The Maori and his religion: In its non-ritualistic aspects

“Mana is a kind of fellowship.” It all began with Jørgen Prytz-Johansen’s spellbinding sentence encountered in Valerio Valeri’s Kingship and sacrifice. What followed was a long quest for unearthing this neglected gem and to offer it— open-access—to scholars worldwide. The quest involved purchasing a yellowed copy of the tome in a Danish antique bookshop, tracing the elusive copyrights for months, and preparing for lingering and taxing editorial work. We believe the outcome was worth the journey. With his magnum opus, Prytz-Johansen achieved an unsurpassed study in anthropological keywords where traditional texts become the tool-kit for unlocking the moral totality grounding Maori society. Through an exhilarating immersion into a non-Western philosophical system and the universe of mana-terms, this volume offers a signal contribution to the study of religious and ethical cosmologies. We are confident that Prytz-Johansen’s memorable musings of the kinship “I,” “life” and vitality, mana, gifts, fortune, and tapu will continue to challenge the imagination of anthropologists, philosophers, and historians of religion for years to come. Our thanks go first to Bo Alkjær, Prytz-Johansen’s literary executor, who granted permission for the reprint and to Morten Nielsen who managed to locate him in Copenhagen. Bo Alkjær also kindly supplied the errata and an extraordinary unedited postscript that Prytz-Johansen had prepared for a planned second edition of his monograph. The postscript appears in HAU’s edition along with a biographic note of Prytz-Johansen authored by Mr. Alkjær. This new edition has been made possible by the generous volunteer labour of the HAU editorial team and a group of dedicated interns. We have digitized the original manuscript and incorporated the errata that Prytz-Johansen himself had outlined for the planned second edition of the volume. We then reconfigured Prytz-Johansen’s original citation system into one closer to the Chicago style employed by HAU. The style originally employed by the author only cited journal articles by using an abbreviation of the journal title and author name, rather than an author-date system. In the list of references only the journal title that had been abbreviated appeared, rather than the full reference details. In the case of monographs, the original system provided the author name and an abbreviation of the monograph title and page number, rather than the year of publication. In this process of substituting these into the text, we decided not to convert Prytz-Johansen’s original footnotes into in-text citations so as to avoid disrupting the flow of the text. The resulting style aims to facilitate an ease of reading as much as possible for a contemporary reader, while preserving the original flow and format of Prytz-Johansen’s often gripping rhetorical style.