Anthropologists and Sociologists on Religious Syncretism

Following Herskovits, sociologists and anthropologists turn their interests to the study of African religious syncretism. As an anthropologist, Alfred Métraux is concerned to uncover the African substructure of Voodooism and he explores the motives of conversion of Vodun believers to Protestantism. In his Voodoo in Haiti, he mainly discusses the native religion of Haiti. He traces the origins of Voodoo from the religious beliefs practiced by the indigenous peoples of West Africa who were brought to the New World accompanying with the Atlantic slave trade. Moreover, he analyzes Voodoo clergy, houses of worship, rituals, initiation rites, holidays, sacraments, and the role of magic in the religion. Through examining the interaction of Voodoo and Christianity, he shows how Voodoo had in turn borrowed from French Catholicism and converted to its magical uses Catholic saints, rituals, and religious objects.  Although he touches religious proselytism and adopted comparative method, he doesn’t mainly focus on the interaction of Voodoo and Christianity.        

Unlike anthropologists, sociologists approach to it rather differently. In African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations, Roger Bastide believes that the correspondences between saints and African deities transplanted to America were analogous to those found in Brazil. Moreover, he thinks that this phenomenon could be explained only by the structural, cultural, and sociological parallels that facilitated the infiltration of Catholicism into the African sects and its reinterpretation in African terms. According to him, they were:

“1. The structural parallel between the Catholic theology of the saints’ intercession with the Virgin Mary, the Virgin’s intercession with Jesus, and the intercession of Jesus with God the Father and the African cosmology of the orixás as mediators between man and Olorun.
2. The cultural parallel between the functional conception of the saints, each of whom presides over a certain human activity or is responsible for healing a certain disease, and the equally functional conception of the voduns and orixás, each of whom is in charge of a certain sector of nature and who, like the saints, are the patrons of trades and occupations, protecting the hunter, the smith, the healer, etc.
3. The sociological parallel between the Brazilian ‘nations’ or the Cuban cabildos and the Catholic fraternities.”

Compared with Boas and Herskovits, Bastide’s method was more concrete. He analyzes it from a sociological perspective and furthers our understandings of religious conversion. Although he explores it from a synchronic perspective, a historical process of religious conversion is still absent.        


From the 1930s to the 1960s, religious syncretism as a topic is greatly paid attention to by scholars. Although Herskovits’s cultural relativism is helpful for them to understand African religious confusion, rarely have they approached it in terms of his method. It is an undeniable fact that scholars start to focus on religious encounters and their impacts on African indigenous people, as well as on Africans in the new world during their African diasporas. However, as for the suitable methods to discuss it, scholars are still in need of further explorations.