Syncretism

The final example of syncretism involves what anthropologists call a "nativistic movement," that is, a religious reaction to the appearance of a more powerful and hegemonic culture. Although such movements have occurred in areas as diverse as Siberia and Melanesia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most intensely studied nativistic movement is the Ghost Dance, which began in northern Nevada among the Paiutes in 1870. In that year, a shaman named Tavibo had a vision in which he learned that if his people danced in a certain fashion, their ancestors, or "ghosts," would return, and the white men would be swallowed up by a great earthquake. Soon other tribes heard of this dance, and by 1871 it had spread widely among Native American tribes in the Great Basin and parts of California. However, the ghosts never materialized, and the religious fervor soon died down.

A generation later, Tavibo's possible descendant, another Paiute shaman named Wovoka (c. 1856–1932), revived the dance, but this time it was heavily syncretistic. As a youth Wovoka spent several years working for a white family that was extremely religious and gave him the name "Jack Wilson." In 1889, during a severe illness, Wilson had a vision in which God told him that not only would his ancestors return, but that a Native American incarnation of Jesus would return to help them, and that the whites, who were the spawn of Satan, would be swallowed by the earthquake that failed to occur in 1870. By the middle of 1890 the second Ghost Dance had spread widely east of the Rocky Mountains and eventually included among its converts the famous Sioux shaman Sitting Bull. However, on December 29, 1890, the Ghost Dance movement also led to one of the great tragedies in Native American history: the Wounded Knee massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in which several hundred people—including women, children, and elderly men—were killed simply because they refused to stop performing the Ghost Dance. Afterward, belief in the power of the dance diminished rapidly.

In sum, these are but a few examples of syncretism, a process that has played an enormous role in human religious history, from antiquity to modern times and in almost every corner of the globe.