Berk and Galvan, Field Guide to Creative Syncretism
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Seeing this as the beginning of a process of comparative induction, to be carried out by many
scholars in many regions, subfields and topical areas, we nevertheless recognize some potentially
fruitful sites or focal areas for research. Clearly the alignment of ramshackled creativity with
engineered promulgation represents one such site (it’s an area of inquiry suggested, but not fully
plumbed, from opposite directions in the work of Sil’s engineering-oriented work (2002) and
Galvan’s more ramshackling-centered study (2004)). The last row of Table 1 also suggest
research foci or sites, in alternatives from a syncretic point of view to dominant temporal, spatial
and hierarchical ways of looking at change. In each of these, syncretism suggests a style or
mode of creative work, using particular raw materials, offering some direction for scholarship
informed by syncretism in each category.
Rejecting periodization and evolutionary thinking, we see temporal change as a process in which
actors engage in “archaeological” efforts to explore and identify prior institutional elements,
usable in new and recombinant forms to address contemporary problems. Likewise, cross-spatial
borrowing is not a matter of some unspecified or organic hybridization, but the actual work of
“cosmopolitan” agents, who through experience or particular knowledge mediate between
locales of diverse institutional form, carrying with them models that they may seek to put
together in ways that reflect their transient experiences. Finally, one might be more able to see
syncretic responses to externally induced institutional change by thinking of agency as a form of
subalterneity, resistance, or withdrawal which clearly entail some degree of reified rediscovery
of that which is “local” and “authentic.” Clearly, real instances of syncretic creativity in real
settings will mix each of these kinds of work and raw materials. We intend these classifications
only as starting points to begin to identify what to look for when one considers syncretic
alternatives to visions of institutional change which are both too structurally determined or too
undernourished in their framing of agency.
We see the collaboration that produced this paper as a way to begin a project of comparative
historical analytic induction to make sense of where, how and when syncretism contributes to
institutional change. Speaking to each other across and through pragmatism and social
constructivism, across and through American political development and the comparative politics
Convention