Herskovits and the Religious Syncretism

Herskovits also challenges sociological interpretations of American and New World Negro institutions and practices. Sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Robert E. Park argue that the Afro-American culture represented functional adaptations to socioeconomic conditions rather than African cultural survivals. Regarding to this interpretation, Herskovits disagrees with them. He points out, syncretism was produced in situations of contact between cultures from “the tendency to identify those elements in the new culture with similar elements in the old one, enabling the persons experiencing the contact to move from one to the other, and back again, with psychological ease.”  Then he “called for greater sensitivity to history and culture in the acculturative process, arguing effectively that synchronic sociological reductionism not only violated the ethnographic record, but worse, supported the racist myth that the Negro had no meaningful African history or heritage.”                

In order to explain his understanding of religious conversion, Herskovits demonstrates his ethnohistorical method and thoughts in detail. He claims that anthropologists should combine ethnology and history together “to recover the predominant regional and tribal origins of the New World Negroes” and “to establish the cultural base-lines from which the processes of change began.”  To assess the relative purity of African retentions and to specify their social domains, Herskovits adopts several related concepts which together can be glossed as the “syncretic paradigm,” these concepts were: (1) scale of intensity, (2) cultural focus, (3) syncretism proper, (4) reinterpretation, and (5) cultural imponderables.