jabel

Syncretism all the way down

Some of us children of empire are rightly worried about further damage to colonized cultures. We try, therefore, to build walls around these cultures and call any breach of those walls “cultural appropriation.”

The fear of cultural appropriation, though, is itself a product of empire. Such a fear attempts to freeze those cultures at a moment in time, specifically the moment when the colonizers “discovered” those cultures. Only an imperial mind would make the mistake of ignoring a culture’s entire history, pretending that it had sprung into existence only when noticed by imperial eyes.

Cultures and religions are always in flux. Gods travel with their worshippers and take on new forms in new lands. Religions are always in relation with the cultures in which they are situated—even if only a relation of denunciation. Religion is syncretism.

While the fear of cultural appropriation arises from a good heart, there is a difference between syncretism and pilfering. There are better and worse ways of encountering other cultures and religions. (“Religion” is such a clunky word here. One source of the problem is the separation of “religion” from “culture”—this is disenchantment. But that’s a post still in my drafts folder.)

The self-determining individual of consumer capitalism finds themselves in the marketplace of religion. Pick and choose. No context. No demands. Only costumes.

At the same time, have some pity on the poor modern seeker. We’re all heretics—“choosers”—now. Perhaps in this welter of choice, we are undergoing the same syncretic process that birthed all religions, including those with ancient pedigree. Perhaps some forgotten thing is being rediscovered; perhaps some new spirit is being awakened. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh.”

This morning, pumping gas at the station on the edge of our neighborhood, I felt again what I’ve sometimes felt over the past few years as I’ve turned toward my particular place, and learned to love it warts and all. One of Wendell Berry’s phrases came to mind: “it all turns on affection”:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbours, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighbourly, kind, and conserving economy.