fect entire religious systems. Berner’s insistence on syncre-
tism as a process, however, has become crucial; other schol-
ars, as we shall see presently, shared this evaluation.
A similar development occurred in anthropology. An-
thropologists were less susceptible to the notion of pure cul-
tures than historians of religion, and early on they subscribed
to a descriptive use of the term. But anthropologists also
began to realize that such a description would make sense
only when applied to a process, “syncretization,” not to a
state: syncretism as a state would call for its opposite, pure
culture, but such a pure culture exists only at the end of an
almost infinite regression towards hypothetical origins; all
known past and present cultures are syncretistic (Stewart and
Shaw, 1994, pp. 7–9; Johnston, 2002, pp. 71ff).
Rejection. More recently, scholars rejected the term al-
together. Following the lead of recent cultural studies, espe-
cially Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) who in
turn followed the pioneering work of the colonial historian
Edward Said, these scholars reject the assumption that reli-
gions are autonomous entities or systems that can at some
point react with each other; they rather focus on the constant
interaction of single elements in a continuum where interac-
tion takes place both at the zones of contact and at every pos-
sible other place as well; in Luhmann’s sense, then, we would
have to enlarge the system to global size. Boundaries are not
the result of intrinsic processes but they are set from outside,
usually through hierarchically superior and powerful agents
that delineate national religions (versus foreign religions), or-
thodoxies (versus heresies), or correct religions (versus native
distortions in a colonial setting). The discourse on syncre-
tism is thus inevitably political, and the descriptive term
“syncretism” is replaced by “hybridity” to express this aceph-
alous interaction of elements in a potentially global system.
Up to now, the term and its concomitant methodology have
been applied to the question of gnosticism (King, 2003) or
the formation of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism (Boyarin,
1999, p. 8).
This approach builds on the insight that religions are
not autonomous entities (Joachim Wach, Religionswissen-
schaft. Prolegomen zu ihrer wissenschaftlichen Grundlegung,
1924, p. 86) and succeeds in taking the criticism against the
term syncretism seriously; in a move that is similar to the re-
jection of the term magic as a “semantic trap” (M. Wax and
R. Wax, Current Anthropology 4 [1963]: 495–513), the de-
scription makes use of a new term. Two problems will have
to be addressed in future research. One is the simple fact that
traditional terminology is surprisingly resistant and inert (or,
perhaps less surprisingly, the scholarly community as such is
conservative), as the case of magic demonstrates. The other,
more serious question is whether a model that deals with cul-
ture can be transferred to religion without modifications and
adaptations: is religion an integral and equal subsystem of
culture, or do its elements behave in a different way?
Middle ground. In between these two opposing views
lies a third approach that on the surface looks like a compro-
mise, although it is somewhat prior to the introduction of
the term hybridity. It starts from the same discontent with
syncretism as a very vague descriptive term with a normative
life of its own and the view that there are no religions that
would be entirely autonomous entities. All religious phe-
nomena in a given society have always been open to interac-
tions not only from inside the system (Berner’s “rationaliza-
tion”) but from the outside, which lead to changes in single
elements or in the entire system. Thus, as a descriptive cate-
gory of religious or cultural phenomena, syncretism would
be unnecessary, not the least because it is a category that is
based on an evolutionary understanding of culture and reli-
gion: these phenomena are defined by their origin. Neverthe-
less, in this approach the concept is retained in two distinct
ways: as describing processes of religious change and in a dis-
course of syncretism; these discourses necessarily involve the
workings of power and of agency (Stewart and Shaw, 1994).
The first way became a focus of scholarly interest in the
later quarter of the twentieth century, and it lacked a distinct
vocabulary. Agreeing with Berner’s restriction of “syncre-
tism” to processes only, this approach opens itself to the same
problem as the first, that is, to the necessity of defining the
term in a rather specialized way, which therefore potentially
reduces its communicative value. The second interest is a
critical and historical one and reflects the self-reflexive state
of contemporary religious studies that it shares with most
other fields in cultural and social studies that also led to the
rejection of the term. The two ways of dealing with the term
and the underlying reality seem in a somewhat precarious
combination; there is no self-evident path leading from syn-
cretism as a process to syncretism as a discourse.
EXEMPLIFICATION. An example might highlight the advan-
tages and problems in the different approaches. I shall not
select one of the well-known areas of syncretism as outlined
above by Colpe but deal with two very distinct phenomena,
the creation of new religious movements and the formation
of divine personalities.
Invention of a new religion. In the past, the term was
applied with preference to new religious entities, either to de-
fine them or to characterize their creation. A case in point
is the Roman mysteries of Mithra. A single actor, the anony-
mous inventor of Mithraism, created it in a conscious act of
bricolage by taking over elements from what he regarded as
an exotic religion (Persian) but acting inside his own cultural
and religious matrix and reacting to concerns in this very so-
ciety (Beck, 1998, pp. 115–128). One could call this creative
process syncretism and agree that the term has to be confined
to comparable processes, such as the formation of single
gnostic bodies or even the creation of Mormonism, or one
could define the term hybridity to denote these same process-
es. The decision is more one of political correctness than of
scholarly gain, and in both cases, it involves the redefinition
of a broader term from another field.
Formation of a divine personality. Another area that
traditionally made use of the term syncretism is the formation8936 SYNCRETISM [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS]