Syncretic (S)p[l]aces

What is the syncretic? How does it come to us? What does it do? These are all questions eminently – if not immanently – geographical. Yet, they are little explored or even discussed within the well-trodden chambers of the geographical annals and disciplinary halls. Perhaps a lack of geographical engagement with the syncretic is an effect of its contemporary conventional usage as “the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought” (www.oxforddictionaries.com 2012). By speaking simply of syncretic amalgamations (or assemblages, combinatorials, coalescings, emergences, etc.) in terms of beliefs, cultures, and philosophies, their amorphous mo(ve)ments that find extension only in and through the membranous relations between bodies and spaces becomes a necessary field of encounter – the very concrete production of geography that has embarrassingly only relatively recently became a matter of investigation and concern to the discipline through long-needed feminist, humanist, and post-structuralist correctives and critiques.