Transculturation, Syncretism, and Hybridity

Abstract

Transculturación (transculturation) is a term coined by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in his canonical essay Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940). This term was a revision of the term acculturation introduced to US and British anthropology and social sciences by the Jewish Polish ethnographer Brolisnaw J. Malinowski in the 1920s and 1930s. The term appeared first in the work of US anthropologist J. W. Powell (1834–1902). Both theories were based in migration and migratory studies, and an analysis of the cultures of immigrant populations into the United States and Cuba. While acculturation¹ described the assimilation processes into US society, where European, African, and other immigrant populations learned English and assimilated into American society, transculturation addressed the complex processes of exchange—linguistic, economic, racial, gendered, and cultural—involved in these exchanges. For Ortiz, cultural assimilation was not a one-way process that involved one less powerful culture assimilating into a more powerful one, giving bicultural peoples a sense of “loss” as Malinowski’s proposed for US acculturation, but a two- or more way exchange of cultural influences, layering upon each other in complex processes of power, loss, and production.