Word: mana
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Collector-Photographer (LIFE) Eliot Elisofon, who organized the show, put his finger on what the primitive artists were after: not beauty so much as life. In fact, says Elisofon, some of the objects "were believed to be alive by their makers. An important belief of the Polynesians was in mana, an impersonal supernatural power. Sculptures contained mana." Such modern sculptors as Lipchitz, Gonzalez, David Smith and Brancusi are not far from this idea, and for mana they, too, sacrifice resemblance. "The primitive artist and the modern one," says Elisofon, "both produce more of what they feel than of what they...
...their power in the service of a democracy instead of in the service of a tyranny. In a free society the scientist will play his role as citizen like anyone else. The new priest like the old priest will have to learn that, no matter how potent the mana that he commands, no matter how great his power and his truth, he is not vested with any peculiar authority to decide on its uses. In a democracy, that authority resides in all persons alike...
...sometimes fighting as long as 36 hours without food or water, crawling on hands and knees up sheer mountains, the end-running Marauders met the Japanese in obscure clearings with names like Walawbum, Shaduzup, Inkangahtawng, Miangkwan. This was the primitive Burma where tribesmen had often never seen a white mana harshly foreboding land of thunderous rivers and almost impassable jungles, where leeches clung to a man and drained his blood while stinking rot filled his soggy boots, where it rained 160 inches a year and nearly every Marauder shook with malarial fever...
When Rome's picture weekly, La Setti-mana Incom, hit the newsstands last week, Italians took one look at its cover and rushed to buy. Although Ingrid Bergman has permitted no photographs of herself and child, Incom's cover showed a joyful Ingrid cooing to her newborn babe in a hospital room, while Roberto Rossellini, the doctor, the nurse and even the Madonna (from a painting on the wall) seemed to beam with approval. Incom's teasing caption: "The Strange Story of This Photograph...