Synkretisme: En analyse af illegitime blandinger og tredje-identiteter

On the basis of the notion of syncretism this article discusses the issues of constructing new religious identities in the history of Christian mission. ‘Syncretism’ represents one of the more controversial categories in the study of religion that have been exposed to solid scholarly critic, partly because of the notion’s problematic situation in the history of Christian mission. In spite of the problems of definition ‘syncretism’ may function as a ‘composite notion’ to analyse 1) the scholarly discourses of the notion 2) the issues of the phenomenon concerning the formation of new religious identities that emerge from ‘the blending of religion’ in the encounters of cultures. But to approach or rethink the issues of the notion anew we must look for new theoretical groundings. This article suggests Harvey Whitehouse’s theory of distinct modes of religiosity, an ‘imagistic’ and a ‘doctrinal,’ based on Melanesian ethnography, which combines theories on memory from the field of cognitive science with theories on the organisation of social and political systems in religion. By application of the theory to ‘syncretism’ identified as a type of innovation of identity, and to examples from Christian mission-history, it is suggested that the different modes of religiosity have influenced both the different forms of codification and the innovation of religious identities inside Christian communities.