Themes and Trends of Religious Syncretism in Africa and Americas

    Since the Great Discovery in late 15th century, religious encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans were inescapable. As Europeans traveled around the world, it not only happened in Africa, but also in Americas. On the one hand, European missionaries transmitted their religious views to non-Europeans; on the other hand, non-Europeans responded to European religious penetration, assimilated new ideas and adapted themselves to new circumstances. As an important historical topic, scholars are interested in discussing how African and European religious views and practices were mixed together in the Atlantic world. Although it was quite a popular phenomenon in world history, it was until the late 1930s that scholars started to focus on it and attempted to explore it in understanding cultural acculturation.       

    In the history of the development of religious conversion study, it experiences four phases. From late 1930s to 1960s, Melville Herskovits doubts Franz Boas’s dualist approach and poses his cultural relativism in examining Afro-American culture. Then from late 1960s to the late 1970s, J. D. Y. Peel and Robin Horton propose his intellectualist theory and Caroline Ifeka-Moller presents her social structural theory, which causes a big debate regarding to the methods on it. From late 1970s to late 1980s, scholars rethink their various methods on interpreting it. In this context, Evandro M. Camara rediscovers Max Weber’s religious tradition and advocates a Weberian sociological analysis in approaching it. Since the 1990s, as social scientists are equipped with new theories, they define syncretism as a contested concept, explore its complexity, and attempt to beyond traditional cannons and methods on it.