Caribbean religious identities and critical terms

In order to study African Caribbean religious identities in their diasporic and transnational manifestations, it is important to participate in the debate within academia concerning contested terms such as hybridity, syncretism, bricolage and double consciousness. The use of these words/concepts within academic narratives have tended to assume the existence of ‘pure’ and ‘finished’ objects of religion and culture. Scholars of African Caribbean religions often have found themselves obliged to deal with these concepts in order to define or capture the creativity and complexity of Caribbean’s religious identities. Consequently, in this thesis I argue that concepts such as syncretism and hybridity must be avoided by Caribbean or religious scholars in general for the following reasons. Firstly, these terms seem to assume the existence of pure religions, cultures or identities; secondly, they create a space where colonial discourses of purity can still circulate; thirdly, they limit a deep and real understanding of religious identities, religions as lived in their complexity and creativity. I will analyse these concepts to demonstrate how they are able to create cultural dominant binary oppositions that hierarchically classify religions and identities in the academy and in the popular imagination and propose alternatives for understanding religious identities and lived realities and experiences in all their complexity.

Hybridity and Syncretism

African Traditional Caribbean religions have been for a long time considered and classified as mestizaje, hybrid or syncretic. As such they fitted within the parameters of Western hegemonic discourse concerning the ‘Other’. In this and the next section, I will highlight how the Western employment of certain specific concepts and discourses was able to create an imaginary of ‘Other’ cultures, identities and religions, in order to construct and maintain Western cultural supremacy and purity. As I will show, this narrative impacted psychologically and culturally on Caribbean people.

Let’s begin by analysing the term hybridity which has haunted Caribbean religions as much as other terms such as mestizaje and syncretism. In his book Hybrid cultures Canclini (1990) employed the term hybrid to describe Caribbean religions, in order to reject the term ‘mestizaje and syncretism because the first one refers only to racial mixture and the latter characterises the mixing of religious or tradition symbolic movements’ (Schmidt, 2008: 95). Therefore, these are unsatisfactory terms to use in the study of Caribbean religions as they imply racial and homogeneous boundaries. By replacing these terms with ‘hybridity,’ he wanted to include in his description of African Caribbean religions the intercultural and modern forms and mixtures and the ‘simultaneous existence of homogeneous and heterogeneous trajectories’ (Schmidt, 2008: 102). However, the term hybridity wrongly suggests the prior existence of a pure religion or tradition, when in reality religions and cultures have always been in motion, adapting and changing as they go. In fact, the violent encounter of African traditional religions and Christianity in the Caribbean led to the formation of new Caribbean religious identities through the amalgamation of heterogeneous religions that clashed in the Americas (Schmidt, 2023: 130).

Furthermore, as highlighted by Schmidt, the term syncretism also raises the issue of representation. She states, ‘another misleading problem with the concept of syncretism is that it implies a hierarchical order of one dominant and pure religion (i.e. Christianity) and other secondary impure traditions (i.e. Indigenous religions)’ (2023: 130). Likewise, Olmos and Gebert underlines that, ‘the identification of Creole religions as “syncretic” is problematical and disparaging: there is a Euro-centric bias in limiting the definition to non-European religions, negating their full legitimacy’ (2003: 7). The use of this term led to the persistent ‘rhetorical division between “pure” faiths and illicit or “contaminated” syncretic belief systems’ (2003: 8).

Critically reflecting on the terms and concepts that populate academic discourse is essential to decolonise religious studies and avoid superficial and homogenous binary oppositions. As highlighted by Balutansky and Sourieau,

The cultural, political, and literary discourse about Caribbean identity…had almost limited itself to binary opposites: white/black, master/slave, civilised/primitive etc… this dynamic was embedded in Europe’s academic rhetoric of identity. Europe’s obsession with linear origins, and especially with “being” a stable category of integrity and purity, resulted directly from its concept of ethnic difference and racial classification as well as from his sense of a God-given right to dominate the inferior “Other” (2017: 3).

As highlighted by scholars such as Canclini (1990), Balutansky and Sourieau (1998), Henke (2008), McGuire (2008), and Schmidt (2023), the usage of terms/concepts such as hybridity and syncretism within the academy and the main cultural Western narrative related to Caribbean religious identities, is a continuation of the colonial discourse (Schmidt, 2023). For instance, Bhabha describes hybridity as a ‘sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities…the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority)’ (Bhabha 1985: 154-155). Long (1986) argues that these terms fail to recognise the creative sphere of humanity, specifically of African Caribbean religions which developed as a form of resistance and survival during enslavement to reverse the master-slave narrative.

Bricolage

The concept of religious bricolage introduced by Lévi-Strauss (1962) and adopted by Bastide (1970), Schmidt (2023), and McGuire (2008) is a functional tool to apply to the study of Caribbean religions. While Lévi-Strauss uses this term as a metaphor to describe ‘the mythical thinking of traditional society’ (Schmidt, 2023: 146), the following authors employ the term as a metaphor to describe the creativity and complexity behind the formation of Caribbean religious identities. For instance, Bastide (1970) uses the term bricolage in his work on Caribbean religions to highlight the process of cultural transformation that happened during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He argues that ‘bricolage illustrates the changes to the collective memory due to the transplantation of people during the slave trade, the opposition during the time of slavery and the adaptation of Africans in the Americas’ (Bastide, 1970: 100). It is important to highlight, once again, that Caribbean religions are an Atlantic creation developed during four hundred years of encounter, cultural clash and physical and psychological violence in particular (but not only) between Africans, Indigenous people and Europeans. In fact, in the Caribbean context, bricolage occurred not only through the exercise of individual choice but in the context of colonialism. Schmidt underlines that applying the term ‘bricolage’ to African Caribbean religions emphasises the fact that they are ‘the result of creativity and innovation’ (2023: 132). She states that ‘adding elements from different traditions helped to fill the gaps created by the brutality of the slave trade by preserving the collective memory while…reacting to the new environment and local influences’ (2023: 132). Therefore, while hybridity ‘implies a notion of purity and hierarchy, bricolage highlights continuity, creativity and change…reflecting the power of human imagination’ (Schmidt, 2023: 132-133). As McGuire points out, religious bricolage is a valuable conceptual tool for scholars of religions because it ‘highlights the degree of agency ordinary people exercise in the construction of their lived religions’ (McGuire, 2008: 196) although once again, it is important to highlight that individual agency and creativity were not part of Lévi-Strauss’s thinking when he developed the term.

The Creation and Creolisation of Caribbean Identities

Cultural, social and psychological factors

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/religious-studies/african-caribbean-religions-and-the-problem-representation

The creation and development of religious identities in the Caribbean have been strongly influenced by colonialism and slavery, not only religiously and politically but also culturally, socially and psychologically. Studies conducted by Roberts (2008) underline that the Caribbean cultural melting pot and its relationship with slavery and colonial rule have had social and psychological effects on Caribbean people and the development of their identities. As Adorno emphasised, the establishment by the European colonisers of a West and an Orient created a social hierarchy permitting ‘the establishment and fixing of the frontiers of identity’ (Adorno, 1988: 66). According to Said, Orientalism ‘an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and…the Occident’ (1985: 2) is a discursive formation, because of the regularity with which statements about the East and its peoples, societies and religions reproduce the dominance and superiority of the West over and against the Orient. As such, Said defines Orientalism in the following way,

Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analysed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorising views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said 1985:3).

According to Fanon (1967), the internalisation of putative inferiority created by the West fashioned a ‘black prototype’ which developed within the black community as a sort of psychological inferior, which is still visible today. In his book Black Skin White Masks (1967), Fanon emphasised that the idea of ‘blackness’ is based on the Western negative metanarrative and attitude toward ‘black’ or generally the ‘other’, which proliferated for over four hundred years, and which had social and psychological effects on the whole black community, especially in the development of their identities. Western denigration of blackness accompanied with the violence of the slave trade, created a ‘dependency complex’ within the psychology of colonised people (Fanon, 1967). During the colonial period, people were forced to find new ways to deal with the new social, political, economic, and violent contexts in which they had been forcibly transported as slaves. Accordingly, while Black people today may have greater economic and political power and opportunities than in the past, this is arguably and sadly only achieved by emulating Western manners or adopting Western bodily tendencies (Fanon, 1967). However, as I will be show in chapter 7, Rastafari develop a strong resistance toward this attitude, by reversing this tendency by embracing African bodily practices and aesthetics.

Furthermore, to understand the fashioning and development of Caribbean identities, it is important to consider the Caribbean as a creole space comprising of multiple and complex identities generated by centuries of European, Indigenous and African clashes and connections in the New World. The result of this multicultural encounter is what Gilroy called the Black Atlantic (1993). In his work, Gilroy saw the Atlantic as a space for cultural exchange and as a web or network of connections between Africa, the Caribbean, America and Europe which continued over centuries. Du Bois (1903) and subsequently Hall (1990) underlined that from the onset of the slave trade to today, African people forced by the surrounding context of slavery and colonialism, developed what has been called ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois, 1903; Hall, 1990), which could be defined as a sort of imposed double identity. According to Du Bois (1903), ‘double consciousness’ can create new and complex identities. As Hall noticed, ‘we cannot speak for long, about “one experience, one [Black] identity”, without acknowledging its other side – the ruptures and discontinuities which constitute, precisely, the Caribbean’s “uniqueness”’ (Hall, 1990: 225).

Caribbean and trans-Caribbean Creolisation

Although the concept of ‘double consciousness’ and bricolage, are useful words/concepts for researchers, in my view they limit the understanding behind the creativity, complexity and motion of Caribbean religious identities, to the point that they will be better replaced by the concepts of creolisation and creolised identities. The etymology of the word creole comes from the Latin word creare (create) or to create ‘anew’ (Cohen 2007). According to Olmos and Gebert, creolization ‘which is the malleability and mutability of various beliefs and practices as they adapt to new [local] understanding of class, race, gender, power, labour and sexuality- is one of the most significant phenomena in Caribbean religious history’ (2003: 4). Furthermore, recent sociological studies concerning globalisation undertaken by scholars such as Hannerz (1987), Bauman (1991), Eriksen (2003) and Cohen (2007), emphasised that we are living in a ‘creolised world’. According to these scholars, the word creole can be used to address the complexity, development and motion of the Caribbean’s cultural and religious identities. In fact, notwithstanding, this term can be applied also to Mediterranean identities (which are involved in this thesis) and their history of perpetual cultural motion. Cohen (2007) explains that identities take different forms within processes of globalisation, these are classified as pure, hyphenated and creole. Eriksen (2003) argues, ‘whereas pure identities draw boundaries around one culture and hyphenated identities around two creole identities represent a degree of mixing that has reached a point where it is no longer possible to talk of hyphens and boundaries’ (2003: 23).

In recent decades, scholars have created three paradigms to explain how cultural and social processes of globalisation are impacting societies and therefore, religious identities. Robertson (1992) stressed that through processes of globalisation, cultures could now see themselves in relation to other cultures and to a global whole. A second paradigm was raised by Tomlinson (1999) who stressed the ‘deterritorialization and intoxication’ of culture. This means that it is not possible anymore to perceive or study cultures within the limit of national borders, or as authentic and pure, because through social processes of globalisation, cultures are constantly influencing each other and recreating themselves. The third paradigm supported by Pieterse (2004) is what particularly concerns this research, namely creolisation. This means that people’s cultural and religious identities are involved in a constant process of cultural, creative renovation and recreation.

However, amongst scholars there are different views regarding the effect of the third paradigm on societies and cultural identities. Eriksen (2003) for example, analyses and compares the works of S. Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul. She explains that, while on the one hand, writers such as Rushdie have a positive view of globalisation and see it as a catalytic social process which is giving life to many social creative formations; on the other hand, Naipaul argues that globalisation is bringing homogenization and destroys any monolithic form of culture and tradition. According to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, by the nature of the universe everything is created, nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed (550 BCE). Heraclitus’ view could also easily be applied to these new sociological theories concerning the creolisation of religious identities in the era of globalisation.

Yet, what may differ now from Heraclitus’ time is the potential of a global creolisation through the use and consumption of new global technologies. Cohen (2007) inspired by sociolinguistic studies in creole languages, proposed the use of creole as a sociological category. He suggested that this will allow scholars to include in their studies ‘all population groups including later migrant arrivals in addition to the original trichotomy (the colonial, Creole and indigene)’ (Cohen 2007: 379).

Furthermore, scholars such as Henke et. al (2008) have tried to grip the complexity of African Caribbean religious identities in a trans-Caribbean space (i.e. Puerto Rico, Guyana, New York, Surinam, and the Netherlands), by emphasising that those identities develop and are constantly produced within two different spaces, the metropolitan space inhabited and lived, as well as the romanticized, imagined and colonialized homeland, in the Caribbean. Transnational Caribbean Religious identities and their cultural/vernacular performances are informed and influenced by the here and there (the Caribbean), past (colonial) and present (post-colonial), homogeneity and heterogeneity at the same time. Henke explains that the ‘Caribbean “transnational nationalism” constructs new expressions of familiar, communal, and national belonging, and a deterritorialized understanding of nation’ (Henke, 2008: xv).

Matory unfolds this point by emphasising that devotees of Caribbean religions have ‘understood themselves as the simultaneous inhabitants of multiple nations, some territorial and some transoceanic’ (2009: 233) and therefore, embracing simultaneously multiple cultures. This highlights the degree of creolisation which crosses over binary oppositions and demonstrates that Caribbean identities have also transoceanic cultural dimensions, touching, even if only in imaginative and creative ways, lands such as Africa, China, and India.

However, in order to understand the complexity of Caribbean vernacular culture in the era of globalisation, Schmidt employ the concept of ‘polyphonic bricolage’, which takes into consideration the heterogeneity of migrating nations and cultures, and the diversity and creativity of trans-Caribbean models in different metropolitan spaces, such as ‘Caribbean New York’ and ‘Caribbean London’ (2008: 28). Nevertheless, this concept is limited applied to diasporic communities and does not take full consideration of people external to Caribbean culture who are embracing it, i.e. Rastafari in Italy. As Henke stresses, ‘Popular cultures of music, religion, and language are evidence of the deterritorialization of the Caribbean and have the potential to influence and transform the global imaginary and to articulate enduring affiliations with local cultures of resistance’ (2008: xx). Therefore, in this research, I privileged the word ‘creole identities’ which is a term that encompasses not only space and time but also cultures and nations. This implies that Caribbean religions are not only trans-temporal and trans-local (Tweed, 2006), but also trans-cultural by being characterised as boundarylessness and therefore, overcoming national, religious, linguistic and vernacular borders. As Bhabha underlines, in the ‘Creole world’ a dynamic ‘third space’ emerges, ‘the act of cultural translation… [which] denies the essentialism of a prior given or original culture’ (1990: 210), showing that all forms of culture are in a continuous process of creolisation and motion. Motion, therefore, is what characterises a creole world and religious identities.

The first to recognise the process of creolisation which involves African Caribbean religions was Brathwaite in 1974. He understood the middle passage as a ‘pathway or channel between this [African] tradition and what is being evolved, on new soil, in the Caribbean’ (1974: 5). Rojo assesses that, ‘creolization is not merely a process but a discontinuous series of recurrences, of happenings, whole sole law is change’ (2017: 55). Therefore, creolised religious identities are the outcome of processes of creolisation, acts of translation that involve constant and creative change from one kind of identity to another. As Balutansky and Sourieau stress, ‘Creolisation is thus defined as a syncretic process of transverse dynamics that endlessly reworks and transforms the cultural patterns of varied social and historical experiences and identities’ (2017: 3). Holmos and Gebert underline that in this era of globalisation this term is even more crucial to ‘reframe notions of past and present transnational and diasporic cultures and communities’ (2003: 6).

Lived Creole religions

A way to decolonise and de-essentialise religious studies and understand the complexity of Creole religious identities is through the practice of studying religions as lived. As McGuire highlights it is misleading to represent any religious tradition as unitary, unchanging, or pure (2008). As McGuire suggests, the making of a religion is a creative process ‘that people may engage in as they go about their everyday lives’ (McGuire, 2008: 196) and this is perhaps particularly true of Caribbean religions. According to McGuire, in order to understand modern religious lives, ‘we need to try to grasp the complexity, diversity and fluidity of real individuals’ religion-as-practised in the context of their everyday lives’ (McGuire, 2008: 213). As stated by Ammerman, by looking at lived experiences instead of looking at hierarchical religious institutions ‘those voices that come from the margins (immigrants, women, Black, indigenous) can be heard’ (2016:84). The study of lived religions allows us to better understand ‘what religion is and when it occurs’ (Ammerman, 2016: 84). Ammerman underlines that lived religions often ‘may not coincide with institutionalized or collective definitions of the sacred…[and] it may not be focused on beliefs [or institutionalised definition of beliefs] at all’ (2016: 87). Religion, in this case, becomes ‘what individuals choose on their own authority’ (Ammerman, 2016: 88) or in Rastafari terms a subjective ‘way of life’ often not associated with religious institutions, but related to cultural and personal-contextual and contingent historical experiences.

As such, the study of lived religion is characterised by a bottom-up approach which goes beyond institutional religiosity and which is essential to the decolonisation of religious studies, due to its ability to provide space and voice to experiences and knowledge from the global South.