The

Politics of
Religious
Synthesis
Jalmaani, Fatimah Sol
“ SYNCRETISM
Greek 'syn'- 'with' and
'krasis'- "mixture", def.
the mixing together of
two or more elements

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 SYNCRETISM
“On Brotherly Love” (Peri Reformation, “Syncretistic
Philadelphias), Moralia Controversies“

Plutarch claimed to have George Calixtus (1586-1656)

found an example of advocated for the unification
of the various Protestant
syncretism in the Cretans,
denominations and ultimate
who reconciled their reunion with the Catholic
differences and came Church
together in an alliance
whenever they were faced
with an external threat. He
labeled this coming together
as “their so-called
‘syncretism’”

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Syncretism is often perceived as
negative in theological circles
(seen as degenerate or
illegitimate) but not in
anthropological ones.
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"Syncretism', then, is not a determinate term
with a fixed meaning, but one which has
been historically constituted and
reconstituted. Of what use is it now? Simply
identifying a ritual or tradition as 'syncretic'
tells us very little and gets us practically
nowhere, since all religions have composite
origins and are continually reconstructed
through ongoing processes of synthesis and
erasure. Thus rather than treating
syncretism as a category — an 'ism' — we
wish to focus upon processes of
religious synthesis and upon discourses
of syncretism. This necessarily involves 5
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"If we recast the study of syncretism as the
politics of religious synthesis, the first issues
which needs to be confronted is what we
have termed "anti-syncretism"; the
antagonism to religious synthesis shown by
agents with the defense of religious
boundaries. Anti-syncretism is frequently
bound up with the construction of
"authenticity", which in turn is linked to
"purity" In Western religious discourses and
scholarship in particular, the implicit belief
remains that assertions of purity speak out
naturally and transcendentally as assertions
of authenticity. (Shaw and Stewart, 1994)" 6
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1
Syncretism
in Latin
America
⦁ “There has been and is a continuous process
of negotiation between Latin forms of
Christianity and indigenous religions and
cultures, and attention needs to be paid to the
historical details and social nuances in each
time and place"
⦁ A degree of cultural fit between a pilgrimage
shrine and the indigenous culture helps it to
achieve acceptance
⦁ "This familiarity makes it possible for pilgrims
to negotiate the cultural pathways of the
sacred center far from their home parish"
(Moruus and Crumrine, 1991)
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VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE - COATLICUE
"Conversion to Christianity, despite the intentions
of the European clerics, did not eliminate the
indigenous associations. The emergence of the
Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of the Americas
within the Catholic tradition, can be taken as a
case in point. This image of the Virgin Mary
miraculously imprinted on the shirt of the Indian
Juan Diego hard on the heels of the Spanish
conquest of the Aztec Empire in the sixteenth
century, shows her standing on the crescent
moon. The site of her shrine, on the hillock of
Tepeyac, was the location of the Aztec shrine to
Coatlicue, terrestrial goddess who had given birth
to Huitzilopochtl, the Aztec personification of the
blazing sun at noon" 9
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 VIRGIN OF
GUADALUPE

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2
Pilgrimage
in the
Andes
⦁ Andean cultures have pilgrimage traditions
extending back 3000 years, and have
reached the peak of their development
during the 5th century imperial Inca rituals
that linked all shrines of the empire through
sacrificial blood.
⦁ This blood is contained in living bodies that
walked extensive mountain trails linking
Cusco to its outlying regions: thus mimicking
a heart and insuring the life, stability, and
fertility of the community.
⦁ This can be understood as "bodily mapping
of socio-religious space

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tr
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THREE STAGES IN THE SPANISH

TI
O
N
RELIGIOUS COLONIZATION OF THE

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"For the Spaniards, they were the vehicles for
displacing the satanic perversions of native
religiosity and for reclaiming a foreign land for their
faith and their God. For the Indians, on the other
hand, they were the means to domesticate the
foreign gods, to insert these evidently powerful
divine interlopers into the matrix of the animate
landscape and through them to reclaim and to
reappropriate the extra-local sacred and ritual
dimension of their colonized territories. Each
group perceived and misunderstood the
behaviour of the other through the inverting
lens of its own misunderstandings. Thus, the
Spanish clergy could and did construe devotional
pilgrimage on the part of the Indians as evidence of
their conversion to Christianity. The Indians, for
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2
Conclusio
n
In summary, then, pilgrimage depends on (l) the
association created within a particular religious
tradition of certain events and/or sacred figures
with a particular field of social space, and (2) the
notion that the material world can make manifest
the invisible spiritual world at such places In
addition, a pilgrimage site is connected in complex
ways to the non-sacred world around it. It has
economic, social, and political ramifications for the
local community, the region, and even the nation.
(Dubisch, 1995)

• The early lack of attention paid to pilgrimage is

being addressed
• We need be less concerned with precise
definitions of what does or does not constitute a
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pilgrimage, than with the lessons we can learn 16
"Pilgrims are embedded in social relations,
they express a particular culture, they may
have political goals and aspirations, and their
presence has economic implications for a
locality. In short, there is still considerable
scope for anthropological work, from a variety
of perspectives, on this ubiquitous but
relatively neglected aspect of religious
behavior".

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THANK
YOU! 18
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