William Mazzarella, "Ecstatic Life and Social Form: The Mana of Mass Society"
Channel: Jnanapravaha Mumbai
Date: 2023-06-13

"Fantasies of Capital: Alienation, Enjoyment, Psychoanalysis" 
— A Jnanapravaha Mumbai Conference (December 16 - 18, 2016)

Day 3 / Session 1 — William Mazzarella, "Ecstatic Life and Social Form: The Mana of Mass Society"

Revisiting the classic anthropological category mana, this paper asks how we might pick up on century-old clues about the relation between ‘primitive’ ritual energy and ‘modern’ practices of mass publicity. The core of the paper is a re-reading of Emile Durkheim’s theory of ritual, placing particular emphasis on how Durkheim imagined the intersection of life and form, energy and signification, enjoyment and meaning. The paper considers what it would take to actualise the latent potentials for a theory of mass publicity that obtrude, symptom-like, out of Durkheim’s conception of mana.