ABSTRACT
The discourse of syncretism enters the field of anthropology through the correspondences between colonization, Christian mission and anthropological studies. Essentially syncretism refers to the innovations following the process of the mixing of opposed cultural forms. The anthropologists Andr Droogers and Sydney M. Greenfield mention the influence of the work of the German-American ethnographer Franz Boas on Melville Herskovits. Herskovits's understanding of the concepts of "borrowing" and "survivals" is both a problem and a challenge in his theory of syncretism, because it is embedded in the Boasian paradigm of "pure" culture. The linguist Derek Bickerton presented a theory about linguistic creolization that says something about how we acquire language. Fauconnier and Turner's theory, which disputes the universal grammarians, is a theory of conceptual blending. By recasting the syncretistic system into a system of "cultural hermeneutics" that has the advantage of signifying a non-discriminating intercultural and interpretational quality, and by describing the African/New World-syncretism as a "counter hegemonic strategy".
