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“RELIGION SYNCRETISM” AS A CONTROVERSIAL NOTION IN EUROPEAN AND RUSSIA STUDIES

M. Sidakova

Abstract

The term “syncretism” has a complicated history in religious studies, especially it concerns European scientific environment. In Russian science it has appeared with more or less determined meaning. Comparative analysis helped us to reveal the main array of issues that concerns the meaning of the term “syncretism”. In the 70s European academics decided to revive this notion, but since it was ignored it has acquired different synonyms. So academics in the most recent papers debate if the revival of the term is really necessary, and does it make any sense to explore the phenomena at all if there is no religion that seems to be totally monolithic. Comparative analysis of the different scientific papers revealed that Russian academics usually do not focus their attention on the problematic origin of the notion and on variety of its connotation. The major explorations include new classifications of the phenomena or its case stories: different nations in Russia have syncretic religious culture. Sometimes researchers identify it as syncretism, in other cases as vernacular or folk religion. It happens that they do not distinguish these phenomena and use both in the same paper. In this research we tried to reflect the difference of the approaches that have been proposed by the representatives from academia from Europe and Russia and through analysis them to elicit its meaning against other terms.

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