This article is based on Sebastián Eduardo Dávila’s project presentation, held during the 5th Transregional Academy on Latin American Art “Contesting Objects: Sites, Narratives, Contexts” that took place at the Museo de Arte Lima ( 4 May – 12 May, 2024), in cooperation with the German Center for Art History Paris (DFK Paris), the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History and the Forum Transregionale Studien. The Academy was made possible with support from Getty through its Connecting Art Histories Initiative.

Born in the context of religion-politics during the European Reformation, and instrumental for the colonisation of the Americas, the concept of syncretism reappeared in the study of religion and culture in the late 19th century.[2] In the early 1990s, authors were already taking distance from syncretism when dealing with cultural practices, due to the term’s Catholic pedigree, its evocation of religious experience, and its limited understanding as the fusion of two distinguishable, self-contained religions or cultures that mix, inevitably flowing into one.[3] Consequently, anthropologists and related scholars have turned to terms like hybridity and creolization, stemming from zoology and botanics or linguistics, in order to describe juxtapositions, additions, or in-between spaces.[4] This development could be described as a subtle secularisation of culture in method. But what if we stick with religion, and specifically Catholicism, as historical horizon permeating lived experience today, particularly in the Americas? In this refusal to abandon religious terminology, what concept of syncretism do we need for the study of culture? I want to draft five theses to advance an understanding of syncretism not as fusion, but as layering of experience through centuries marked by colonisation, diaspora, and resistance across the hemisphere. The craft of (re-)drafting a concept is necessary if we want to do justice to processes of both imposition and survival, or the loss and transmission of saberes stemming from Indigenous and Afro-diasporic peoples, among others. Saberes means knowledge that is experienced, passed on through means of transmission, not transference.[5] Saberes do not reside in monuments that commemorate the past, but demand acts of remembrance in the present. Craft is a labour involving knowledge, skill, and a sheer amount of experience.