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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Religious syncretism is a currently fashionable topic, both among anthropologists and theologians. To the anthropologist, syncretism offers not only fascinating field material, but also important theoretical questions. Supposing two or more world religions are present in the same culture, as is the case with the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka. Will the internal logic of the world religion oblige its adherents to reinterpret the culture? Or will the common culture eventually obliterate the boundaries between the religions? For theologians the boundary between Christian and merely Christian-influenced is both extremely difficult to draw and extremely necessary. Whom do we admit to the local council of churches? Where does liturgical inculturation end and repaganization begin? What about the survival of pagan attitudes-devotion, for instance, to Mammon or Mars—to be found among the ultra-orthodox? Some contemporary theologians, for instance Robert Schreiter in his Constructing Local Theologies, have found it possible to take a rather sympathetic view of syncretism, but this seems to go with a certain sociological naivety, since syncretism is usually the product of systems of domination in which there is a wide gap between the religions of the dominators and the dominated.
There is a story of a famous medical scientist who used to tell his students, ‘These, gentlemen, are the symptoms of typhoid fever, but you will find all the cases are different.’ The same surely applies to syncretism. We need to look at particular cases, before we generalize about syncretism. In this article, I am looking at two studies of syncretising religious situations published by anthropologists in this decade, Jon P. Kirby’s God, Shrines and Problem-Solving among the Anufo of Northern Ghana, and James W. Fernandez’ Bwiti, which deals with a new religion among the Fang of the Gabon.
1 For an intriguing discussion of this point in the Sinhalese case see Stirrat, R.L., ‘The Shrine of St Sebastian at Mirisgama’. Man NS Vol 16 (1981), pp. 183–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Schreiter, Robert, Constructing Local Theologies, SCM, 1985, pp 151–158Google Scholar.
3 Collectanea Instituti Anthropos, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 1986, pp 368, DM 85.
4 Princeton University Press, Princeton and Guildford, 1981, limited paperback edition, pp xxiv and 731, £19.
5 La Notion de Personne en Afrique Noire (edited by Germaine Dieterlen, Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 1973) has many essays on the African understanding of the self.
6 See the second edition of Meyer Fortes’Oedipus and Job, with an additional essay by Robin Horton (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
7 Notably J.H.M. Beattie. See his ‘On understanding ritual’, in Wilson, Bryan, Rationality, Blackwell, 1970Google Scholar.
8 Fernandez, op. cit, pp. 304, 309.
9 Robert Schreiter's statement (Schreiter, op. cit, p. 96) that ‘Many African cultures do not have a story of the Fall’ is true, but then many African cultures do not have myths of human origins. The majority of African myths of human origins seem to have some story of a fall.
10 Fernandez, op. cit, p 341.
11 Fernandez, op. cit, p 305.
12 Fernandez, op. cit, p 474–5.
13 See chapter 19 in Fernandez for the Bwiti practice and theory of preaching. All the forms of Bwiti studied by James Fernandez were evidently influenced by Catholicism. Some Protestant catechists had gone over to Bwiti, and one wonders what ‘Protestant’ Bwiti is like. Presumably it would have much more stress on the Bible, as distinct from Bible stories.
14 Horton, Robin, ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’, Africa 37 (1967), 50–71, 155–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘On the Rationality of Conversion. Africa 45 (1975), 219–235, 373–397)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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