ABSTRACT
Virtually every culture or religion is synthetic; they have all changed over time, adopting and incorporating exogenous elements and ideas along the way. As Hannerz (1987) and others have suggested, creolization, hybridization, interculturation, or whatever one wishes to call it, is now the rule not the exception. I would only add that it has probably been this way for a very long time, not just since colonization or the emergence of global capitalism. The notion of a pure tradition is only an ideal but, like the notion of a pure ‘race’, a potentially dangerous one.
