Berk and Galvan, Field Guide to Creative Syncretism
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modern corporation and the regulatory state—drew freely from old practices developed in the
military and the courts.
Nowhere was this confusion of old and new more evident than in the institutional politics of
antitrust. The dominant narrative tells us that the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was a
reactionary law, enacted to block the concentration of business enterprise associated with
industrialization. By the first world war, however, Americans had come to accept the modern
corporation and antitrust was relegated to checking its abuses of power. But a closer look
revealed that the debate raged on and those who hoped to use the state to craft alternatives to
corporate power retained a foothold in state and federal antitrust administration, where they
advanced mutuals, cooperatives and associations.
The result has been a “loosely coupled” economic and regulatory order, in which diverse forms
of enterprise and regulation existed simultaneously. Moreover, it appears that all institutions in
this order are syncretic combinations of old and new rules, practices and standards of legitimacy.
No single set of features best describes the twentieth century American political economy.
Perhaps the problem, Berk concluded, was not with these sorts of findings as much as it was with
theories of institutional development that periodized history too sharply into definable epochs of
order and change and underestimated the creative capacity of economic and political agents to
generate a variety of institutional forms.
Galvan came to institutional syncretism by thinking about competing legal orders,
especially
with regard to land tenure and village-level politics, in a corner of rural Senegal, West Africa. In
this and most parts of the “third” world, colonialism and post-colonial development schemes of
various sort were supposed to modernize agriculture, land tenure, law, and politics, making them,
respectively, more efficient, equitable, transparent, and fair. They did not. In this particular
patch of the developing world, the last century is littered more with the wreckage of latest and
greatest development schemes and solutions, alongside the debris of decaying old rules, lifeways
and values.
Convention