The embodiment of a floating signifier

As described in ethnographies, the 'floating signifiers' of social anthropology appear akin to similar categories in contemporary Western societies such as energy. Both may be embodied in actual experience. The practice of ritual orgasm, Pra-Na, and its relation to the group's cosmology, are intrinsic to a religio-therapeutic community in San Francisco whose ideas derive from reified Western notions of 'vital energy' along with popular Chinese medicine, and in which the second author conducted fieldwork involving participant observation between 2008 and 2009. The article examines closely the formulations of 'energy' in the Western world, and similarities to non-Western concepts such as Melanesian mana, and asks whether the experience of ritualised orgasm by members of the group leads to their notion of cosmic energy, or whether the understanding of embodied energy is purely arbitrary from a somatic perspective. With reference to Durkheim's ([1912]1976. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin) -effervescence, we suggest the former is most likely.