Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture

Author(s): Charles Stewart

Source: Portuguese Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2011), pp. 48-55
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/portstudies.27.1.0048
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Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture

Charles Stewart
The tangled vocabularies for mixture present confusion and uncertainty even for
experienced researchers. What does hybridity mean that syncretism does not,
and how do either of these terms differ from creolization? The problem is that
all of these words have been used willy-nilly by different influential scholars, or
regional schools of thought, often with little effort to specify in detail what the
term is supposed to mean, and which antecedent contexts of usage are being
embraced, or rejected. I will not be able to settle this issue once and for all; no
authority, in my opinion, will ever emerge to control these terms and give them
definitive, mutually exclusive spheres of reference. They are part of the creativity
and flow of living theoretical vocabulary. The terms hybridity, syncretism and
creolization inspire and evoke as much as they refer and denote.
It is worth comparing this state of affairs with the vocabulary of the hard
science most directly concerned with mixture, namely Chemistry, where we find
the following distinctions:
Element Irresolvable unit.
Compound Combination of two or more elements that has unique properties distinct
from the properties of its elemental constituents. Water, for example, is distinct from
hydrogen and oxygen. A compound can be resolved into constituents, but this involves
adding/generating energy (electricity is needed to separate water into hydrogen and
oxygen).
Mixture In a mixture the components retain their own properties. Hydrogen and
oxygen can be mixed; they only become a compound when ignited. Mixtures can be
separated by physical means such as filtration or evaporation. In a mixture proportions
may vary, while in a compound they are fixed (e.g. H2O).
Homogeneous Mixtures Components so intimately combined that they cannot be
distinguished by visual observation.
Heterogeneous Mixture Components may be distinguished visually.
Solution Homogeneous mixture of two or more substances, usually of molecular size
or smaller. Components cannot be separated by physical means (e.g. filtration). Different
from a compound because proportions may vary; different degrees of concentration are
possible.
Suspension Particles in suspension are larger, sometimes visible to naked eye, and
may settle out. A type of heterogeneous mixture.
Colloid One substance divided into small particles, colloidal particles, and dispersed
throughout a second substance for example, fog, smoke, ruby glass. A type of
homogeneous mixture.
Portuguese Studies vol. 27 no. 1 (2011), 4855
Modern Humanities Research Association 2011

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Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture

49

The chemical vocabulary for mixture could probably be further explored, but this
is sufficient to show that Chemistry has a clear analytical vocabulary grounded
in certain principles: variable versus fixed proportion; visibility or invisibility of
elements; energy necessary for fusion or separation. Chemistry focuses on units
of nature that show universal consistency in properties. Furthermore, these units
do not talk back. Chemical compounds do not read research reports, or change
their minds about how to act. For Ian Hacking, they are indifferent to how they
are classified.1 In this respect Chemistry is a positive science, fundamentally
different from the social sciences and humanities. Although Durkheim initially
set out to create Sociology as a science based on the study of social facts, his
positivism cannot capture the looping effects of classifications.2 As Hacking
explains: A new or modified mode of classification may systematically affect
the people who are so classified, or the people themselves may rebel against
their knowers, the classifiers, the science that classifies them.3 Social science
researchers may, for example, identify a situation and denominate it as
syncretism. The people so described may then agree or disagree with this
analysis. They may celebrate their syncretism and use it to attract new members,
or they may decide to stamp it out as an embarrassment. The classification itself
precipitates social changes.
To use Clifford Geertzs terms, the hard sciences generally work at the level
of models of , which are value-free descriptive or analytical statements about
empirical objects.4 Social scientists may present descriptions of social situations
that are nothing more than models of . These social scientists cannot, however,
prevent their descriptions and analyses from being mobilized within the social
field as models for the moulding of societies. Models of are deduced from
existing things. Models for are blueprints for the establishment of objects that
do not yet exist; people apply them to construct ideas and images that appear
realizable.
The American idea of the melting pot, or Fernando Ortizs culinary analogy
of the Cuban stew known as ajiaco,5 are two such examples where a model
of a particular situation is adopted as a model for what should go on in
the future with institutional assistance. Acculturation, assimilation and even
1
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), p. 105.
2
Emile Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method [first pub. 1895], trans. by W. D.
Halls (New York: Free Press, 1982); Ian Hacking, The Looping Effects of Human Kinds, in
Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. by D. Sperber, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995), pp. 35183.
3
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 239.
4
Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:
Basic Books, 1973), pp. 87125 (p. 93).
5
Stephan Palmi, Fernando Ortiz and the Cooking of History, Iberoamerikanisches Archiv,
24 (1998), 35373.

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50

Charles Stewart

multiculturalism may start out as descriptions (models of) and then become
goals to be implemented, maintained, or achieved (models for). In the domain
of mixture, then, it is difficult to keep the neutral description of a society
separate from the impulse to produce society in a certain way. Not only are our
terms for mixture inconsistent (creolization, mixture, hybridity), but the social
phenomena that they identify are inconstant because, once labelled, the public
recognition of these phenomena causes them to alter from what they were.
I differentiate the key terms of my title in the following way:
Mixture: most generic term for blending of distinctive elements in any sphere.
Hybridity: begins in race theory/genetics, but has long since been extended metaphorically.
Now largely synonymous with mixture.
Syncretism: Originally applied to religious systems. Extends to fusions of idea systems:
philosophies, ideologies, ritual practices, science/medicine.
Creolization: The process by which Creoles are formed. Initially, a Creole was a plant,
animal or person of Old World origin, born and raised in the New World. Creolization
thus involves indigenization and transformation. In linguistics a creole is a pidgin
language learned as a first language by a succeeding generation.

Creolization and syncretism broadly overlap the idea of mixture/hybridity, but

they are not reducible to mixture. Syncretism covers certain limiting cases such
as dual systems where people practise two religions side by side, in alternation
or complementarity. Such situations often arise after conversion and may fre
quently be found in areas that have recently been missionized. Theravada
Buddhism as practised in Thailand, Burma or Sri Lanka furnishes an example.
It has long been noted that, theologically, Buddhism does not admit any
supernatural beings. The Buddha was an exemplary human being and adherents
follow his path to wisdom. In local Burmese communities, however, people also
appeal to a variety of supernaturals such as the nat spirits that survive from preBuddhist times,6 while in Sri Lanka people resort to Hindu gods as well as local
spirits.7 In Gombrichs analysis, the Buddha and his path mediate otherworldly
concerns of salvation, while people appeal to gods and spirits only to ameliorate
this-worldly problems of disease and misfortune. Whether this arrangement
represents the complementary use of different traditions or their mixture is in
the eye of the beholder.
Cases of religious convergence such as that encountered by Steven Vertovec
present another limitation on the syncretism-as-mixture model.8 In Trinidad,
Shouter Baptists, practitioners of the Afro-Christian religion of Shango, and
6

Melford Spiro, Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation, in Culture and Human
Nature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1994), pp. 187222 (p. 194).
7
Richard Gombrich, Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of
Ceylon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 49.
8
Steven Vertovec, Ethnic Distance and Religious Convergence: Shango, Spiritual Baptist,
and Kali Mai Traditions in Trinidad, Social Compass, 45 (1998), 24763.

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Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture

51

followers of the ecstatic Hindu cult Kali Mai all have very similar forms of spirit
possession. Yet they have not borrowed from each other. The shared features can
be accounted for in terms of separate historical traditions, although they may
have come closer in form through proximity, and conditioning by the same local
social and environmental forces. They are not syncretic, but rather convergent.
Creolization similarly covers territory that does not overlap with mixture. The
earliest definitions of a creole often insisted that this was a person of pure Old
World descent. What made this person different from erstwhile compatriots in
the Old World was the acclimatization, seasoning, indigenization, adaptation
and loss undergone in the New World. Such restructuring can occur either with
genetic mixture, or without it, via localization in a new environment and the
acquisition of immunities, cultural practices, and goals.
Cui Bono?
Is mixture a good or a bad thing? Generally speaking, in the past, it was a bad
thing. The main terms under consideration here have historically had fairly
pejorative connotations. A hybrid in the nineteenth century was deemed to
be weaker than its progenitors, and doomed to sterility. A syncretism, for
missionaries in Africa and elsewhere, was a lamentable situation that arose
when people did not learn Christianity properly, and mixed it with indigenous
religions. The original creoles in the sixteenth century were deemed by people in
European homelands like Spain to be weaker, prone to vices, and untrustworthy
for having grown up in the different climate of the New World.
Gradually mixtures came to be seen as good. Hybrids could be stronger, more
resilient and creative. Syncretisms came to be viewed as an inevitable feature of
all religions. And within a few generations creoles used the assertion of New
World indigeneity to claim independence from Spain. The idea of the pure creole
receded in favour of national ideals that embraced mixture between European,
African and indigenous peoples in Latin America. Mixture has been further
celebrated in the last twenty years with the rise of postcolonial studies. Hybridity,
as it is most commonly denominated in this literature, has been valorized as a
space of resistance against modernist, nationalist projects of homogeneity, and
against fundamentalisms. Homi Bhabha coined the influential idea of the third
space which displaces the traditional certainties of either parental tradition,
and which becomes a site of creative expression.9 Salman Rushdies The Satanic
Verses has furnished a prominent example.
I think that societies, peoples, languages and religions have all sustained
influences and interpenetrations in the past. They are all mixed, nothing is
pure, and that can easily be shown in most cases by historical research. The
Portuguese, in Freyres view, had interbred with and absorbed influences from the
9
Homi Bhabha, The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha, in Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference, ed. by J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 20721.

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52

Charles Stewart

Moors before they began to colonize different parts of the world. The Japanese
language is written in a modified Chinese alphabet. Christianity contains traces
of Judaism, Roman religion and various eastern religions, and so on.
Calling a religion syncretic, or a culture hybrid, is thus not much of a
revelation for scholarship; there is little triumph in affixing a label of mixed
on social forms. Of more importance is the study of: 1) who, in the social field,
is making claims of purity or mixture; 2) the historical and immediate context
that gives rise to those claims; and, 3) who the claims are directed at who is
being addressed as an audience, or held up as an example? In short, studies of
the politics of hybridity rather than descriptive taxonomies of hybridity are what
we should endeavour to provide. In the case of Freyre, for example, it is not so
much the contents of his formulation of Brazilian mixture and mutual influence
amongst the core Afro, Euro and Indian populations, or necessarily the accuracy
of his scenario, that I would focus on, but rather the question of which theories
of mixture or purity he was contesting, and what theories were subsequently
developed to contest Freyre. Mixture and purity are political issues and they
continue to be such in societies across the world.
One standard critique of the mixture/hybridity/creolization concept, as
deployed in postcolonial studies or theories of globalization, is that it implies the
existence of prior pure entities that combine to form the hybrid. Postcolonial
theorists who apply the idea of hybidity often do so within a progressive agenda
aimed at overcoming essentialist notions of homogeneous cultures shared by all
members, or opposing pure ethnic identities such as those proposed by ethnonationalist movements such as the British National Party. This criticism seems
devastatingly embarrassing as it reveals that postcolonial writers are unwittingly
strengthening the essentialist, pure identities that they are supposed to be
demolishing. The hybrid purportedly depends on the existence of pure types
that combine in the first place. According to this critique, resorting to an idea of
hybridity traps one into positing pure and discrete ethnic groups.
A further flourish can then be added to this criticism: if everything is hybrid,
or creole, when does hybridity begin and where does it end? Hybridity theory by
implication is an absurd house of cards ready to be toppled off its non-existent
foundation.
I do not find either of these objections persuasive and I am surprised at how
often they get repeated. To refer again to the cases of Portuguese colonists, the
Japanese language and the Christian religion mentioned above: when these
entities come into contact with other people, languages or religions they do
not do so as pure entities, but only as entities that appear different at a given
moment in time. No postcolonial hybridity theorist that I know of has claimed
that the ancestral components that spawn the hybrid were pure. This is a straw
man,10 but it does force some valuable thinking.
10
See Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London: Sage, 1994), pp.
12, 209; Aisha Khan, Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol,

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Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture

53

The exogenous traditions or groups or languages that meet and create hybrids
need not be pure, but they must be seen as different, or discrete. Japanese and
English are recognized as different, but no one is insisting that either language
itself is free from outside influences. Indeed there are Japanese loanwords in
English and English loanwords in Japanese. This does not make them the same
language, or mutually intelligible. What people recognize when two languages
come into contact is difference; bodies of practice that may be considered
zones of difference. Hybridity must be understood against the flow of time
as a particular moment when exogenous traditions appear new and different
to each other. After a while, when hybrids are formed, they become their own
new entities perceived as zones of difference to other hybrid entities. Yesterdays
hybrid becomes one of the progenitors of tomorrows hybrid. Its hybrids all
the way down. But there is a cycle that begins with the encounter between
two mutually apparent zones of difference. Hybridization begins in these
moments and the resulting mixtures have life cycles. People go from dynamic
consciousness of their process of mixing to a situation of taking their own
composition for granted. Bakhtin labelled these respectively conscious and
unconscious hybridity.11 A pidgin language spoken between speakers of two
different mother tongues would carry with it a level of conscious realization
that two different languages are being mixed, reinforced by the fact that those
communicating retain mastery of different native languages. The children born
speaking this pidgin as their exclusive native language do not reflect on it as a
mixed language; it is just their language and this is how all natural languages
have been formed over time.
From Mixture to Crystallization
Here lies the object of study for future research, and it has been identified and
well articulated by Pnina Werbner.12 When does intentional hybridity become
organic hybridity, and how does organic hybridity sometimes arrogate purity to
itself? In Brackette Williams analysis: The starting point for the definition of
purity is not [...] some objective point at which real purity, or for that matter,
authentic culture existed, but rather the classificatory moment of purification
and the range of issues that motivated its invention.13
Cultural Anthropology, 16, (2001), 271302 (p. 282); and Stephan Palmi, Creolization and its
Discontents, Annual Reviews in Anthropology, 35 (2006), 43356 (p. 448).
11
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 358.
12
Pnina Werbner, Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity, in Debating Cultural
Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. by Pnina Werbner
(London: Zed Books, 1997), pp. 126; Pnina Werbner, The Limits of Cultural Hybridity: On
Ritual Monsters, Poetic Licence and Contested Postcolonial Purifications, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 7 (2001), 13352.
13
Brackette Williams, A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic
Terrain, Annual Reviews in Anthropology, 18 (1989), 40144 (p. 429).

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54

Charles Stewart

From a different angle, the question is: how do people become aware and
reflect upon the moment when they no longer belong to one tradition or
culture, but have crossed over into another? In the pidgin to creole situation
this transition is made when the subsequent generation learns the pidgin as a
first language. Culture and ethnicity are a bit more fluid and difficult to pin
down. Creolization may begin to occur after relatively short periods. A Brazilian
diplomat explained to me during the course of the Gilberto Freyre Week in
London that the value of diplomatic personnel decreases after five years in a
posting because diplomats become too rooted in the foreign country and are no
longer able to see it as impartially as they could in earlier years. Governments
thus routinely rotate high-level diplomatic staff every four or five years.
Japanese who go to Brazil remain quite proficient in Japanese language in the
first generation, but in succeeding generations they lose the ancestral language
and become Brazilian by formal citizenship, and self-identification, although as
a minority group they embrace an ethnic tie to Japan. In the 1990s many second
and third generation Japanese Brazilians journeyed to Japan to work during
a period when the Japanese economy was booming. Although according to
Japanese ideology, Japanese-ness flows from Japanese descent, people did not
recognize these migrant workers as fully Japanese.14 As Joshua Roth observed:
Nikkei [people of Japanese ancestry residing overseas, in this case Japanese
Brazilians] for the most part looked Japanese, yet did not speak or behave
like them. Their very body language betrayed a fundamental difference in
sense of self. The public displays of affection among Nikkei couples, the
use of fio dental (literally dental floss, that is, thong bikinis) by some Nikkei
women at public swimming pools, the smells of barbecued beef and linguia
(Portuguese/Brazilian sausages), and the boisterous conversation and music
that escaped the confines of cramped Nikkei apartments all presented
Japanese with a jarring sensory presentation utterly different from what
many had expected of the Japanese Brazilian returnees.15

While living and working in Japan, Japanese Brazilians endure a certain degree of
exclusion and criticism from the surrounding Japanese society. At the same time,
they feel increasing nostalgia for Brazil, and imagine themselves returning with
money and commodities from Japan. While in Brazil they strongly embraced
a sense of Japanese-ness and the idea of an ancestral homeland elsewhere. The
trip to Japan convinces them, however, that they are really Brazilians and that
they will never be Japanese.16 Brazil is their home. Instead of coming home to
Japan, or re-finding home there, indications are that the majority rapidly come
to view it as just a place to sojourn as a migrant labourer. After their return to
14
Takeyuki Tsuda, Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in
a Transnational Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 117.
15
Joshua Roth, Adapting to Inequality: Negotiating Nikkei Identity in Contexts of Return, in
Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. by C. Stewart (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast
Press, 2007), p. 207.
16
Tsuda, p. 370.

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Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture

55

Brazil people will continue to address them as japons, but they now know more
surely than ever, that they are brasileiros.17
These Japanese Brazilians, who migrated to Brazil between 1900 and 1940,
have creolized in the course of their stay in Brazil and they cannot easily
decreolize upon return to their original mother culture. Within two or three
generations Japan has become foreign to them. This example illustrates that
hybridization creates new zones of assumed, embodied identity, while at the
same time creating new zones of difference. In this case one new zone of
difference happens to be Japan, the original ancestral culture from which they
departed sixty or eighty years earlier. To attempt to re-settle in Japan would not
amount to decreolization but rather to a new creolization, or recreolization.
This is the circularity of hybridity. Instead of focusing on mixture, which has
been at the core of studies of hybridity and the other terms in my title, it might
be more fruitful to look at the formation and dissolution of zones of difference
or spaces of identification. How do these come into being? How fast? And how
do those involved perceive what is happening? To change our angle of study we
might again take some inspiration from Chemistry, but now we must look at the
terms for analysing the formation and dissolution of discrete entities. The key
term here would be nucleation, which takes place in familiar processes such as
crystallization, congealing, condensation and gelling. This change in focus will
allow us to highlight the crucial dimension of time in the formation, dissolution
and reformation of identities and other bodies of cultural practice.
Department of Anthropology
University College London

17

Ibid, p. 368.

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