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.
Read more about this topic: Syncretism
Famous quotes containing the words cultures and, cultures and/or societies:
“Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.”
—Kate Millet (b. 1934)
“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.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbour in the end.”
—Barbara Ward (19141981)