Syncretism

Syncretism is an important element of global religion, one that denotes amalgamation, exchange, synthesis, and a fusion of diverse beliefs and practices. Originating in religious studies, the term has been growingly used in history, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies. Until recently, it has been postulated on the assumption that civilization, culture, and religion are endowed with unity, coherence, and boundary but that their interaction produces mixed, syncretic forms. Most frequently, syncretism has been identified in religious belief and practice particularly in “heterodox cults”—for instance, African Americans who might combine Islam and the Baptist religion or the Baul singers of Bengal, whose culture brings together Vaishnavism and Islam. It is also used in architecture, in the visual and performing arts, and in the world of ideas, ideologies, and individual and cultural identities to refer to groups as Hindu-Muslim or Hindu-Buddhist.

The syncretic is identified with change produced from cultural encounter that can sometimes yield great cultural florescence as in the case of the Turko-Persian encounter with India and, to a lesser extent, the Arab-Islamic with Europe. It is associated with elite and courtly cultures imbricated in the multiculturality of premodern empires, such as those of the Mauryan emperor Asoka, who became a Buddhist, the Chinese Tang Dynasty, or the 16th-century Ottoman and Mughal empires under Suleyman and Akbar. Syncretism is often located in folk cultures of peasants and pastoralists, in frontier regions or borderlands, and among people relegated to the margins. That syncretism can be a site of resistance for the colonial subject has been emphasized by anthropologists such as Michael Taussig, Jean Comaroff, and Aihwa Ong. In Taussig's work, for example, spirit possession and magic suggest spaces where a spirit queen might preside over “the amputees of history.”

Nonetheless, the critique of syncretism has been a lively one pointing out its pejorative connotations that refer to it variously as confusion, contamination, spuriousness, and deviance. Having come into currency with Protestant discourses, it had often signified the otherness, or distinctiveness, of pagan worlds.

Furthermore, the point has been powerfully made that civilization, culture, and religion are themselves grounded in forms of encounter, learning, and exchange and do not represent any presumed pure domains. This goes for the period following globalization but also for the centuries preceding. Thus, the Judaic was important for early Christianity. Popular Christianity has been the site of many “heresies”—Christians continued with folk practices in Europe and combined Christian theology with indigenous traditions in Latin America. Christianity then has evolved in a dialectical relationship with the “pagan.” Similarly, Islam everywhere encountered indigenous cultures; hence, the existence of Indonesian, Indian, and now European Islam. That is, what is presumed as pure itself dissipates on closer examination.

Officially, the Catholic Church has only recently begun to uphold the validity of syncretisms after Vatican II. The distinction it now makes between religion and culture has allowed it to introduce the notion of enculturation or the indigenization of the Gospel. Among New Age Religions and independent churches, syncretism is conceived of as reversible and even as making possible a return to “pagan origins.”

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