Syncretisms

My anthropology assumes syncretism as a key word for understanding the transformation in the relationship between cultures and ethnography. Within the conflictual processes of globalisation and localisation, syncretism involves, disturbs, and overwhelms the traditional ways of producing ubiquitous culture, fetish consumption, and digital communication. The term ‘syncretism’ not only helps with the comprehension of a context of accelerated and confused transformations, but also addresses growing communicative disorders alongside a creative, decentralised, and open movement of the term. The paradox of being an instable word inhabits syncretism, due to its continuous change of meanings. Often, the word syncretism is embellished with elegant or more conflicting synonyms, such as pastiche, patchwork, marronisation, hybridism, blending, mulattism, and acculturation: all related to the ambiguous game played by so-called cross-cultural contamination. As part of this game ́s excessive inconsistency, vulgarity and indigenisation, all the clichés of the trio aesthetic-ethic-ethnic are broken and stirred up, as are everyday’s behaviours and lifestyles. Ultimately, through digital mixing, syncretism invests, dissolves, and reshapes the relationship between strange and familiar levels; and the liaisons among elite, mass, and avant-garde cultures.