Marx and Manatheism

A mong the most quoted texts in the literature of anthropology is no doubt Claude Lévi-Strauss’s short Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss first published in 1950. The passages that continue to exercise an enormous force of attraction on readers are those pertaining to the notion of mana, a concept— or, as Lévi-Strauss would call it, a signifier—which itself functions as a name for just such forces of attraction in the “primitive” cultures analyzed by Mauss as well as by his uncle, Émile Durkheim. Lévi-Strauss famously argued that mana functions in the way his two predecessors claimed before all in their own writings: “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 ismana there.” Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to critique and, ultimately, disenchant the concept by analyzing it as a linguistic phenomenon, as the name for a structural feature of all human languages that comes to be hypostatized, treated as a substantial reality, has, it would seem, itself absorbed a remnant of the force it was meant to dissolve. The work of disenchantment can, it would seem, exercise its own considerable charms. Lévi-Strauss’s account of the emergence and persistence of notions like mana is essentially an anthropogenic one itself structured around a conceptual impasse or