Across Polynesian cultures, from Hawaii to Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Tonga and Samoa, mana names an efficacious, supernatural power understood to inhere in chiefs (ali'i, ariki), priests, ancestors, certain objects and even words spoken with authority, and to manifest practically as success, healing power, fertility of land, or victory in battle. A chief's mana was understood as inherited through genealogy (whakapapa in Maori), tracing back toward the gods, and as needing to be actively maintained; it could be increased through right conduct, successful leadership and ritual observance, or diminished through defeat, transgression or violation of tapu.
Tapu, sacred restriction, and mana operate as a paired system: a person or object of great mana is correspondingly tapu, requiring ritual protocols to approach safely, since ordinary or lesser-mana people risked harm from careless contact with something powerfully sacred, a dynamic recorded in detail in early ethnographic sources such as George Grey's nineteenth century collection of Maori traditions. Mana was never confined to religious specialists alone; it operated as the basic currency of political and social legitimacy throughout Polynesian societies, so that a chief's authority to rule and a priest's authority to mediate with the gods rested on the same underlying concept, not on two separate grounds.