Mana entered Western scholarship largely through nineteenth century missionaries, notably Robert Henry Codrington, working in Melanesia, whose descriptions were then generalized by comparative religion scholars such as Marcel Mauss and R. R. Marett into a supposed universal category, an impersonal mana-type power said to underlie taboo and magic across unrelated cultures worldwide; this generalizing move, sometimes called "pre-animism," treated Polynesian and Melanesian mana as evidence for a hypothesized primitive stage of religious development common to all humanity. Later anthropologists, including Claude Levi-Strauss, criticized this generalization sharply, arguing that mana had been turned into an all-purpose theoretical placeholder detached from its specific ethnographic contexts, and that Polynesian and Melanesian concepts, while related, are not identical to each other or reducible to one universal primitive category.
The word has also entered popular Western culture at a considerable remove from its religious sense, most visibly as a generic term for a magical resource or power-point in video games and fantasy fiction, a usage with essentially no connection to the specific Polynesian religious, genealogical and political concept described above. As a category internal to Polynesian religious and social life, mana has not been the subject of any scientific test; the debate around it in the history of religion has been about how the concept has been used and generalized by scholars, not about whether the power it names can be measured.