Mana in Christian Fiji: The Interconversion of Intelligibility and Palpability Matt Tomlinson How might religious discourse about powerlessness motivate practical strategies for gaining power? To answer this question, I analyze two events in Fiji, both explicitly violent and markedly Christian: the story of a murder committed by a man who wanted to become a Methodist minister and a threat of cannibalism by men who supported a coup d’état that was justified with reference to Fiji as a Christian nation. These events are best seen as responses to a common theme in indi- genous Fijian religious discourse: the loss of mana (efficacy). This theme motivates the “interconversion” of these events between poles of intelligibility and palpability: palpable actions are transformed into intelligible products such as narratives; conversely, intelligible products are enacted. The cases of “good Christian” murder and cannibalism, I argue, reveal the transformative dynamics of religious discourse and suggest how claims about the loss of efficacy can be practically effective. Matt Tomlinson, Monash University, Anthropology/School of Political and Social Inquiry, Menzies Building, No. 1111, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia. E-mail: matt.tomlinson@arts.monash.edu.au. Fieldwork and archival research has been funded by an International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Bowdoin College, and the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. I thank these institutions for their support. Parts of this paper were discussed at the Rhetoric Culture Conference in Mainz, Germany, in February 2005. I especially thank Niko Besnier, Paul Geraghty, Shane Aporosa, and three anonymous reviewers for JAAR for their comments, suggestions, and corrections. All errors are my own. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2007, Vol. 75, No. 3, pp. 524–553 doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfm034 © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org Advance Access publication on August 4, 2007