Cultures and Societies
Syncretism represented an avenue leading to cultural compromise: it provided opportunities for established beliefs, values, and customs to find a place within at the framework of a different cultural tradition, and by doing so; it enabled expansive traditions to win popular support in foreign lands.
Syncretism is often used to describe the product of the large-scale imposition of one alien culture, religion, or body of practices over another that is already present.
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Famous quotes containing the words cultures and/or societies:
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
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—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)