‘Mana’, a term denoting spiritual power, is found in many Pacific Islands languages. In recent decades, the term has been taken up in New Age movements and online fantasy gaming. In this book, 16 contributors examine mana through ethnographic, linguistic, and historical lenses to understand its transformations in past and present. The authors consider a range of contexts including Indigenous sovereignty movements, Christian missions and Bible translations, the commodification of cultural heritage, and the dynamics of diaspora. Their investigations move across diverse island groups—Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Hawai‘i, and French Polynesia—and into Australia, North America and even cyberspace. A key insight that the volume develops is that mana can be analysed most productively by paying close attention to its ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Since the late nineteenth century, mana has been an object of intense scholarly interest. Writers in many fields including anthropology, linguistics, history, religion, philosophy, and missiology have long debated how the term should best be understood. The authors in this volume review mana’s complex intellectual history but also describe the remarkable transformations going on in the present day as scholars, activists, church leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs take up mana in new ways.

Celebrating the first twenty-five years of Mana adventures! Since the first game's release in 1991, Square Enix has been dazzling fans worldwide with the fantastical and action-packed world of Mana. More than twenty-five years later, the magic of Mana still lives on and now Dark Horse Books and Square Enix are proud to present The Art of Mana. The first official art book of Square Enix's hit Mana video game series, The Art of Mana collects more than twenty-five years' worth of memories with over 200 pages featuring more than 400 illustrations from the original creative team along with detailed explorations of every character, original sketches, world designs, and much more. Presented in English for the first time, this beautiful collection is not to be missed.

We often invoke the “magic” of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of “mana,” which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between “primitive” ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal ritual the same as the mana that energizes a revolutionary crowd, a consumer public, or an art encounter? At the intersection of anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma, ideology, and aesthetics.

The discovery of New Zealand, the last place on earth to be peopled, is surrounded by myths."Maori Mana: the power of New Zealand's first inhabitants" takes you on a journey exploring the histories of the country's first Polynesian discoverers, its encounters with Europeans and the subsequent settling by Westerners. Particular attention will be paid to the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman and the Dutch immigration wave of the 1950s. Through a discussion of the meeting house and meeting grounds, the relationships Maori maintain to the land will be considered. The vital role of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) and its present-day repercussions will be looked at. Finally the role of taonga or cultural treasures embodying the ancestral identity of a Maori kin group in relation to particular lands and resources will be explained. In so doing attention will be paid to taonga made from different materials by men as well as by women.

Brilliantly elucidating and weaving together the forces of indigenous sovereignty, colonialism, and personal health, Potent Mana offers a uniquely holistic and intimate portrait of the long-term effects of colonialism on an indigenous people., the kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiians). An ethnographic exploration based on fifteen months of research, the book moves the conversation on the dangerous effects of colonialism forward by exploring the theories and practices of Native Hawaiians engaged in decolonization. Decades of substance abuse, mental illness, depression, language loss, and the concomitant dispossession from sacred lands have accompanied colonialism. Consequently, healing, both mental and physical, are essential to decolonization and indigenous sovereignty in twenty-first century Hawai'i. Native Hawaiian-run treatment centers and clinics more than political rallies are centers for healing and decolonization on O'ahu today. The effects of colonialism and the measures taken to counter and move beyond it, as Wende Marshall convincingly argues, do not take place solely on a supralocal level but shatteringly involve the physical and emotional well-being of real individuals. Becoming decolonized is about overcoming the shame of colonialism, and requires a process of remembering the traditions of ancestors and reinterpreting and rewriting histories that have only been told from a colonial point of view. Decolonization is an indigenous perspective, and an understanding that health was impossible without political power and cultural integrity.

In Mana: A History of a Western Category Nicolas Meylan proposes a critical account of Western imaginations of mana, an Oceanic word borrowed by Europeans to denote ‘supernatural power’.