intellectuals were preoccupied with the workings of power, but they could also be quite content to leave the operations of that power shrouded in mystery—mystification and reenchantment were never far at bay.

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The rise and prominence of scholarly discussions of mana amply illus-trates how deeply ambivalent those moderns could be about the opera-tions of power. And nowhere was that ambivalence more acute than in relation to religion. Even in liberal modernity, religion is surely a central site of social power, but both in theory and in practice, that power is often disclaimed and occluded by rhetorics of transcendence, mystery, and awe. In light of this long legacy of scholarly ambivalence in even acknowledg-ing the social potency of religion, it is little wonder that we have so few resources available to help us access the potency and valence of enchant-ment in the contemporary world.

Randall Styers is associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Caro-

lina at Chapel Hill. Styers’s research and teaching focus on religion in modern Western

culture, including critical approaches to the study of religion, religion and gender,

religion in American law and politics, and critical social theory. He is the author of

Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Oxford University

Press, 2004).

Notes

1. See records of the Diamond Jenness Expeditions to New Guinea and the Canadian Arctic (1909–20) in the Oxford University Archives, particularly correspondence from Jenness to R. R. Marett dated June 28, 1911, and cor-respondence from Mrs. J. G. Frazer to Jenness dated July 23, 1911, and Sep-tember 20, 1911.

2. See, for example, Marett 1918, concerning A. E. Haddon’s mana in becoming the new chair of the Folklore Society, or Marett’s letter to Ernest A. Hoo-ten of the Harvard Peabody Museum dated November 20, 1931, concerning Mrs. Hooten’s mana.

3. On various recent critiques of Lévi-Strauss’s theorization of mana, see Smith 2004, particularly 127–34 and 140n30. See also in this regard Boyer 1990 and Godelier 1999.

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