The expression ‘syncretism’ is used more or less similarly to the idea of creolization by anthropologists studying the mixing of African and European elements in the popular religions of Haiti, Cuba and Brazil, the three countries of the New World that have been most intensively studied. Scholars like Herskovits suggested that African retentions in religion (and music, food, language, family relations, attitudes and behaviour) were much greater than had been supposed by unsympathetic observers. Nowadays there is less interest in the authenticity of African survivals in religion and more in the way in which Christianity and African religions were conjoined syncretically, in other words through a process of creolization. Herskovits anticipated this himself by referring to  ‘the thoroughgoing assimilation of Christian and pagan beliefs, which has taken place among new world Negroes’ and again ‘these Negoes [of Haitii Cuba and Brazil] in responding to the acculturative process, have succeeded in achieving, at least in their religious life, a synthesis between aboriginal African patterns and the European traditions to which they have been exposed’. A nice example is how natural phenomena are turned into ‘Saints’. So we have St. Soleil (St. Sun) Ste. la Lune (St. Moon), Sts. Etoiles (Sts. Stars) and St. la Terre (St. Earth), all of whom are worshipped. Think too of St. Bouleversé – who is an anthropomorphised version of the reverses of fate and fortune.

In summary, a new set of religious beliefs − like Voodoo in Haiti, Santaria in Cuba, Shango in Trinidad and Candomblé in Brazil − draws from at least two prior religious traditions, but cannot be reduced to either. That this new ‘third column’, as Malinowski once deemed a similar phenomenon, is definable in its own terms, and has sustained and evolved generationally, make these Creole religions analogous to Creole languages: they are like mother tongues, not pidgins.

RELATED WEBLINKS:

Haitian Voodoo
[From Bob Corbett's Haiti webpage]

Santeria (Cuba)
[Link provided by the University of Virginia]

Brazilian Candomblé
[Link provided by the University of Virginia]

African Independent Churches (AICs)