Mana as a Floating Signifier

One influential mid-century anthropologist reclassified the term entirely: rather than a fixed concept, he described it as an 'empty' word that absorbs whatever meaning a given theorist needs it to carry — an observation about how Western scholars used the word, more than about what it meant to the Oceanic peoples who coined it.

Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1950 introduction to Marcel Mauss, reclassifying mana as a floating signifier