Narrative
The Melanesians
Robert Henry Codrington · 1891
Synopsis
A study of the peoples of the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands and the small islands lying between them. The book describes kinship and social organisation, chiefs, property, secret societies, magic and possession, the rites of birth, death and funerals, the arts, and it records tales from tradition. It sets out at length the mana, a force distinct from physical power, which acts for good as for ill and which it is advantageous to possess or to control.
Context
The book appeared in Oxford, from the Clarendon Press, in 1891, six years after a study of the Melanesian languages; the Times reviewed it as early as July. Its observations concern chiefly the New Hebrides, the Solomons and the islands between. His definition of mana was taken up by Marcel Mauss in his 1904 essay on magic and by Robert Ranulph Marett, then by the whole of the anthropology of religion. The work was reprinted in New York in 1972 and can today be read online.
Who it is for
A dense work of ethnography, organised by theme; the passage on mana is the most cited.
Prizes and reception
The first detailed description of mana in English, it brought the word into the vocabulary of anthropology.
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