The Mana of Mass Society by William Mazzarella (review)

The deepest questions, perhaps, animating the anthropological imagination are those about the motives that make people act, so consistently and recognizably over time, in all those ways that are, inadequately, called "cultural." What forces give form and objective reality to the repeated, seemingly rehearsed, and yet ever-new and vital performances of everyday life? In the late 19th century, such questions were asked especially about apparently irrational magic, fetishistic attachments, carefully observed taboos, and all the panoply of practices that for self-consciously civilized Europeans escaped the grasp of positive, materialistic, scientific explanation. How could such beliefs and practices—as they may be found in "Australia, Africa, and Scotland" (Frazer 1994:28)—be compatible with the dignity of the human intellect (to say nothing of the salvation of the soul)?

The term mana is a hardy survivor of this history, as both an item of "native" belief and a scholarly analytic. The missionary Robert Codrington, author of the Victorian compendium The Melanesians (1891), is usually credited with introducing it into anthropology as the Melanesians' own term for a magical "force altogether distinct from physical power, which acts in all kinds of ways for good and evil" (as quoted in Tomlinson and Tengan 2016:3). In fact, this definition was already in circulation among Europeans from 1877, as a "native" explanation of magic, when the Sanskritist Max Müller quoted it from his correspondence with Codrington. In the hands of the French ethnologues Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, mana was recast not as an item of native belief, but as the very intellectual foundation of magic, "a completely universal affirmation of magical power" (Mauss 2001:155). Shortly thereafter, more literal-minded scholars began to question its general applicability and even its local presence in this or that community of practitioners of magic. Exhausted by such empirical niceties, the high point of mana's popularity had already passed by 1950, when Lévi-Strauss (1987) demoted it to the status of an empty signifier floating atop a reservoir of semiotic powers, a fundamentally non-scientific concept that took on the cast or coloring of whatever it happened to come near. Since then, however, the term with all its shifting coloration and wide resonance has never ceased to exert a fascination. It has remained available for use by any anthropologist who wants to allude to some animating force, some vital principle, some excessive power inherent in things or practices, and to do so with both ethnological specificity and general reach. A scholar like Marshall Sahlins can thus write that "the mana of the social contract lies in symbolism itself" and trust that he will be understood to be making a point about aspects of Fijian kingship and one about fundamentals of social and political life (1983:74).

In his new book, The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella turns back to the archive of anthropological speculations about mana, in just this spirit of comparison. This book is the latest entry in Mazzarella's career-long task of developing a "political anthropology of mass publicity" in order to understand "the place of affective intensities in modern mass democracies" (2013:3–4, 2003). A line of comparative thoughts and evaluations links "primitive" magic and mana to mass democracy and mass marketing, he observes. Most anthropologists will know that Durkheim compared the power of the "primitive" totem to that exercised over citizens by the national flag, and that Malinowski compared Trobriand beauty magic to the "advertisements of modern beauty specialists," seeking parallels between "modern and primitive savagery" (as quoted in Mazzarella 2017:33–34). Such parallels, Mazzarella notes, were seldom meant to flatter anyone, and they have hardly disappeared from our contemporary political discourse. Current allusions to tribalism and magical thinking are as close as the latest op-eds and headlines. But Mazzarella wants to show that such comparisons and the judgments they provoke constitute a kind of diagnostic of mass society itself, and the conditions of subjectivity within it. Thus, he asks: "Are there nonprejudicial...