Chapter 2 argues that syncretism, a form of eclectic union, is temporal as well as spatial. As a temporal form, syncretism consolidates historical events, daily individual experiences, and social practices onto a shared plane. This chapter analyzes syncretism in Risorgimento Florence, examining how the city adapts to serve modern Italy while maintaining its historical significance. I read Florence through the travel narratives of Susan Horner, two guidebooks (Walks in Florence, which Horner coauthored with her sister Joanna; and Mornings in Florence by John Ruskin), and a forgotten novel (Isolina, which I attribute to Susan Horner). Across these genres, syncretism emerges as a temporal form capable of defining liberty democratically so that Florence potentially serves as a model of egalitarianism internationally in response to nineteenth-century revolutions and wars.

This chapter challenges the supposed transformation “from Baal Hammon to Saturn” in North Africa one of the chief grounds upon which narratives of cultural continuity are predicated. It argues that instead of simple syncretism or the persistence of a god, the material signs used to construct and identify the deity to whom stelae were dedicated underwent important transformations in the second and third centuries CE, changes closely tied to the experiences and practices of empire. Stelae of the third and second centuries BCE made a god present indexically; stelae of the imperial period embraced iconicity in ways that were entangled with empire, including new divine epithets tied to imperial authority and new road systems in the province. And by the end of the second century CE, this iconic system could even work to perpetuate clear social hierarchies.

Born in the year of the liberation Korea from Japanese colonisation, Younghi Pagh-Paan (*1945) grew up during the Korean war and the subsequent division of her homeland. Although she trained in Seoul, her career as a composer properly started with her move to Freiburg in Germany in 1974. The result was a culture shock, and, throughout much of her career, Pagh-Paan struggled with her displacement and endeavoured to reconcile her gender and cultural identity as an Asian woman with Western modernism; vowing, in her own words, ‘[n]ot [to] write music that distances me from what […] I perceive inside me as the root of our culture’. This chapter discusses Pagh-Paan’s career and her aesthetic beliefs, such as her commitment to the student movement and democratic opposition in her country and her syncretistic religiosity that embraces the different spiritual traditions of her country, such as Shamanism and Taoism, as well as her fervent Catholicism. Analysing the reflection of these ideas in her music I conclude that, transcending notions of cultural contrast or ‘East-meets-West fusion’, Pagh-Paan’s work is a response to more than a century of intimate entanglements between Western and Korean culture.

This chapter surveys the market for popular works on world religions that exploded in Britain during the 1890s. Critics have explored how scholars like the Oxford Sanskritist F. Max Müller laid the groundwork for religious studies in the twentieth century by mapping global religions onto a global hierarchy of languages and cultures. Such work tends to confirm our view of Orientalism as an extension of imperial power-knowledge. However, middle-class liberals, evangelical missionaries, and occult enthusiasts all had their own reasons for exploring the religions of the world. Their fascinations unfolded against the backdrop of imperial power but were seldom reducible to it. In addition, studying these publications can challenge our association of the “Naughty Nineties” with radicalism and subversion by showing the importance that middlebrow religious culture played in broadening religious horizons. Popular Victorian publications on Buddhism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism would lay the basis on which Anglo-American religious liberalism could flourish into the postwar period.

Christianity was a growing religion in Britain from the 330s onwards, and Chapter 3 tackles the difficult question of the relationship between Christianity, Christianisation and godlings. The chapter examines the phenomenon of Christian demonisation of pagan cults, arguing that it was a more complex process than mere condemnation and suppression, which inadvertently produced the potential for the survival (and even reinvention) of some of the beings it targeted. Through comparisons with the better evidenced Christianisation of other cultures in Europe and further afield, the chapter develops an interpretative framework for the likely changes undergone by popular religion in Britain’s lengthy conversion period. The framework includes the likely ‘undemonisation’ of formerly demonised entities and the creative ‘re-personification’ of supernatural forces to account for the survival and reinvention of godlings in a Christianised society – where godlings should not be seen so much as ‘pagan survivals’ but rather as non-Christian artefacts of Christianisation.

This essay examines the textual representation of creole religiosity as it developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during its transition from a transplanted, transatlantic belief system into a hybrid American faith. Various textual genres attest to this Creole faith in transition including spiritual life writings, chronicles of religious orders, sermons and tracts dealing with miracles and portents, as well as more formal literary genres including theater and poetry. Creole religiosity was a highly gendered phenomenon, and these texts reveal the contours of the exemplarity the Church demanded from men and women as well as the challenges launched against these ideals. Authors studied here include the canonical like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, as well as nuns and clerics whose names are less familiar but whose texts bring New Spanish devotional culture to life.

This chapter introduces the volume by offering a reflection on the notion of transition within and across Latin American literary production from 1492 to 1800. This period is defined by a series of transitions as, motivated by personal ambitions or brought by force, Europeans and later Africans and Asians crossed oceans to inhabit the already inhabited lands of the Indies. Native societies and the emergent European colonial societies were transformed by these interactions and the processes that underlay them. This introductory essay explores the broad historical context for this period of transition as it was registered on local and global scales. The book is organized around six thematic areas, which in turn are introduced.

The present study explores the learnability of complex morphological patterns, specifically number and gender categories. The typology of morphological systems suggests that infrequent, complex, and structurally marked categories such as the dual are more likely to show neutralization or syncretism than unmarked categories. In two artificial language learning experiments, adult English speakers were exposed to a language with noun class categories both for gender and number. Results suggest that syncretism of gender across dual forms allows for greater learnability of the dual form. However, overall learnability was not affected by whether syncretism occurred in the singular, dual, or plural. These results further the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that shape complex morphological patterns.

Highlighting that in practice the boundaries between religious traditions are not as sharply demarcated as depicted in the media and academic literature, many of the Lagosians whom I interviewed described themselves as ‘religious shoppers’ who had changed their religious allegiances or shifted between them. Chapter 1 analyses religious shopping against the backdrop of entrenched depictions of Lagos as an ‘apocalyptic megacity’. Itsmain argument is that in order to fully understand how religion is practised in a multi-faith setting such as Lagos, we must tackle the compartmentalization of the study of religion by taking religious pluralism – as manifested in the practice of religious shopping – as our starting point. This entails that we approach religion first and foremost as lived practice and experimental mixing.

Chapter 3 presents an ethnographic case study of Chrislam, a series of religious movements that mix Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices, in its sociocultural and political-economic setting in Lagos. In contrast to conventional approaches that study religious movements in Africa as syncretic forms of ‘African Christianity’ or ‘African Islam’, I suggest that ‘syncretism’ is a misleading term to describe Chrislam. In fact, Chrislam provides a rationale for scrutinizing the very concept of syncretism and offers an alternative analytical case for understanding its mode of religious pluralism. To account for the religious pluralism in Chrislam, I employ assemblage theory because it proposes novel ways of looking at Chrislam's religious mix that are in line with the way in which its worshippers perceive their religiosity. The underlying idea in Chrislam's assemblage of Christianity and Islam is that to be a Christian or Muslim alone is not enough to guarantee success in this world and the hereafter; therefore, Chrislamists participate in Christian as well as Muslim practices, appropriating the perceived powers of both.

Chapter 4 addresses the role of the classical rhetorical tradition in bolstering Iberianized Catholicism among native converts in Paraguay and Portuguese India. By taking a connected and comparative approach to the application of the classical rhetorical tradition by Jesuit missionaries and its reception by native audiences both in the Americas and in coastal western India, this chapter argues that classical rhetoric shaped Konkani-language missionary oratory much more than Nahuatl, Quechua and Guarani examples, and offers a possible explanation based on the social and caste structures of the two contexts. In so doing, this chapter places Latin American ethnohistory in a new meta-geographical context, and argues for the important constitutive role played by non-European languages, peoples and cultural practices in the Iberian World.

This essay examines significant trends in Caribbean drama and performance since 1970. From Errol Hill’s vision of a Caribbean national theatre rooted in the traditions of carnival, to Derek Walcott’s engagement with the conditions of colonialism, syncretism is key. Folk and popular culture have assumed a prominent place within Caribbean theatre as part of the process of artistic decolonization. The essay examines plays by Patrick Chamoiseau and Patricia Cumper, which engage in ‘canonical counter-discourse’, before turning to works which explore Afrocentrism and an independent Caribbean identity (seen in the dramas of Hill and Walcott). Performances committed to the consideration of domestic political contexts, foregrounding issues of gender and class, are explored in the work of the Sistren Theatre Collective and Grupo Teatro Escambray, while their legacies are seen in the queer theatre work of Caribbean diaspora artists such as d’bi.young anitafrika and Staceyann Chin.

This chapter focuses on performance at the crossroads of Native and non-Native cultures in early America. It considers in particular the literary depictions of those performative cultures and the literary productions that arose from them. Sacred, militaristic, political, juridical, theatrical, and communicative performances appear throughout colonial and Indigenous archives. Their presence deeply informs Native American literary history and increasingly drives the evolution of North American literary history. The chapter considers the literary record of strategic performances of Indianness whereby Native Americans claim authority over their identity within colonialism. It then considers how this knowledge should necessarily impact the content of literary anthologies and the literary surveys they serve. Attending to the performative cultures of early America makes visible the formative and persistent influence of Indigenous culture on non-Native expression. But it should not encourage a disregard for cultural distinctions or, more specifically, for the sacred.

As the territory and influence of Muslim political authority expanded, the realities of Islamized societies varied greatly. While the resilient appeal of Arabia cannot be denied, the transformation of Asia led Muslims to give Islamic meaning to actions, beliefs, practices, and sensibilities that might have taken form along different paradigms from those emerged in Arabia. Through the centuries Muslims found alternative locations for pilgrimages to fulfill their ritual obligation, but also questioned Mecca’s status as an ideal embodiment of Islamicity as an imagined construct. The hajj rituals show borrowings from pre-Islamic practices, as does the architecture of “classic” mosques in North Africa and the Arab Mediterranean; in Mecca the fusion of local customs with “the law of Islam” was not different than in Java, Aceh, Malaya, or the Levant. Muslim places of worship, general sense of aesthetic, rituals, and legal interpretations adopted and adapted to what existed before the arrival of Islam, in Asia as much as in Arabia. This chapter provides empirical examples and theoretical frameworks to explore and articulate how processes of Islamization necessitated negotiations and active engagement between past and new traditions without undermining Muslims’ commitment to Islam’s precepts.