The Future of Religious Syncretism

As we can see, since the late 1930s, scholars from different disciplines approach to religion syncretism variously and they have contributed their methods, as well as insights in helping us to understand it from different perspectives. Although they interpret it differently, they haven’t closely worked with each other. Peel and Horton think their intellectualist approach is compatible with Ifeka-Moller’s structural method. However, they both go into extremity and defend their own points of view and methods at the expense of underestimating other scholars’ constructive contributions. In fact, both historical and structural methods are needed in exploring religious change in the Atlantic world. If intellectualists, sociologists, anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines could collaborate with each other from different disciplines, our understanding of religious confusion will be greatly enriched.          

  As our studies on religious syncretism keep on going, our understanding of syncretism is always updating. Boas’s universalist/particularist strategy was firstly criticized by his student Herskovits in the late 1930s, and then Herskovits’s cultural relativism was displaced by the social structural and intellectualist methods in the 1970s. In the 1980s, scholars questioned traditional methods on interpreting it and asked themselves to reexamine it. Since the 1990s, scholars realized that syncretism was never a static concept, which was much more complex than what we could imagine. During the past years, it has been defined and redefined by various scholars. In the future, it will be reconsidered again and our understanding of religious change will also be renewed.