Logics and Limits of New Age Appropriations: Where Syncretism Comes to an End

Abstract

This chapter starts with an observation and a doubt. The former is of how the New Age, which has been considered a paradigmatic example of contemporary syncretism or hybridism, systematically excludes several of the most dynamic forms of religion found in the different countries of Latin America. The long list of religious, spiritual or therapeutic practices that anthropologists and sociologists are prone to draw up in order to demonstrate the eclecticism of the New Age, hardly ever includes Pentecostalism, devotion to popular saints, or Afro-American religions. The doubt that follows this observation is whether the blindness of academia to the syncretic capacity of the New Age?in a continent characterized by this cultural dynamic?has not led to its neglecting to study the equally real and important logics of exclusion, with the subsequent result of a ?conceptual overestimation? in drawing the specific contours of the phenomenon to be examined. I will develop a reflection on why specific religious practices and beliefs appear to revolve outside the orbit of the New Age. To synthesize, I will sketch a reflection on the limits of appropriation or reinterpretation by the New Age, with a special interest in its relation to the distinct Latin American religious traditions.