Herskovits and the “Syncretic Paradigm”

    Scholars have long taken interest in the conversion of African slaves to Christianity in the New World since the late 1930s. However, rarely have they examined the historiography of religious syncretism. In this paper, rather than discuss the impact of religious syncretism on a specific people, I am going to consider African religious syncretism from a historiographical perspective and discuss its contributions in helping us to renew our understandings of the African religious change in the Atlantic world.                                                                    

Herskovits and the “Syncretic Paradigm”
    In analyzing race and ethnicity, anthropologist Franz Boas firstly questions traditional beliefs and proposed his own strategies to deal with it after the World War I. Traditional anthropologists argue that blacks were genetically inferior and “unassimilable” to American culture. However, through adopting two conflicting strategies, namely, universalist and particularist, Boas attempts to reinterpret it. He thinks race as an important category for understanding mental and emotional characteristics of individuals and his universalist strategy predicted that modern technology was creating a uniform culture in America to which blacks were rapidly assimilating. Moreover, he even assumes that blacks would be assimilated in the United States.                                                                       
Boas confidently believes that his dualist approach could explain African religious conversion and he never confronts the contradiction between his universalism and particularism. However, Melville Herskovits, the only Boas student who mainly conducts investigations on Afro-American cultures, deeply reflects the drawbacks of his methods. Herskovits is very interested in considering the relationship between Afro-American and white American culture, as well as the historical diffusion of African culture in the New World. Unlike Boas, he recognizes that the universalist/particularist classification was problematic and develops a theory of cultural relativism. According to him, “the somewhat more thoroughgoing assimilation of Christian and pagan beliefs which has taken place among New World Negroes has, however, gone in large measure unrecognized.”  In the case of the New World Negroes who lived under Catholic influence in Brazil, Cuba and Haiti, he presumes that the religious exchange was not one-sided and Boas’s dualist method limits our understanding of African history and culture.