2010/08/20 by Terry Rey, Karen Richman · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Caribbean and African Literature and Culture #Colonialism, slavery, and trade
paper · doi:10.1177/0008429810373321
crossref issued 2010/08/20 · crossref published 2010/08/20 · crossref published-online 2010/08/20 · openalex publication_date 2010/08/20 · crossref created 2010/08/20 · crossref published-print 2010/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref deposited 2026/05/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27 · crossref indexed 2026/07/27
The convergence of African religion and Christianity in the Atlantic world has inspired some of the most significant and most analyzed examples of syncretism in the study of religion. Scholarly discussions of these phenomena, however, tend to portray religions like Vodou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil as mergers of various Euro-Christian and ‘‘traditional’’ African elements that chiefly result from processes of cognitive ideation, thereby blurring the integrative somatic dimensions of religious syncretism. Modes of embodying knowledge, power, and morality are thus largely absent from the discussion of religious syncretism in Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, as well as other contact-cultural religions, whose congregational and performance spaces now span national boundaries. Drawing upon the historiography of Kongolese and Haitian religion, and on our multi-site ethnographic research among religious communities in Haiti, to think about religious syncretism in the African diaspora, this paper focuses on two key metaphors of mimetic knowledge and embodiment, mare and pwen (tying and point), arguing that they are both fundamental processes in Haitian religious syncretism and essential tropes for understanding Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, processes that are of predominantly Central African, and especially Kongolese, origin.