Crypto-Religion and the Study of

Cultural Mixtures: Anthropology,

Value, and the Nature of

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Syncretism
Joel Robbins*

Although anthropologists rarely use the term crypto-religion, one can

argue that they tend to analyze the cultures of most non-western converts
to Christianity in crypto-religious terms. This tendency, which follows
from the theoretical investment anthropologists have in cultural continu-
ity, inflects anthropological approaches to conversion and syncretism in
disciplinarily specific ways. This paper works to develop a model of syn-
cretism that is not haunted by crypto-religious analysis and to demon-
strate its value in considering cases in which people have converted to
charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Christianity. The argument is illus-
trated with field materials from research in Papua New Guinea and con-
cludes by considering what this rethinking of anthropological notions of
syncretism might mean for placing the concept of crypto-religion in the
theorization of processes of religious transformation more generally.

ALTHOUGH IT MAY INITIALLY appear to be unrelated to my

major themes, I begin this article on the way notions of crypto-religion

*Joel Robbins, Department of Anthropology-0532, University of California-San Diego, 9500

Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0532, USA. E-mail: jrobbins@weber.ucsd.edu. An earlier version
of this paper was written for the conference “Comparing Religious Conversion and Crypto-
Religion in Christian and Muslim Societies” organized by Maurus Reinkowski and Marc Baer at
the University of Freiburg. I thank the participants at the conference, and in particular the two
organizers, for comments on the version I presented. I also thank the staff of the JAAR and Rupert
Stasch for comments that improved the final text as it appears here.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, June 2011, Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 408–424
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfq098
Advance Access publication on December 13, 2010
© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
 Robbins: Crypto-Religion and the Study of Cultural Mixtures 409

have shaped anthropological approaches to syncretism with the obser-

vation that anthropologists have come very late to the study of
Christianity. It is only in the last decade or so that some of them have
made a self-conscious effort to develop an anthropology of Christianity
that focuses on studying and comparing the religious lives of Christians
around the world. Scholars have suggested numerous reasons why
anthropologists put off for so long the task of studying Christianity

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(Robbins 2003a; Cannell 2006; Bialecki et al. 2008). One argument has
it that Christians are too familiar to constitute a proper object for a dis-
cipline founded on studying otherness. Conversely, some argue that at
home some kinds of Christians are too different, too opposed to the
modernist ideals upon which anthropology is founded, to make
empathizing with their worldview comfortable, even when that world-
view has been exported to places other than those in which anthropolo-
gists live their lives (Harding 1991). In more practically grounded
terms, others point out that anthropologists and missionaries often
struggle against one another quite directly in those locales both of them
call the “field,” and this leads anthropologists to side with those of their
informants who resist the Christian message and to spend less time
with those who more thoroughly convert. Finally, a last position has it,
anthropologists have theoretical difficulty with the very notion of con-
version as a radical rupture with the beliefs and practices that one held
before, a conception of conversion that is central to the kinds of evan-
gelical Christianity that are spreading so rapidly today in many of the
parts of the world anthropologists study (Robbins 2007). Suggesting as
such concepts of conversion do that one can throw off one’s culture in
an instant, and just as quickly take on a new one, they fly in the face of
the ways anthropologists conceptualize culture as their object of study.
Whether they subscribe to older notions of culture as deeply held and
shared traditions or newer ones of culture as long-sedimented, highly
disciplined bodily practices, anthropologists tend to assume that the
cultures they study endure through time. The fact that Christian
conceptions of conversion proclaim that this need not be the case
renders them an immediate affront to this core disciplinary assumption,
and provides anthropologists with one more reason to avoid studying
Christians in the field.
All of these explanations for why anthropologists have avoided
Christianity in the past capture part of the truth, and in this article
I am not particularly interested in choosing between them. I have
chosen to dwell on the impediments anthropologists have found block-
ing their path to the study of Christianity because I think they bear
directly on the perhaps particular ways in which anthropology has
410 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

inflected the notion of crypto-religion as well as a number of other con-

cepts important for the study of religion: most notably, those of conver-
sion and syncretism. In what follows I want to develop this claim by
examining critically the anthropological interest in crypto-religion and
its influence on disciplinary approaches to conversion and syncretism,
and then, more constructively, to go on to argue for a new approach to
syncretism that is less beholden to the assumptions crypto-religious

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analysis puts into place. This new approach, I will suggest, among other
things makes possible a much richer comparative study of Christian
conversion and its cultural implications, a point I will illustrate with
some field material from my research on conversion to charismatic
Christianity in Papua New Guinea.

ON THE BANALITY OF CRYPTO-RELIGION

In talking about the place of crypto-religion in the anthropological
imagination, it is worth noting at the outset that anthropologists do not
use the term very much. Indeed, if as a condition of making use of this
term I had to cite even a single important anthropological work in
which the author prominently deploys it, I would have to keep quiet.
Yet if we do not worry about the term itself, but rather about the con-
ceptual space it stakes out, it is not at all difficult to make the argument
that anthropologists who have been faced with Christian conversion
among those they study have turned to the notion of crypto-religion
with impressive consistency over the whole sweep of disciplinary
history. They make use of the idea of crypto-religion in two forms.
One, which we might call the full-blown form, suggests that although
people may claim to have converted on the basis of the kind of change
of heart that Christian doctrine in many of its formulations demands,
in reality they have only done so because they were coerced into con-
verting by the colonial situation and its missionary representatives, or
because they were bribed by the goods the missionaries offered (food,
medicines, etc.) into playing along with a game the rules of which they
never really accepted. Underneath whatever show of Christian convic-
tion such “converts” make, this form of the crypto-religious argument
has it, it is clear that their primary religious commitment is to their tra-
ditional faith—the practice of which anthropologist should work assidu-
ously to document. This full-blown form of the crypto-conversion
model is not very subtle in its analytic technique—its argument can be
boiled down to something like “keep searching until you find some
beliefs and practices that look traditional and assume that they are the
 Robbins: Crypto-Religion and the Study of Cultural Mixtures 411

most important aspect of people’s lives”—but it has nonetheless been a

mainstay of the anthropology of religion.1
In its less full-blown form, the anthropological model of crypto-
religion is often far more analytically sophisticated and theoretically
up-to-date. Rather than simply suggesting that people engage Christian
missions only as much as they have to or want to for pragmatic reasons
and always keep Christian ideas at arms length in cultural terms, this

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model argues that missionary efforts often do significantly transform
the lives of those at whom they are directed. Even as missionization has
such effects, however, this genre of argument has it that missionaries
rarely touch the core of people’s religious lives, which remain bastions
of tradition and critical energy that can be put in service of resistance
to the emerging colonial or postcolonial orders which Christianity rep-
resents. This style of analysis has been most influentially developed by
the Comaroffs, notably in the two volumes of their Revelation and
Revolution trilogy that have thus far been published (Comaroff and
Comaroff 1991, 1997).
In these two books, the Comaroffs analyze the encounter between
British Nonconformist missionaries and the Southern Tswana people of
South Africa between 1820 and 1920. The overarching claim they argue
across both texts is that for the most part the missionaries failed to
communicate the content of the Christian message they preached to the
Tswana. At the same time, however, the Nonconformists were able to
convey to the Tswana many features of the capitalist culture that gov-
erned the ways they lived their own lives. The Comaroffs call the
process through which the missionaries taught the Tswana much about
capitalism but little about Christianity “the long conversation.” They
describe this conversation in the following terms:

This conversation had two faces. Its overt content, what the parties
most often talked about, was dominated by the substantive message of
the mission and was conveyed in sermons and services, in lessons and
didactic dialogues. As we shall see, the gospel, delivered thus, made
little sense along the South African frontier in the first half of the nine-
teenth century. More often than not, it was ignominiously ignored or
rudely rejected. But, within and alongside these exchanges, there
occurred another kind of exchange: an often quiet, occasionally stri-
dent struggle between the Europeans and the Africans to gain mastery

1
Douglas (2001) provides a detailed history of the anthropological study of Christianity in
Melanesia that cites a number of examples of this type of analysis, though she does not discuss
them explicitly in terms of their reliance on the idea of crypto-religion.
412 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

over the terms of the encounter. (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 199,
emphasis in original)

Throughout the two volumes, the Comaroffs have thus far dedicated to
chronicling the long conversation, they argue that across its course the
Tswana and the missionaries struggled over such “terms” as the
language that would dominate their interaction, the way their inter-

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action would unfold in space, and what should count as reasonable
argument and valid knowledge within it. Moreover, the two sides also
debated over the nature of work, and the best ways to heal, dress, con-
struct homes, and socially identify oneself. But despite its seemingly
wide-ranging character, the long conversation appears never to have
featured much meaningful discussion of the cultural content of
Christianity itself. Instead, as suggested in the above quotation and in
many other places in both texts, the Comaroffs suggest that the Tswana
did not attend to this content, ignoring it when they did not resist,
reject, or misunderstand it (1991: 201, 228, 236; 1997: 8, 69, 338). As a
religious system with meanings of its own, Christianity seems to have
had only a minimal role to play in the long conversation.
In spite of the fact that the line of argument the Comaroffs rep-
resent does not dwell on the ways ostensible converts are forced to hide
their traditional religious beliefs and practices—in fact does not tend to
refer to the people it studies as converts at all—I think it is fair to clas-
sify it as an argument about crypto-religion. In anthropological terms,
at least, the conclusion of this kind of argument is very similar to that
reached by those who deploy the full-blown form: both assert that
while people find themselves engaged by much of what the mission
brought to them, and are able to stay in dialogue with the mission to
the extent they have or want to, they have managed to preserve their
religious consciousness largely intact and thus should not be counted as
Christians.
Committed to one or the other of these models of crypto-religion,
the majority of anthropologists were until recently ill-prepared to recog-
nize any other kind of conversion than the kind that hides a more fun-
damental commitment to traditional religion. They routinely relied on a
hermeneutic of suspicion that counseled them to doubt the sincerity, or
at least the accuracy, of the claims the people they studied sometimes
made that they had in fact converted in more far reaching ways.
Searching for traditional religion behind the Christian mask, they were
licensed to discard the mask itself as soon as they had torn it off.
This approach was a comfortable one for anthropologists who were
not inclined to study Christianity anyway for the reasons listed above. It
 Robbins: Crypto-Religion and the Study of Cultural Mixtures 413

did not involve them in studying something that was at once too close
and too distant from the world at home, nor did it entangle them
further with the missionaries who were such an awkward presence in
the field situation. And crucially, it did not force them to question the
assumption of cultural continuity that was so much a part of the intel-
lectual foundation of their discipline. All of this is to say that the
anthropological investment in crypto-religion is over-determined. To be

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sure, many of the people anthropologists have studied may well have
been crypto-religionists, but probably not all of them. The fact that vir-
tually all of them have been analyzed as such is a testament to how
much work the idea of crypto-religion has done to help traditional reli-
gion maintain its place at the center of anthropological attention.
The cost to anthropology of such a single-minded focus on crypto-
religion has been a relatively poor record of contributing to the theori-
zation of concepts such as conversion and syncretism that are closely
connected with the study of Christianity. I discussed conversion briefly
above, and will not discuss it in detail here. My focus instead will be on
syncretism, a topic that in various ways applies to Christianity through-
out its history and that is of clear importance to the study of global
Christianity today. As anthropologists have turned to the study of glo-
balization in the last fifteen years, syncretism and allied notions such as
creolization and hybridization have become very popular. Yet there is a
growing recognition among many in the discipline that they have not
been well theorized (Friedman 1999; Palmié 2006; Eriksen 2007;
Robbins 2007; Stewart 2007). Scholars most often deploy them simply
to make the point that in some situations cultural elements are mixed
together, without attempting to consider how such mixtures are cultu-
rally ordered. I want to suggest that at least as they are applied in the
religious domain, it is anthropological models of crypto-religion that
stand behind such facile uses of these terms. These models allow
anthropologists to assume that the fundamental cultural ordering of
any situation is provided by traditional ideas, even if in crypto-fashion
such ideas are not evident on the surface of things. Structures of the
longue duree will always win out, so there is little sense in considering
the ways new elements do more than find themselves absorbed by the
traditional frameworks that encompass them.
The effect of treating all cases of cultural mixture as ones in which
crypto-religious dynamics are in play is nowhere more evident than in
the imagery that surrounds syncretism. In such imagery, new religious
ideas and practices are always “on the surface,” an “overlay” that covers
over “core” or “deeper” traditional ideas. Or, referring to terms whose
use Fausto (2007: 84) has noted, Christianity stands as a matter of mere
414 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

“appearance” that may obscure but does not destroy a traditional

“essence.” Anthropologists rarely imagine that these polarities can be
reversed: that a religion like Christianity might provide the core that
underlies a superficial or coerced play with tradition (though see
Ingham 1986). It is quite likely that all of this imagery borrows on
Christian, and particularly Protestant, conceptions of conversion as
something that must touch the depths of the person, and not just their

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outward behaviors (as they say in Papua New Guinea, it is no good to
be merely a “skin Christian”)—that is to say, in making such arguments
anthropologists are engaging the conceptual resources of the very
Christian tradition they are working to sideline. More importantly for
my argument here, however, is that when syncretism is understood in
this way, it becomes in anthropological hands little more than just
another rubric under which to pursue traditional anthropological
approaches to cultural continuity. And while the techniques that
anthropologists have developed for studying continuity may be of inter-
est to those examining crypto-religion elsewhere, they have not led
those who use them to have much that is new to say about syncretism.

VALUE AND THE STRUCTURE OF SYNCRETISM

In the remainder of this paper, I want to consider what a model of
syncretism that does not rely on the assumption that people are always
practicing crypto-religion might look like. What would a model of syn-
cretism freed of the imagery of hidden traditional depths and evanes-
cent novel surfaces allow us to see that we cannot now see? Before
laying out this new model, however, I want to pause to make one dis-
tinction that will make my argument easier to follow. This distinction is
one between syncretism understood as an individual project and syn-
cretism understood as a cultural phenomenon. Many studies of syncret-
ism by anthropologists and others focus on the elaborate projects
specific individuals have undertaken to synchronize or otherwise
manage relations between their old and new religions. For example, the
book that has most influenced my conception of crypto-religion,
Jacobs’s Hidden Heritage (2002), largely takes this approach in its
chapter on conversion. Studies of individual syncretic projects are
important, both for understanding religious change at the level of per-
sonal experience and because such individual projects provide the raw
materials out of which cultural syncretisms are built. But my focus here
is on theorizing cultural syncretisms, which I take to be syncretic struc-
tures that are institutionalized in widely shared beliefs and routinely
enacted practices; in the content of daily conversation and the
 Robbins: Crypto-Religion and the Study of Cultural Mixtures 415

architecture of public rituals. I am interested, that is, in the syncretisms

by which communities live their common lives. It is these cultural syn-
cretisms to which I turn my theoretical attention.
My view of syncretism is informed by a model of culture that
defines it as made up not only of concepts or categories, but also of
values that structure the relations between them. This model of culture
is drawn from the work of the anthropologist Louis Dumont (e.g., 1980,

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1986), a scholar perhaps most easily if a bit too roughly placed as the
most innovative member of the structuralist camp after Lévi-Strauss, as
read through Weber’s work on value and rationalization. There is no
space here to lay this model out in detail.2 For present purposes, it will
suffice to say that in this model values arrange cultural categories into
hierarchies in which less-valued categories are only elaborated or ration-
alized to the extent that they do not conflict with more-valued ones.
Furthermore, it is only in contexts that are themselves less valued that
less-valued categories are able to approach full expression. As an
example of these last two features of cultural organization, consider the
way in which within cultures influenced by western liberalism, highly
valued ideas of liberty (conceived of as the right to differ) limit the
rationalization of less valued ideas of equality (conceived of as a matter
of similarity); because of this, ideas concerning equality of opportunity,
which support the achievement of individual difference, are quite well
worked out while those of equality of outcome, seen to promote the
creation of similarity, are less so. Equality of outcome is in fact only
thoroughly pursued in the less-valued context of the home (where all
children, even as their abilities to differ from one another should be fos-
tered, should be loved and treated equally).3
When we turn to looking specifically at cultural syncretisms, this
model of culture allows us to argue that they too are structured by
values, such that we need to examine the relations between old and new
elements to determine how the syncretism is structured, rather than
assuming that older elements are always more fundamental. Should
such syncretism be arranged along the lines of Christian values, then
older elements that remain in play would not signal the survival of a
deeper, crypto-religion but would rather indicate that traditional ideas
that do not conflict with more-valued Christian ones have been some-
what elaborated, albeit only in ways that do not challenge those that are
more valued.

2
I lay out my reading of Dumont in greater detail and provide key references in Robbins (2004a,
2009).
3
This analysis is laid out in much greater detail in Robbins (1994).
416 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

In order to suggest the advantages of this approach over the more

traditional anthropological approach to syncretism as crypto-religion, I
turn now to some material from my fieldwork among the Urapmin of
Papua New Guinea. The Urapmin are a group of 390 people living in
the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Contacted in the late
1940s, they were never directly missionized by Westerners. They did,
however, learn about Christianity from those of their neighbors who

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were missionized by the Australian Baptist Missionary Society, and in
the 1960s they began to send some of their young men and women to
other communities to study with these missionaries. These young men
and women converted, and they brought a general knowledge of Baptist
Christianity back to Urapmin, but they did not succeed in converting
many other members of the community. Things then changed dramati-
cally in 1977 when a charismatic Christian revival movement with its
roots in the Solomon Islands swept through the region in which the
Urapmin live. As the revival progressed, people in Urapmin responded
to becoming possessed by the Holy Spirit, or to watching their relatives
become possessed, by converting to the charismatic form of
Christianity that the revival brought. Within a year, all Urapmin had
converted, and they came to see themselves as an entirely Christian
community. They tore down the cult houses and “threw out” the ances-
tral bones that had been at the center of what they came to define as
the religion of their ancestors, and they built churches and began to
pray regularly in their gardens and houses as well. Achieving salvation
in what they understood to be Christian terms became their main indi-
vidual and collective project.4
By the time I arrived for field research in the early 1990s, it was dif-
ficult to describe Urapmin religion, or indeed Urapmin life more gener-
ally, in anything but Christian terms. Yet if in predictable
anthropological fashion I had been searching for some kind of crypto-
religion on which to hang my analytic hat, there was one obvious place
to look. This was to the nature spirits (motobil) that the Urapmin had
traditionally understood to own all of the land and other natural
resources, including animals, around them. Although the nature spirits
were rightful owners of everything the Urapmin drew on for their
subsistence, they generally let the Urapmin use what they owned.
In return, however, they expected the Urapmin to observe a number of
taboos, some connected with how people comported themselves when

4
I discuss the history of Urapmin conversion and the nature of their contemporary Christianity
much more fully in Robbins (2004a).
 Robbins: Crypto-Religion and the Study of Cultural Mixtures 417

gardening and hunting, and others connected with eating specific kinds
of foods. When Urapmin broke these taboos, the nature spirits would
make them sick by grabbing human bodies with their hands and feet
and clutching them tightly. In some cases, the spirit holding someone
would eventually let go of its own accord, but in others a spirit would
cling obstinately to its victim, requiring people to sacrifice a pig to it
before it would let go. Urapmin understood all adult sicknesses that did

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not end in death to be caused by nature spirits in this way (nature
spirits can also be the cause of infant death; human sorcery causes all
adult deaths).
From the point of view of their Christianity, the Urapmin now say
that in reality the nature spirits do not own all of the resources the
Urapmin use. Rather, as they regularly put it, “God made everything”
and it belongs to him. Furthermore, God wants the Urapmin to be able
to use all the thing he made, and hence there is no need to observe the
taboos the nature spirits put in place. In fact, observing such taboos
amounts to displaying a lack of faith in God’s power, since it suggests
that one does not trust that God can protect one from the punishments
the spirits might attempt to exact.
The Urapmin talk in similarly disempowering terms about what
they currently take to be the real identity of the ancestors to whom they
used to perform rituals designed to make their land prosper and help
their boys become strong warriors. Now, they say, they realize that these
ancestors did not create the Urapmin people. Rather, God created both
the Urapmin and their ancestors, and sometime after the time of Adam
and Eve, the ancestors lied and claimed to have themselves been divine
and created the human beings who came after them. During the
revival, this realization justified the abandonment of the traditional cult
houses and ancestral bones, and the abrogation of another set of
taboos, this one connected with the ancestral mother known as Afek.
Hence in both the case of the ancestors and that of the nature spirits,
Christianity would appear to have neatly erased traditional Urapmin
religion.
Yet the story is not so simple, or at least not as far as the nature
spirits are concerned. It is true that my discussion thus far does pretty
much accurately describe what happened to the ancestors. Though
older Urapmin can describe their traditional religion and the role of
ancestors within it, there is no hint of active religious practice that is
organized around the ancestors, and it is not possible to make a case
for the existence of a crypto-religion carried out in their name. But as
regards the nature spirits, there is a more complex story to tell. When
Urapmin get sick, they still blame the nature spirits. It should come as
418 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

no surprise, then, that dealing with these spirits constitutes one of the
major preoccupations of Urapmin Christian life. One of the most
important groups of Christian ritual specialists dedicates most of their
time to this task. This is the Spirit women—a group of women who can
become possessed by the Holy Spirit virtually at will when sick clients
come to them. Once the Holy Spirit possesses a Spirit woman, it shows
her which spirit(s) is holding on to her sick client. She then prays in

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the Spirit to ask God to tear the spirit off of the client, chase it from
the Urapmin territory, and bind it in hell. Sometimes, when a child
remains sick even after several prayer sessions, the Holy Spirit will even
tell the Spirit woman attending to the child to order the sacrifice of a
pig to the nature spirit. Urapmin are ambivalent about following this
directive, since aside from these sacrifices they practice no other tra-
ditional rituals. But you cannot, as they say, “talk behind the Holy
Spirit’s back,” by which they mean you cannot doubt what the Holy
Spirit says through the Spirit women, and since nature spirits can
succeed in killing children, the stakes are very high in any case. Thus
people do on occasion sacrifice pigs to nature spirits in order to cure
children of illness.
It would be inaccurate to represent the Urapmin concern with
nature spirits as the center of their Christian religious lives—both in
church and in their very active personal prayer lives people care over-
whelmingly about sin and salvation—but it is fair to say that worries
about the nature spirits are their most prominent secondary religious
concern. Along with engaging the nature spirits through the Spirit
women whenever someone is sick, people often talk about the benefits
that would come if the Spirit women could clear all of them out of
Urapmin territory by deploying rituals that look like versions of those
that mark the globally diffused spiritual warfare movement (Debernardi
1999; Jorgensen 2005; Robbins n.d.). For an anthropologist inclined to
find a crypto-religious survival of tradition underneath the Christian
“surface” of Urapmin religious life, the salience of the nature spirits in
everyday talk and practice would appear to make for a very easy case.
There is no doubt, such an anthropologist might argue, that the
Urapmin have taken on some aspects of Christianity, nor that they like
to present themselves as Christians, but it is equally clear on the evi-
dence of the role of the nature spirits in their lives that their traditional
religion is still flourishing in important respects.
An analysis of syncretism that focuses on the role of values in struc-
turing the relations between the cultural categories of different origins
that make up any given cultural mixture can help us determine the
extent to which this account of crypto-religion in Urapmin might be
 Robbins: Crypto-Religion and the Study of Cultural Mixtures 419

true. Such an analysis can begin by posing a question that does not
appear to be readily answered from within a crypto-religious account:
why has the fate of the ancestors, who have almost disappeared from
Urapmin religious life, been so different from that of the nature spirits?
If people in Urapmin had as their primary goal the retention of their
traditional religion, why would they not continue to venerate their
ancestors as much as they continue to fear and placate the nature

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spirits who they once thought owned the world around them? From the
point of view of an analysis based on values, this is not so difficult to
explain. The primary value in the kind of charismatic Protestantism the
Urapmin practice is the salvation of the individual. The struggle for
such salvation is for each individual based on the recognition that God
has created the universe and established the most important framework
from within which to engage it. When God is understood in this way,
Urapmin conceptions of the ancestors represent a direct threat to the
task of rightly understanding his creative power. For the ancestors were
traditionally understood as creators themselves, both in the mythical
past, when they created the Urapmin people, and in the recent past,
when their power created strong men, abundant gardens, and plentiful
game. Coming into conflict with the more-valued idea of God as
creator, the elaboration of ideas about the ancestors has been radically
restricted; since so much of the way people understood the ancestors
focused on their creative power, the ancestors have been reduced to
having almost no role in a contemporary Urapmin culture that accords
Christian ideas the highest value.
The case of the nature spirits is different. Ideas about them have not
been restricted almost to the point of erasure, but they have been
retained and elaborated only to the extent that they help to account for
the existence of illness and sometimes death in the world. Since the
Urapmin do not credit the Christian God with creating these things, or
at least not with causing current manifestations of them, the nature
spirits have been able to retain a presence in Urapmin life. In effect,
they supply a key element of the Urapmin solution to the problem of
theodicy. But to the extent that people might be tempted to further
elaborate upon the nature spirits—for example, by reviving and extend-
ing the tradition of using them to think in creative and positive ways
about notions of ownership and sharing (Robbins 2003b)—they would
find themselves blocked by a public discourse uninterested in allowing
the spirits to encroach on God’s turf. In no respect can the nature
spirits represent ambivalent, trickster-like figures, which there is some
hint they may have done traditionally. It is only as figures of evil that
they are able to survive in Urapmin life.
420 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

I could develop further this analysis of the relationship between

Christianity and traditional religion in Urapmin. One way to do this
would be to consider the way nature spirits now enter public discourse
primarily in relation to Christian ritual specialists, the Spirit women,
who continually proclaim the mastery God has over them. Another
would be to look at how the Urapmin practice the sacrifices they do
carry out, surrounding them with prayers that state vociferously that it

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is ultimately God who heals (see Robbins 2009). But I think I have said
enough in the context of this article to demonstrate the way an analysis
in terms of values can get us further into a situation like that of the
Urapmin than can one in terms of crypto-religion. Without denying
that some aspects of traditional religious belief do remain in play, it
situates them with a precision that shows that they do not set the goals
toward which Urapmin people strive in their religious lives.

CONCLUSION
I want to make three points in conclusion. I have argued here that
the notion of crypto-religion nicely illuminates a tendency of analysis
that is so deep in the anthropological approach to the religious lives of
those outside the west that anthropologists are all too often unaware of
their reliance on it. Because it is fundamental to the way anthropologists
deploy their notion of culture, it is also likely to influence those from
other disciplines that draw on this theoretical tradition. Having named
the phenomenon of crypto-religion and become conscious of the ana-
lytic tendency it underwrites, perhaps we can begin to consider criti-
cally our over-application of it. The piece of theoretical theatre, to
borrow Althusser’s (1971: 174) nice phrasing, at the heart of the idea of
crypto-religion is that of people struggling to maintain their religion in
the face of various kinds of pressure to abandon it. This image of
people struggling to preserve their religion fits perfectly with the
anthropological investment in cultural continuity. But anthropologists
and others interested in studying culture should only resort to it where
this is the drama that is actually taking place. Where other things are
going on, they will need other concepts and tendencies of analysis. I
have offered a model of the way syncretic phenomena can be analyzed
as structured by values as one contribution to this diversifying project.
My second point in conclusion is of relevance to all scholars from
whatever disciplinary background who study Pentecostal and charis-
matic Christianity. The Urapmin cultural situation is far from unique.
Versions of it appear in almost all places in which people who were not
previously Christian convert to Pentecostal or charismatic Christianity.
 Robbins: Crypto-Religion and the Study of Cultural Mixtures 421

In the vast majority of these cases, a phenomenon I have called onto-

logical preservation occurs in which people continue to believe in the
reality and power of the spiritual beings who were at the center of their
traditional religion, but at the same time demonize them and enlist
God as their ally in a struggle to defeat them (Robbins 2004b). The
complex cultural formations that result from the combined processes of
ontological preservation and demonization are complex, with traditional

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religion appearing to be very much alive in the midst of equally vocal
commitments to conversion in the same way beliefs in the power of
nature spirits co-exist with the lengthy church services held three or
more times a week in Urapmin. Analysts who confront these cultural
formations have had difficulty interpreting them. Some, focusing as it
were on the hours in church, see them as clear indications of the over-
whelming force of cultural globalization wiping out “local” cultures.
Others, eyes trained on the power converts continue to attribute to the
spiritual figures of their traditional pantheons, see these situations as
clear examples of how local ideas can hold out even in the face of the
intense pressures for abandonment conversionist religions often bring
to bear. In the midst of such interpretive confusion, there is a tempta-
tion to adopt a crypto-religious line of argument in which analysts attri-
bute the spectacular growth of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity
to what they take to be its secret of allowing people to essentially prac-
tice their traditional religion under the protective cover of a Christian
façade. I hope to have shown how inaccurate such an account would be
for the Urapmin, and to have indicated that it is likely equally off target
in many other cases of Pentecostal and charismatic conversion as well.
More generally, I hope that the model of syncretism I have presented
might allow us to determine empirically when such a crypto-religious
analysis holds, and when it does not.
The third strand of my conclusions is addressed specifically to the
concerns of those whose work is focused on the study of crypto-religion.
Throughout the process of writing this article, I have been sensitive to the
extent to which I have wandered far beyond the territory explored by
most scholars of crypto-religion. Rather than sticking close to the core
theoretical drama of crypto-religion—struggling traditionalists negotiating
their lives in the face of coercive demands for change—I have treated the
concept of crypto-religion as underwriting a whole style of anthropologi-
cal analysis, and one with several variants. I hope to have shown that no
matter how specialized and perhaps relatively rare crypto-religion may
appear to be as an empirical phenomenon within the history of religions,
anthropologists tend to treat it as very widespread and quite banal—in
practice, until very recently, they have defined it as the default outcome
422 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

of most encounters between Christianity and other cultural traditions.

The anthropological reliance on crypto-religious analysis, I have argued,
has warped the way in which the field has conceptualized conversion
and, in particular, syncretism. Perhaps this analysis might be useful to
those studying crypto-religion in the stricter sense as well. Perhaps, for
example, a close look at the values in play in truly crypto-religious situ-
ations might allow analysts to provide more nuanced accounts of the reli-

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gious mixtures that follow from them, or to explore the values in play in
cases where true segregation of religious ideas and practices takes place.
At the very least, I hope that this tour through the ways another discipline
has grappled with the notion of crypto-religion might shed some light on
the concerns of others who study this phenomenon.

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