New Phase on Religious Syncretism

New Phase on Religious Syncretism         
                                         
Since the 1990s, several classics are published, in which religious syncretism is greatly reconsidered. One of the most classical one was Syncretism/anti-syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, which is edited by Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw. Assuming that “embracing a term which has acquired pejorative meanings can lead to a more challenging critique of the assumptions on which those meanings are based,” Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw collect essays on the politics and processes of religious synthesis and attempt to rehabilitate syncretism.  Rather than simply use the term as a label to define the boundaries of tradition and innovation, or the confines of culture and religion, they explore the fluidity, permeability and political contingency of these boundaries to become “part of the very subject-matter of syncretism.”  Thus, syncretistic form continually created and recreated as particular actors struggle to promote or resist religious synthesis.                      

  They are concerned to the complexities and contradictions inherent in processes of hybridization, which shapes the strength and novelty of their book.

For example, in discussing the changes introduced in male initiation rites in northeast Papua New Guinea, Wolfgang Kempf challenges our traditional understanding of syncretism through accounting the paradoxical nature of syncretism. Focusing on the circumcision ritual as a product of the Yawing’s encounter with Western colonial values and practices, Kempf points to the contradictions emerging from Yawing men’s subversive appropriation of Christian concepts. In their struggle to resist Christian hegemony, the Yawing end up reproducing the very discourse they try to challenge, thereby contributing to the legitimation of Christian values.    Rather than discuss how Christians forced Yawing men    to accept their Christian views or how Yawming men directly    responded to European Christianization, he tells us the Yawming could appropriate Christian views in their own ways, which could not be simply explained by traditional approaches. Therefore, the complexity and ambiguities of religious change is still in need of further explorations for scholars.