ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the historical motives for the scholarly discourse connecting power with syncretism. The issue of defining the category of syncretism has mostly been a problem for historians of religions who were occupied with interpreting heterogenous or innovative historical data primarily from Late Antiquity. However, the discourse of syncretism has entered the field of anthropology through the correspondences between colonization, Christian mission and anthropological studies. The approach to syncretism was largely a search for cultural survivals of ethnic minorities as a way of keeping track of the project of reformulating old customs in contact with newer ones. Essentially syncretism referred to the innovations following the process of the mixing of opposed cultural forms. The history of colonization involved racial issues, which collided with the emergence of new Creole identities in the New World; identities that met the discrimination with counter-cultural force.
