Pill Pod 179 - MANA (Exclusive)
Added 2024-08-16 23:00:05 +0000 UTCAfter a brief recap of the Deleuzo-Guattarian Australian breakdancer we read chapters 6 and 7 of Durkheim's Elementary forms of Religious Life and try to get a hold on the primordial concept of concepts: MANA.
Comments
This anthology explores historical and contemporary concepts of mana. I haven’t attempted the essays yet but read the editor’s intro and am intrigued by their suggestion that mana should be thought of more as an ethic. Discuss! https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/32433/610766.pdf;jsessionid=324222EF3FE355E2D9953F9BD279BC92?sequence=1 NEW MANA: TRANSFORMATIONS OF A CLASSIC CONCEPT IN PACIFIC LANGUAGES AND CULTURES, Edited by Matt Tomlinson and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan
Jo Marie
2024-08-21 00:46:45 +0000 UTCKia Ora, Absolutely, I’ve been thinking along the same lines about this. As I understand it from a pakeha perspective, mana is inextricably bound with tūrangawaewae (connection to place) and tīpuna (ancestors) as well as tapu (place, person, or thing imbued with scaredness and / or taboo). In this sense, perhaps, mana can at once inhabit the personal / political / social / spiritual / material aspects of life – providing a broader ontological security…?
Jo Marie
2024-08-21 00:45:07 +0000 UTCTēnā koe :) Do you think one has to live among a culture that takes mana as a given in order to begin to grasp it? I've lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for nigh on 15 years and have come to sense the inseparability of mana and tūrangawaewae. Both seem threatened by colonial legacies. What are your thoughts?
Your celium or mine
2024-08-20 03:36:09 +0000 UTCIt's now been rejected by most academics, but anthropologist Margaret Murray's _The Witch-Cult in Western Europe_ from 1921 was hugely influential in both academic and popular ideas of witchcraft in the 20th century. You see ideas from it pop in places as diverse as the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and the neo-pagan religion of Wicca
Toby Chappell
2024-08-20 03:29:03 +0000 UTCthe field of esoteric history has changed massively since the 19th century so i wonder about hubert's sources but i will look into it.
Ichabod
2024-08-19 21:44:32 +0000 UTCthats interesting. i havent heard of witch theories from prechristian europe but thats something i want to look into. thanks for the reference.
Ichabod
2024-08-19 21:41:11 +0000 UTCWhile that may be true, on this point Durkheim cites Henri Hubert who studied Celtic and pre-christian Germanic religion, so I don't think the reference is to the catholic or puritan inquisitions. It may be that the german folkloric tradition of the hag in the woods has a common ancestor to that, but I don't know the lineage there (c.f. Grendel's mother in beowulf?)
Plastic Pills
2024-08-19 17:41:49 +0000 UTCthe thing you said at the end about witches in the woods isnt supported by historical evidence and is a stereotype invented by witch hunters in the middle ages. in reality it was mostly priests and university students who were studying and practicing occult magic, often openly before it became a taboo.
Ichabod
2024-08-19 13:58:50 +0000 UTCI’m not confident I know anything at all about dialectics but I thought there had to be a third term? Like being-nothing-becoming. In this case I guess Mana is what holds the contradiction between internal and external so maybe something like internal-external-mana or external-internal-mana.
Jack
2024-08-19 12:09:25 +0000 UTCI think there's a similar idea in Culianu's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Well worth a read
glasnost
2024-08-19 11:03:28 +0000 UTCThat’s interesting af, but I’d say the shift happened because of secularisation. Modern psychology does its best to strip consciousness of any mystical elements, leading to its banalisation. I think mana is what is invested in the market, which could be an older word for what we might also call libidinal investment.
anacidcommie
2024-08-18 21:05:45 +0000 UTCI feel like there’s a dialectical relationship happening between the internal and external.
anacidcommie
2024-08-18 21:02:56 +0000 UTCI wonder if there's an etymological link between Mana and manners? Also caving is a horrifying activity anyway, imagine doing it with the corpse of a loved one. It might actually be a really healthy way to grieve (if you don't get stuck down there)
Alex B
2024-08-18 17:51:58 +0000 UTChaha that’s funny!! Get your (black?) MANA hat ready to wear. Or it could be Make America Naughty Again, or Make America National Again, or Make America Native Again’ Etc etc etc
Zachary Manenti
2024-08-18 17:00:31 +0000 UTCThinking about it the next day… it seems like mana is a kind of pre-condition or condition of the possibility of social symbolism, but not as a conceptual or logical principle, but almost like the amniotic fluid/the oceanic sac of social glue… but doesn’t really have to be a substance though, as it’s carried over into the individual and social more like the fundamental medium or backdrop of what relations are cut out of symbolically. The primordial backdrop or energetics of what emerges as the particular and singular forms of the outer and inner worlds of the human.
Zachary Manenti
2024-08-18 16:56:07 +0000 UTCAlso, Mana has Pasifika roots that are broader than just Melanesia. All of Polynesia from Aotearoa to Hawai’i use the term and I’ll have to ask my Chuukese friends about the terms use in Micronesian dialects
Kainoa Written
2024-08-18 14:18:38 +0000 UTCAwesome pod. In Hawaiian we also use the word mana to mean authority and privilege as well as interstitial stages of development like the branch between a trunk and a leaf or the stage of a fish development when the scales start to develop color
Kainoa Written
2024-08-18 14:14:15 +0000 UTCQi gong practices like tai chi chuan has many overlaps with individual understandings of Mana amongst many I’ve interacted with growing up Hawaiian. Martial Arts are also very popular on the islands, possibly because of this
Kainoa Written
2024-08-18 12:30:18 +0000 UTCAs a resident Hawaiian audience member, I appreciate Pillz’ pronunciation of Mana Only one vowel there friends
Kainoa Written
2024-08-18 12:26:03 +0000 UTCVictor’s point about social conformity resonates with me since I’ve seen those social experiments where people sit in a waiting room with paid actors who’s tabs up every time an alarm sounds. After a few rounds of repetition people will begin to stand up because everyone else has been doing it. But then Pill’s points about mana being basically a scientific point of view, in a way, because it’s meant to systemize and comprehend experience. It’s almost like there’s never been much of an interest in a subject until modernity, and now we’re all individual subjects, but the things we’re interested in are only things because they’ve been thingified socially.
Jack
2024-08-18 12:22:36 +0000 UTCWould it be too much to theorize that the shift from magic to psychology was partly because the Market absorbed the power of Mana? The market took on the power of heaven.
Khemith
2024-08-18 09:15:44 +0000 UTCI like your comment. Internal and external is a good distinction. If I may attempt to philosophize then the boundary between internal and external is a limit, and if we negate the limitation we get an infinity. Or maybe the limit sets up two infinities going separate ways.
Jack
2024-08-17 21:57:01 +0000 UTCI wonder if it is similar to ‘Chi’ in Chinese culture. The chi energy you develop in Tai chi or or martial arts, or use and unblock or redirect thru the channels and meridians in acupuncture ——which is outside us and inside….that is stored individually in the lower belly. I wonder if mana and chi can be called the ‘life force?
Zachary Manenti
2024-08-17 20:13:02 +0000 UTCI read the title as “Make America Normal Again”
Wilson TV
2024-08-17 15:16:41 +0000 UTCI'm starting to think that *we* are already mtg plane walkers. Such a focus on material planes of existence, when we have so many immaterial planes of existence that we inhabit and pass thru.
ageOfBumFires
2024-08-17 13:54:07 +0000 UTCMana kind of does what imagination does for Kant. In Kant imagination is like a bridge between the categories of the understand and the intuition. Mana bridges the sacred and profane.
Jack
2024-08-17 08:14:08 +0000 UTCWhat these early sociologists are doing seems a lot like what I’ve been reading about Rousseau. At some point humans become social and fall into history. Was that original distinction that made humans become social the distinction between the sacred and profane? So what Durkheim is doing is first save objects of knowledge, and objects themselves, by making time and space social categories. But this original distinction, or maybe any distinction, doesn’t change not being into being, right? It just symbolizes a shared experience.
Jack
2024-08-17 08:11:38 +0000 UTCI’m from NZ, mana is a core foundation of Māori culture - the practice and embodiment of mana is more complex than Durkheim could have ever understood. If only he’d seen this Ted Talk :) https://youtu.be/qeK3SkxrZRI?si=sD5otFSnBDF9KN3Y
Jo Marie
2024-08-17 07:56:26 +0000 UTCCodrington, the Anglican anthropologist who popularised the concept of Mana did not co-opt this from first nation peoples of the Australian mainland. He spent more time on Norfolk Island, administered by Australia since 1914. The concept/force of Mana is revealed across the shared cultural rites and beliefs in Pasifika Nations that comprise Melanesia and Polynesia. Durkheim may have found the concept useful to frame his analyses conducted in Australia but it does not originate there. Not necessarily a surprise that early 20th and late 19th Century European colonialists freely conflate cultural concepts across the groups placed under the yoke and lens of their imperial mission, consciously or not.
Your celium or mine
2024-08-17 00:35:26 +0000 UTCIf you took the position that her goal was to cement breakdancing as something to appear regularly in the Olympics (likely decided based on the events media popularity) then she did a great job. Don't think you mentioned this, but the hosting country gets to pick an event each year and breakdance was France's choice.
Melophrasis
2024-08-17 00:22:50 +0000 UTC
