Syncretism 265understanding African American cultural formation does
not dismiss the African infl uences on black culture, but ac-
knowledges the real limitations that isolation from Africa
and bondage placed on that development.
One noted example of cultural syncretism among en-
slaved Africans in the Americas was their conversion to
Christianity. In the British North American colonies, which
later became the United States, that conversion involved a
blending a various religious beliefs and rituals from West
and Central Africa with Protestant Christianity. Th e prod-
uct of that fusion is what scholars and lay people alike refer
to as black Christianity. In this illustration, African beliefs
in spirit possession rationalized the Christian belief in the
Holy Spirit to the slave’s worldview. Similarly, African reli-
gious practices that incorporated dance and the playing of
multiple musical instruments validated for converted slaves
the Psalmist’s entreaty to worship the creator with dance
and music. Th us, ecstatic worship, dance, spirit possession,
and shouting rooted in the varied heritages of enslaved
Africans transformed not only their religious identity
as African Americans but also the worship style of white
evangelical Christians. In this case, religious syncretism
was reciprocal.
Syncretism allows scholars to explain not only the his-
toric development of African American culture but also
contemporary confi gurations of black culture, particularly
in the age of globalization. Syncretism helps explain a new
era of cultural cross-pollination in the African Diaspora,
where Latino, Caribbean, African, and African American
cultures combined to produce new vibrant cultural expres-
sions, such as hip-hop.
See also: Acculturation; Africanisms; AmalgamationJeannette Eileen JonesBibliography
Hall, Robert L. “African Religious Retentions in Florida.” In Afri-
canisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Herskovits, Melville J. Th e Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1941.
Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. “Th e Birth of African-Amer-
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says in History and Culture, ed. Timothy E. Fulop and Albert
J. Raboteau. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Stewart, Charles. “Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Refl ections on
Cultural Mixture.” Diacritics 29, no. 3 (1999):40–62.
Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Th eory and the Foun-
dations of Black America. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987.explain the complex phenomena of cultural interpenetra-
tion by acknowledging but not deriding mixture. Linguists
(scholars who study language) initially used creolization
to explain the emergence of new languages—pidgins and
creoles—when two or more distinct linguistic groups came
into contact. Pidgin was the simple form of a language fi rst
spoken by people who came into contact with one another
but did not share a common language. For example, fi rst-
generation Africans enslaved in the Americas developed
pidgins to communicate with their European enslavers.
Th ose Africans passed those languages down to their chil-
dren, so that the next generation spoke them as “native”
languages—creoles. Although scholars use creolization
predominantly to explain linguistic mixture or syncretism,
the term is also used to explain identity formation. As in-
dicated in the preceding example, not only were new lan-
guages formed (i.e., patois, Black English, and so on), but
new identities were formed as well (African Americans,
West Indians, Creoles).
Hybridity also explains cultural mixture. Although
initially used pejoratively to denote racial mixture (misce-
genation or “mongrelization”), scholars now use hybridity
to explain the mixture of two cultural elements. Like syn-
cretism, hybridity recognizes deliberate choices made by
individuals to blend identities or cultural elements to their
benefi t. For example, the term African American recog-
nizes the hybrid identity of peoples of African descent in
America. Ostensibly, it does not privilege either the Ameri-
can or African component of black identity in America. It
views black identity as a hybrid of two cultural experiences,
broadly speaking. It acknowledges the African origin and
past and the American past and present that inform the Af-
rican American experience.
With regard to the history of Americans of African
descent, scholars employ syncretism to explain not only
the “birth” or emergence of African American culture, but
also its specifi c elements as they evolved in the context
of race-based slavery and white supremacy. For example,
some scholars of the colonial and antebellum African
American experiences invoke syncretism to explain such
myriad cultural phenomena as slave naming practices, reli-
gion, parades, burial rituals, family patterns, marriage rites,
language, music, dance, diet, and dress. In their examina-
tion of these cultural elements, these scholars call atten-
tion to the African retentions found in slave adaptations of
dominant cultural forms. Th us, syncretism as a model for