Mana (spirituality)

Problem of definition

The concept of mana was discussed many, as well on the translation as on its significance, but also more largely, it made the subject of debate on the validity or the relevance of the “concepts of the mana type”. Thus, in 1881, Codrington defines the mana as a “diffuse vector of spiritual power or symbolic system effectiveness supposed to live certain objects and people”. Ten years later it specifies by affirming that the mana is a “capacity of influence” sticking to the people and the things, conveyed by the ghosts and the spirits.

Keesing says that these definitions are creations of Europeans, but not indigenous design. Indeed, since Codrington, when mana was privileged like substantive, it was always translated like such, whereas actually it had three possible forms: active verb, passive, substantive verb. This aspect still appears at Marcel Mauss, for which the mana becomes basically a substantive. “One says of an object that it is mana, to say that it has this quality; and in this case the word is a kind of adjective”. At the beginning of the century, the mana term started to illustrate the idea of an abstract quality or a support of supernatural capacity on which rests the human action or on which this one depends.

Largely exceeding the context océanien, mana became a notion of the anthropological metalanguage. Today the most succeeded explanation is that of Keesing: it gives three uses of them:

verb of state meaning “to be effective, powerful, carried out”, used in a way stereotyped to describe the effectiveness and the chance.
verb employed in the prayers and the invocations: “blessed, supports, make effective…”
like substantive: “effectiveness, realization, power…”

That raises many questions, in particular those of the translation, and significance. Because all that one allots to the mana remains floating or vague. Lévi-Strauss compares the mana with the French words “trick” or “thing”. He says indeed that “behind thing, there is machine and in a remote way the idea of force or being able”. As for trick, that derives from the happy blows in the plays. For him, the designs of the type mana (wakan, orenda) concern a form thought universal and it proposes a linguistic explanation. The function of the concepts of the mana type, writes it, “is to be opposed to the absence of significance without comprising by oneself any particular significance”, it is to fill a difference between meaning and meant. It is their semantic vacuum which makes these concepts central. Those represent “this meaning floating precisely which is the constraint of very thought finished, although the scientific knowledge is able, if not to seal it, at least to discipline it partially (…). We see in the mana, the wakan, the orenda and other notions of the same type the expression conscious of a semantic function, whose role is to make it possible the thought symbolic system to be exerted in spite of the contradiction which is clean for him”.

With the example of the mana the difficulties of the use and the significance arise. However, if one does not manage to give a definition of the mana, one finds a function with Lévi-Strauss to him. As for the significance of this type of concepts, it is probably necessary to give up it, since they are in themselves meaningless and thus likely to receive any direction.

However, one had given a direction to the mana, a diffuse and invisible substance of being able, a European creation. Keesing poses the problem of the translation: a bad translation can indeed involve not only the creation of non-existent entities, but also of analytical big problems. Because of me-translations, the Ethnologue S often invented pseudo problems. Only it is not a question to seek significances with these concepts, it is also necessary to observe the use which is made by it, the context of stating, etc

Mana in the roleplays and the video games

For example, in the vast majority of the strategy games or current MMORPG, the term of “mana” indicates the energy of a unit, which it can generally devote to launching a fate, and which differs from its vital force (“points of life”). Taking into account the million players throughout the world, such as for example 7 million for only the World Off Warcraft in May 2006, the direction of this term like magic energy or not of magic (PM, still called Magic not or MP) is imposing itself for a whole category of the population.

Mana Olandj

See too

Magic and religion

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