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Charles Stewart Hibridity Syncretism Mixture PDF
Charles Stewart Hibridity Syncretism Mixture PDF
Charles Stewart Hibridity Syncretism Mixture PDF
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The tangled vocabularies for mixture present confusion and uncertainty even for
experienced researchers. What does ‘hybridity’ mean that ‘syncretism’ does not,
and how do either of these terms differ from ‘creolization’? The problem is that
all of these words have been used willy-nilly by different influential scholars, or
regional schools of thought, often with little effort to specify in detail what the
term is supposed to mean, and which antecedent contexts of usage are being
embraced, or rejected. I will not be able to settle this issue once and for all; no
authority, in my opinion, will ever emerge to control these terms and give them
definitive, mutually exclusive spheres of reference. They are part of the creativity
and flow of living theoretical vocabulary. The terms hybridity, syncretism and
creolization inspire and evoke as much as they refer and denote.
It is worth comparing this state of affairs with the vocabulary of the hard
science most directly concerned with mixture, namely Chemistry, where we find
the following distinctions:
Element — Irresolvable unit.
Compound — Combination of two or more elements that has unique properties distinct
from the properties of its elemental constituents. Water, for example, is distinct from
hydrogen and oxygen. A compound can be resolved into constituents, but this involves
adding/generating energy (electricity is needed to separate water into hydrogen and
oxygen).
Mixture — In a mixture the components retain their own properties. Hydrogen and
oxygen can be mixed; they only become a compound when ignited. Mixtures can be
separated by physical means such as filtration or evaporation. In a mixture proportions
may vary, while in a compound they are fixed (e.g. H2O).
Homogeneous Mixtures — Components so intimately combined that they cannot be
distinguished by visual observation.
Heterogeneous Mixture — Components may be distinguished visually.
Solution — Homogeneous mixture of two or more substances, usually of molecular size
or smaller. Components cannot be separated by physical means (e.g. filtration). Different
from a compound because proportions may vary; different degrees of concentration are
possible.
Suspension — Particles in suspension are larger, sometimes visible to naked eye, and
may settle out. A type of heterogeneous mixture.
Colloid — One substance divided into small particles, ‘colloidal particles’, and dispersed
throughout a second substance — for example, fog, smoke, ruby glass. A type of
homogeneous mixture.
1
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), p. 105.
2
Emile Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method [first pub. 1895], trans. by W. D.
Halls (New York: Free Press, 1982); Ian Hacking, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’, in
Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. by D. Sperber, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995), pp. 351–83.
3
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 239.
4
Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:
Basic Books, 1973), pp. 87–125 (p. 93).
5
Stephan Palmié, ‘Fernando Ortiz and the Cooking of History’, Iberoamerikanisches Archiv,
24 (1998), 353–73.
6
Melford Spiro, ‘Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation’, in Culture and Human
Nature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1994), pp. 187–222 (p. 194).
7
Richard Gombrich, Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of
Ceylon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 49.
8
Steven Vertovec, ‘Ethnic Distance and Religious Convergence: Shango, Spiritual Baptist,
and Kali Mai Traditions in Trinidad’, Social Compass, 45 (1998), 247–63.
Cui Bono?
Is mixture a good or a bad thing? Generally speaking, in the past, it was a bad
thing. The main terms under consideration here have historically had fairly
pejorative connotations. A hybrid in the nineteenth century was deemed to
be weaker than its progenitors, and doomed to sterility. A syncretism, for
missionaries in Africa and elsewhere, was a lamentable situation that arose
when people did not learn Christianity properly, and mixed it with indigenous
religions. The original creoles in the sixteenth century were deemed by people in
European homelands like Spain to be weaker, prone to vices, and untrustworthy
for having grown up in the different climate of the New World.
Gradually mixtures came to be seen as good. Hybrids could be stronger, more
resilient and creative. Syncretisms came to be viewed as an inevitable feature of
all religions. And within a few generations creoles used the assertion of New
World indigeneity to claim independence from Spain. The idea of the pure creole
receded in favour of national ideals that embraced mixture between European,
African and indigenous peoples in Latin America. Mixture has been further
celebrated in the last twenty years with the rise of postcolonial studies. Hybridity,
as it is most commonly denominated in this literature, has been valorized as a
space of resistance against modernist, nationalist projects of homogeneity, and
against fundamentalisms. Homi Bhabha coined the influential idea of ‘the third
space’ which displaces the traditional certainties of either parental tradition,
and which becomes a site of creative expression.9 Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses has furnished a prominent example.
I think that societies, peoples, languages and religions have all sustained
influences and interpenetrations in the past. They are all mixed, nothing is
pure, and that can easily be shown in most cases by historical research. The
Portuguese, in Freyre’s view, had interbred with and absorbed influences from the
9
Homi Bhabha, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference, ed. by J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 207–21.
17
Ibid, p. 368.