Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will present historical and ethnographic material on the encounter of Hindus and Catholics in Goa and problematize the idea that syncretism can be accounted for in the contexts and paradigms of modernity.

Paper long abstract:

For the most part syncretism is treated as an achievement of modernity. Two typical modern 'mediating grounds' are commonly evoked to account for its operation: a secular domain that allows to describe syncretism as the politics of religious synthesis, and the idea of Religion as a human universal that sees syncretism as a form of religious pluralism.

In this presentation I will problematize the anchorage of syncretism in modern circumstance and thought and — using historical and ethnographic material from the encounter of Hindus and Catholics in Goa — will argue that it has both deeper roots and more complex rationales. Two lines of argument will become especially important to explain why both Hindus and Catholics in Goa occasionally ritually honor and in general trust the divine or saintly forces of the respective other religious tradition:

• the existential practical concerns for the contiguity and neighborhood, genealogy and family relations that constitute and reproduce the village community, and the concern for bodily health and protection;

• the practical enactment of the epistemic axiom that the divine and, by extension the Truth, manifests itself in tangible form and signification and, in particular, embodies the village itself.

In sum, I will argue that syncretism reveals and to some extent resists the ruptures that marked the transition from the premodern to the modern era; and its socially embedded and practically embodied rationales cannot be abstracted in the modern division of religion and the secular, nor ideas of religious pluralism or tolerance for that matter.