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The introduction places the book in the context of the larger literature on Islam in Anatolia. It explains how this book is part of a recent wave of studies that take a critical, revisionist approach to the deeply entrenchedparadigmdeveloped by the early-twentieth century Turkish historian Fuad Köprülü, highlighting in particular the perils of a binary vision of religion based on high Islam and folk Islam, and the ahistorical application of the notion of syncretism in Alevi-Bektashi studies. The introduction also offers an outline of Alevi beliefs, rituals, and socio-religious organization, discusses the recently surfaced Kizilbash/Alevi manuscripts and documents that form the book’s primary source base, summarized the major themes and argumentsthat emerge from them, and explains the organization of the chapters around these themes.

Through a synthesis of personal ethnography, sociological and theological reflection, author Michelle González takes aim at the Christocentric, church-focused, and hyperphilosophical discourse of recent Latina/o theology. By focusing on three forms of popular religiosity, González aims to show that if Latina/o theologians are to address the religious needs of Latinas/os they must take seriously practices that church hierarchy and orthodox Catholic theology deride and frown on. Evil Eye, Santería, and Espiritismo are syncretic forms of Christianity that decenter religious practice, relocating it in ritual and communal memory. The chapter argues that if Latina/o theologians are to give credence to the epistemic productivity of Latina/o communities, they must challenge their orthodox Catholic assumptions, namely a focus on textual exegeses that presupposes a hierarchical system of knowledge certification that always devalues the experiences of subjects.

This chapter investigates the question of how the Judaizing Evangelicals appear to want to become Jewish, believing in Jesus. It carefully analyzes the social and cultural organization of the religious hybridization undertaken by the community of the Judaizing Evangelicals. Special attention is given to how Christian tenets are gradually understood in new ways and are replaced by Jewish ideas and practices within this changing religious community. The analysis indicates that religious change is an open dialectic process, challenging both clear-cut “continuity” and “discontinuity” arguments found in the anthropology of religion. By revealing the dialectic role of past structures in change processes, the theoretical framework expands current conceptualizations exploring cultural hybridity.

This chapter discusses religious syncretism, with particular emphasis on the representation of Chinese witchcraft and religion. As evidenced by the numerous works that are analyzed in this chapter, Cuban and Cuban American writers and artists have in recent years shown a renewed interest in religions of African and Chinese origins.

This chapter discusses the notion of religious syncretism in Mesoamerica. It shows that the hybrid character of religious practices in the Americas eluded not only the Spaniards but also later knowledge of these events. Syncretism, as a way of thinking, becomes symptomatic here of cultural interactions that operated on a subconscious level, sheltered by architecture and the arts. The colonizers attempted to exploit what they considered to be the language of indigenous forms, but actually limited their engagement only to what they could control. Although the Spaniards did not intend to admit pagan imports into their teachings, architecture, and art, their narrow-mindedness and arrogance prompted them to dismiss as irrelevant anything that was not explicitly figurative or message-like. At the same time, complexity, ambiguity, and contradictions were inherently meaningful in earlier Mesoamerica. The Spanish system of symbolic communication and the pre-Hispanic modality of evocative thought have coexisted, operating on different levels, never intersecting theologically but frequently occupying the same material environments.

This chapter presents an argument about the character of Muslim fundamentalism in South Asia. The argument runs as follows: While a concern with orthodoxy and orthopraxis is only to be expected among the carriers of a religious tradition when they enter an alien socio-cultural environment and make converts, their anxiety about the loss of the pristine purity of belief and practice at a later stage of consolidation expresses itself in the form of efforts at reform and revival. This chapter also discusses the arrival of Islam in India and the opportunities and dilemmas it presented—religious authority versus secular power in medieval India, religious syncretism and revivalism, redemption by education, and Islamic fundamentalism in South Asia in the twentieth century.

The growth of Evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism is widely regarded as a potent argument against the validity of secularization theory. To explain this growth, Chapter 12 draws on theoretical approaches to analysing new social movements, which allows an expansion of the repertoire of explanations concerning religious change and a testing of alternatives to the models provided by secularization theory. To explain the worldwide growth and relative resilience of the Evangelical and Pentecostal movements, the chapter identifies a number of conditions and explanatory factors: cultural and social confirmation, religious syncretism, social deprivation, and the widespread magical worldview and broadly accepted spiritistic beliefs in Latin American countries that are conducive to the acceptance of Pentecostal experiences and healing rituals.

The Netherlands are among the most secular countries in Western Europe, with the proportion of those without religious affiliation now accounting for more than 60% of the Dutch population. The chapter addresses three questions. First, why did the power of religious and church ties weaken disproportionately in the Netherlands in comparison to other Western European countries, despite the fact that rates of participation were once above average? Second, why was the Catholic Church more strongly affected by this decline than the liberal Dutch Reformed Church? Third, can an increase in the importance of a highly individualized—Christian or non-Christian, or syncretistic—religiosity be observed that compensates for these losses by the churches? To answer these questions, the chapter refers to so-called pillarization, the ambivalent consequences of the Second Vatican Council, and the remarkable vitality and potential for conflict within the shrunken segment of religious orientations and practices in the Netherlands.

Continuities in written doctrinal language contrast with semantic shifts within the indigenous speech community, revealed through petitions, testaments, trial testimony, and other records, as well as modern oral evidence. As the Mesoamerican cultural matrix has itself been modified by Christian practice and visual symbols, new associations have become attached to traditional linguistic resources. At the same time the Indians have reformulated and reinterpreted the Christian message along lines consonant with traditional cosmology and moral theology. Thus cultural gaps, and along with them linguistic gaps, have narrowed through the process of religious syncretism. Mutually reinforcing influences have converged in the creation of the particular variety of religious devotion defined as Mexican Christianity.

The Epilogue recounts the story of Andrea Mustoxidi’s clash with Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–74), who lived for a time as an exile on the Ionian Islands. The reason for this disagreement was the gradual replacement of Italian with Greek as the official language of the Ionian state in the early 1850s, a process that Mustoxidi supported but in which Tommaseo discerned xenophobic, and more particularly anti-Italian, dimensions. The Crimean War created additional tension on the islands, widening the gap between Christian Orthodox and Catholics in the region. The conflict between these two intellectuals is seen as symbolically marking the end of the ‘transnational patriotism’ moment in the Adriatic, a declaration of the irreversible dissolution of its common Venetian cultural space. The de-Venetization, Hellenization, and Orthodoxization of the Ionian Islands signified the completion of the transition process from empires to nation-states.