ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses rethinking syncretism in the African diaspora as a critical and revisionary practice, one that reconfigures dominant discourses with variable, and at times quite significant, consequences. The concepts of syncretism, reinterpretation, and cultural imponderables, which for Herskovits distinguished different types of African retentions, are recast in my argument as modalities of revision and resistance. The classic syncretism of African gods and Catholic saints, we can recast its historical genesis as a grand counter-hegemonic strategy. What Melville J. Herskovits perceived as a psychological mechanism of cultural integration, allowing blacks to move between African and colonial orders with relative conceptual and emotional ease, was in fact a much more powerful process of discursive appropriation. The essentials of Herskovits's syncretic paradigm extract the interpretive kernel from its scientistic shell. This involves a pilgrimage to the classic shrines of New World syncretism where, in Brazilian Candombl, Cuban Santera, and Haitian Vodoun, African gods embrace Catholic saints to promote new religi.
