Syncretic Forms Research Articles

The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. By Timothy Insoll. Cambridge World Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv, 470; 125 illustrations. $95.00 cloth, $37.00 paper. Timothy Insoll's detailed overview of archaeology of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa can be read as both an encyclopedic summary of Iron Age archaeology as well as a challenge to begin thinking about archaeology of religion and religious practice. In many ways, this volume is a much-needed and more nuanced revision of works such as J. S. Trimingham's regional summaries and overviews of influence of Islam on sub-Saharan Africa.1 Additionally, it serves as a materialist companion to Nehemiah Levtzion and Randall Pouwels's recent History of Islam in Africa (2000). This ambitious volume focuses on material correlates of Islam and Islamic practice, delineates what an archaeology of Islam might look like, and how it might be attempted. Insoll rightly indicates that although archaeologists might recognize that Islamic practice was one of most significant processes in development of many societies after seventh century A.D. (through trade, politics, and social processes of conversion), they have not yet found a cohesive language to investigate and express those themes. The bulk of volume is a detailed assessment of archaeology of Islam in seven regions (Ethiopia and Horn of Africa, Nilotic Sudan, East coast, Western Sahel, Central Sudan, West Sudan and forest, and the interior). Insoll's regional summaries show dexterity in working with minutiae of regional archaeological sequences. This work perhaps necessarily duplicates a considerable amount of summarizing done by other fine texts, such as Graham Connah's Civilizations (2002) and David W. Phillipson's Archaeology (1993), although it includes numerous more recent findings. Whereas Connah uses archaeological data to demonstrate processes of Iron Age urbanization and state formation, Insoll's particular contribution is to investigate processes of religious transformation during similar periods. To accomplish this goal, Insoll first argues that an archaeology of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa requires an integration of multiple sources, including those of archaeology, ethnography, history, architecture, and linguistics. second, Insoll attempts to establish a material baseline for what he defines as two discrete religious traditions: Islam, and pre-Islamic African traditional religions. These archaeologically detectable manifestations include ritual architecture, diet, domestic spaces, burials, and art. Third, Insoll emphasizes that archaeology of Islam must be investigated as a process, whereby Islam is contested, resisted, accepted, or integrated, thus bridging his concepts of traditional religions and Islam. He is careful to note, however, that this is no simple process from one tradition to another, but one where peoples throughout continent developed syncretic forms of religious practice that resulted in a plurality of Islams. Insoll favors trade between populations and Muslim traders as most common reason for conversion to Islam (as seen in chapters on Western Sahel, Nilotic Sudan, East coast, and West Sudan). …

The Internet as Distributor and Mirror of Religious and Ritual Knowledge

AbstractSince the early 1990s, religious movements appeared on the Internet and introduced new forms of communication in ritual and dogma. Their Internet sites present different dogmatic, institutional, and other aspects of their religion; provide interactive communications and religious services; or simply sell religious items. This paper puts forth the argument that the gaining of ritual and dogmatic knowledge is losing its dependence on direct social interaction in a spatial community, and increasingly relies on Internet-based discourse in religious newsgroups and other discussion forums. Nevertheless, for migrant communities in the diaspora (Zoroastrians, Hindus, and adherents of Afro-American religions), the Internet appears to be offering a new opportunity for re-establishing the spatial bonds of the lost religious community. In other cases such as that of the Wicca religion, this greater independence of traditional religious and social hierarchies encourages the development of fragmentary and syncretic forms of religion.

Introduction: Diaspora, Performance, and National Affiliations in North America

Although current theories of diaspora argue for a break between an older irrevocable migration from one nation to another and a new transnational movement between host country and birthplace, research on nineteenth- as well as twentieth-century North America demonstrates that earlier migration also had a transnational dimension. The cultural consequences of this two-way traffic include syncretic performance forms, institutions, and audiences, whose legitimacy depended on engagement with but not total assimilation in local conventions and on the mobilization of touristic nostalgia in, say, Cantonese opera in California or Bavarian-American musicals in New York, to appeal to nativist and immigrant consumers. Today, syncretic theatre of diaspora is complicated on the one hand by a theatre of diasporic residence, in which immigrants dramatize inherited conflicts in the host country, such as Québécois separatism in Canada, along with problems of migrants, among them South Asians, and on the other by a theatre of non-residence, touring companies bringing theatre from the home country, say India, to ‘non-resident Indians’ and local audiences in the United States.

A Globalizing Constitutionalism?

This article uses primary data from the constitutional texts of 91 postcolonial nations (over the course of the latter part of the 20th century) to question the effects of global political norms upon documentary constitutionalism. The independence constitutions were strongly influenced by intra-imperial and transnational lines of circulation, but not global ones. They were differentiated by former empire, religion and political-economic ideology. A significant change came about during the 1990s, when most of these original constitutions were rewritten or replaced. The newer constitutions are more isomorphic than before, indicating the global influence of democratization, human rights ideology and economic neoliberalism. On the other hand, this process of homogenization has been tempered by two countervailing processes: constitutional complexification and differentiation. These processes produce syncretic forms within and across constitutions. They reveal that divergence can unfold concomitantly with, rather than in spite of, constitutional convergence.

Aesthetics of diaspora: Contemporary minstrels in Turkish Berlin

The process of identity formation of the Turkish hip-hop youth in Berlin is a constant negotiation between past and future, 'roots' and 'routes', local and global, home and diaspora. German-Turkish youth in general are socially conscious and critical of the increasing discrimination, segregation, exclusion and racism in society. These new syncretic forms of expressive minority youth cultures expose a social movement of urban youth that already has a distinct political ideology. Some of the Turkish rappers in Berlin take a significant position within these new social movements as the spokespeople (contemporary minstrels and/or storytellers) of their communities. These rap groups have eventually played a vital role in developing an anti-racist struggle by communicating information, organising the collective consciousness and testing out, deploying, or amplifying the forms of subjectivity within the Turkish diaspora. Accordingly, this article attempts to explore the forms of expressive culture which the Berlin-Turkish hip-hop youths have constructed as a reaction to the structural outsiderism and exclusion, and demonstrates their construction of a double diasporic cultural identity.

God opnieuw denken? Een andere weg naar de Godsleer

In this article the room is explored to integrate into systematic theology the recent research on the fields of archaeology of ancient Palestine and of Israelite history of religion. Inscriptions presenting ‘Jahweh and his asjera’ as well as the openness for a form of syncretism in Canaan both question the history of Israel as it has been seen by Von Rad c.s in the antithetic way. From a canonical perspective many god(des)s-images rightly have been broken. What, however, when we read the texts anew, trying to unfreeze the frozen dialogue? Perhaps the flinders of the old images can break our new ones.

‘Roots’?: the relationship between the global and the local within the Extreme Metal scene

Music's ‘malleability’ (Taylor 1997) has always facilitated its export and import from one location to another. Indeed, such processes are central to the creation and dissemination of new musical forms. Yet in our contemporary globalised world, such processes occur ever more extensively and rapidly giving rise to new forms of appropriation and syncretism. Record companies from the developed world find new audiences in the developing world (Laing 1986). Musicians from the West appropriate non-Western music, sometimes collaboratively (Feld 1994; Taylor 1997). Non-Western musicians and musicians from subaltern groups within the West create new syncretic forms drawing on both Western and non-Western music (Mitchell 1996; Lipsitz 1994, Slobin 1993). The resulting ‘global ecumene’ produces considerable ‘cultural disorder’ (Featherstone 1990, p. 6) whose results cannot easily be summarised.

Health promotion, fitness and bodies in a postcolonial context: the case of Trinidad

There has been little exploration in medical sociology literature of health promotion and the body in Third World contexts. This paper addresses ways in which practices of the body relating to health contest colonizing forms of social control by examining representations and practices of the body in Trinidad, West Indies. It reviews recent sociological work relating to health promotion. It is argued that while the literature is increasingly concerned with the links between health promotion and social identity, it has not utilized the observation from postcolonial theory that western identities have been crucially affected by the colonial experience which involved the othering of people outside the West through a process of racialization. This paper examines ways in which health-promoting selves in a non-western setting are formed through a critical negotiation of western categories of difference. Through the study of fitness culture in Trinidad, and particularly the phenomenon of getting in shape for Carnival, various instances of ambivalence and resistance towards constructions of colonized bodies are shown. Medical sociology literature furthermore does not acknowledge the role of non-western ‘others’ in contesting universalizing western master narratives and thus in leading to the fragmentations of identity thought to be associated with a new, more advanced stage of history, called postmodernism. The paper examines African and Indian health beliefs and practices in Trinidad and how they have responded to western medicine ever since colonization over 200 years ago, sometimes defying, sometimes incorporating elements of it into practices of the body to create hybrid and syncretic forms. By showing that challenges to western medicine as a master narrative have existed in a colonized country for over two centuries, the paper questions the idea that such challenges are a recent phenomenon signifying a more advanced stage of history.

Early Dalit Literature and Culture in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Western India

The formation of the Dalit Panthers and the flourishing of Dalit literature in the 1970s saw the advent of a new connotation for the Marathi word ‘Dalit’. Chosen by the Mahar community leaders themselves, the title ‘Dalit’ was used by them to replace the titles of untouchable, Backward or Depressed Classes and Harijans, which had been coined by those outside the Dalit communities to describe the Mahar and Chambhar jatis. ‘Dalit’ identified those whose culture had been deliberately ‘broken’, ‘crushed to pieces’ or ‘ground down’ by the varna Hindu culture above them. As such, it contained an explicit repudiation of all the Hindu cultural norms of untouchability, varna structure and karma doctrine which varna Hindu society had imposed. The adoption of this new title was an affirmation of the Dalit community's struggle for cultural independence and separate identity. Yet this struggle for an independent cultural identity was not merely a cultural struggle of the 1970s, but one which stretched back almost a century to what, retrospectively, must be seen as the inception of Dalit literature and culture in the activities of the Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal and the first Dalit writings of Gopal Baba Valangkar in 1888. This article aims to recover this much-neglected early history of the Dalit communities of western India at the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, it examines how these early Dalit communities came to articulate an emergent Dalit cultural identity through the construction of a syncretic form of bhakti Hindu culture.

The Cross and the Serpent: Religious Repression and Resurgence in Colonial Peru by Nicholas Griffiths

538BOOK REVIEWS tions of the impact of the Spanish conquest wUl find this work to be of great value. It is also a handsome volume, virtuaUy error-free with copious Ulustrations ,many ofthem photographs taken by the author. It is highly recommended to a wide class of readers. Stafford Poole, CM. Los Angeles The Cross and the Serpent:Religious Repression and Resurgence in Colonial Peru. By Nicholas Griffiths. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1996. Pp. xi, 355. $37.50.) This important revisionist study complements such recent works concerned with issues in the Christianization ofAndean Indigenous populations as Sabine MacCormack's 1991 Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru and Pierre DuvoUs' 1986 Cultura andina y represión:Procesos y visitas de idolatrías y hechicerías. Drawing his careful and thorough analysis from archival records in Peru, Spain, and Rome, Nicholas Griffiths argues convincingly against the standard interpretation in mission histories that repression effectively eradicated native religious practices by 1660 and firmly estabUshed CathoUcism in colonial Peru. His close examination of archival sources indicates that extirpation activities persisted intermittently weU into the eighteenth century. Delineating the cases of many accused hechiceros, he also chaUenges the theorizing of Michael Taussig's 1980 The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America and Irene Silverblatt's 1987 Moon, Sun and Witches that seventeenth-century idolatry trials in Peru represented a New World counterpart of the European witch craze. Griffiths focuses most of his study on the ideological and institutional shortcomings ofwhat he terms the Extirpation Campaign.He emphasizes that Eurocentric perspectives among the clergy hearing idolatry charges against shamans during most of the seventeenth century invalidated the process from its beginnings . Refusing to recognize native religious practitioners as respected and powerful leaders, the extirpators identified them as frauds who deceived their cUents whUe enriching themselves. This mind-set proved counterproductive, for the punished shamans retained and even enhanced their prestige among the Indians as preservers of traditional beliefs. Nor did the destruction of mallquis and huacas obUterate their perceived numinous significance Ln Indian communities . Contrasting the idolatry trials with those ofthe Inquisition, Griffiths contends further that they lacked the institutional support necessary to succeed. He maintains that only the occasional interest of zealous prelates, such as Archbishop Pedro de VUlagómez, who revived the Indian idolatry trials after 1660, provided limited continuity for repressive activities. Griffiths demonstrates that the manipulation of idolatry trials by native religious and political leaders to further their own ambitions, as weU as to protect BOOK REVIEWS539 their communities from Spanish domination and repression, also contributed to the demise of the Extirpation Campaign. Indian resistance strategies and the politicization of idolatry trials became increasingly evident during the 1690's and the early eighteenth century. As Griffiths documents, these cases often were power struggles between the shaman, the Christian priest, and the indigenous poUtical authority, the kuraka, for community control. Unlike Inquisition procedures,defendants were permitted to know the identity ofwitnesses.They frequently used this information to gain dismissal of the charges against them with convincing arguments that the accusations arose solely from the enmity of jealous rivals and community exploiters. In a lengthy conclusion, Griffiths considers the survival of certain native rituals either in a syncretic form or as practices that have been unchanged since before the Spanish conquest as a legacy of the faUed Extirpation Campaign.WhUe some scholars may question the extent of such linkages, Peruvanists wUl especiaUy welcome his insightful contribution to Andean cultural encounters. JosephA. Gagliano Loyola University ofChicago Asian Educating the Women ofHainan:The Career ofMargaretMoninger in China, 1915-1942. By Kathleen L. Lodwick. (Lexington:The University Press of Kentucky. 1995. Pp. xvi, 255.) Crusaders against Opium:Protestant Missionaries in China, 1847-1917. By Kathleen L. Lodwick. (Lexington:The University Press of Kentucky. 1996. Pp. xiii, 232. $29.95.) Known for her pubUcation of The Chinese Recorder Index (1986), Kathleen L. Lodwick exhibits versatUe scholarship in a biography ofMargaret Moninger, a missionary to Hainan, and in a study of missionary, institutional, and governmental events surrounding suppression of opium Ui China at the turn of the century. Moninger (1881-1950) was an Iowa-born, Presbyterian-sponsored missioner to Hainan (1915-1942...

Les perífrasis modals de necessitat-obligació i probabilitat en català. Seguiment diacrònic. Segles XIII al XX

The analysis presents a serie of systematized information which helps to retrace the application frequency that modal periphrasis deure + infinitive, haver + infinitive and tenir + de + infinitive have reached from 13th to 20th centuries, their formal variants and functional changes. It has also analysed another periphrastic structures that eventually they join Catalan modal periphrastic system, and it has been examined some specific aspects of the analysis: the notion of verbal periphrasis, the variations that involve modal variables and the others that belong to deure + infinitive syncretic form, the monitoring in cult and late Latin of periphrastic forms with the habeo and debeo verb, in addition to the use of modal indicators, the repetition of periphrastic forms in the syntagmatic sequence, nexus variables, syncretic structures and some analogical process.

Delusions of witches and suppression of femininity in the Occidental culture from the analytic viewpoint

In this study, we look into the historical roots of the witch-hunt. For a period of 540 years, between 1241 and 1782, the burning of witches has been well documented. During these 540 years witch-hunts were simply the culmination of a passionate hostility against femininity as such within western culture. As can clearly be seen in the texts of the great medieval theologians, the humiliation and degradation of the female sex--and the condemnation (or diabolization) of sexuality as well as antisexual prejudices--originate from a pre-Christian, heathen-mythological way of thinking, which was largely established by the medieval church as a form of syncretism and the notions of which persist even today. In those days the compulsive regulation of sexuality and the threat of the torments of hell, if one did not obey these rules, initiated the vicious circle of failure, guilt and fear in people's minds and so made it impossible to overcome the Oedipus complex. This regression to the 'anal stage of development' prepared the ground for sadomasochistic destructiveness, which was (supported by superstition) projected outwards onto the so-called witches.

A Framework for Teaching West African Musics in Schools and Colleges

Existing classifications of West African musics seem to have a limited applicability as models for music education in schools and colleges. Hence, a more comprehensive classification, highlighting a range of syncretic forms, is merged with a structure in Ghanaian drum ensembles to yield a sequential, two dimensional, model. It is then argued that the model can be used as a framework for teaching West African musics in primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions. A more general discussion is followed by an integrated arts application; finally, a musical perspective, including compositions by the present writer, is presented.

Building God's House in the Roman World: Architectural Adaptation among Pagans, Jews, and Christians by L. Michael White

BOOK REVIEWS627 of the Minster came at the end of the thirteenth century when "almost 150 [sic] years of litigation began, not now between the bishops and the chapter, but between the deans and their chapters." Not surprisingly perhaps, contempt for the authority of the dean and chapter on the part of the lesser clergy and servants of the cathedral (like Thomas Mudd, its drunkenly insubordinate organist in 1663) runs like a leit-motiv through the pages of this volume; and it is hardly less surprising that the chapter should have fallen victim to one of the most notorious and ruthless ecclesiastical patronage networks in the country after William Pitt nominated George Pretyman as bishop of Lincoln in 1787. No doubt Lincoln Cathedral has suffered more than its due share of internal faction; and no doubt too it has suffered from its comparative isolation and from the irony that the mother church of medieval England's largest diocese should be so unsuitably located. Not that any of these disadvantages inhibited the erection of what William Cobbett called "the finest building in the whole world." Might it even be that Christian cathedrals derive much of their creative energy from human strife and frailty? Perhaps we should positively hope so; for otherwise Peter Kidson's belief that the future history of Lincoln and other cathedrals can only be one of"temporary reprieve or decent mummification" is too disquieting to contemplate. R. B. Dobson Christ's College, Cambridge Ancient Building God'sHouse in theRoman World:ArchitecturalAdaptation among Pagans,Jews, and Christians. By L. Michael White. (Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, for the American Schools of Oriental Research. 1990. Pp. xviü, 211. »27.50.) This volume may be considered, in my opinion, a very important contribution to the history of the primitive and early Church, especially in regard to the Church as building. The bibliography on this subject, particularly with relation to the Christian community in Rome, comprises a long series of tides; and with respect to other cities of very early Christianity, apart from DuraEuropos , which is dealt with in many works both large and small, towns such as Antioch have been thoroughly investigated; in the case of Antioch special attention is due to André Marie Jean Festugière's Antioche païenne et chrétienne . But the very special feature of L. Michael White's book is to stress, with a large apparatus of critical information, the connection between early pagan, Jewish, and Christian places of worship. Architectural adaptation is the principle, but architecture goes hand in hand with other forms of religious syncretism or, more so probably in the case of Christianity, of highly valuable 628BOOK REVIEWS eclecticism. Rightly for the Roman world is to be understood that ecumene of political, administrative, and military government unified under the leadership of Rome as capital of the Empire. Yet, as is well known, the Oriental part of it transcended, by and large, even the realm of the Hellenistic conglomerate of states to allow Jewish and then Christian penetration of the Caucasian regions—Georgia, Armenia, and then Persia, Ethiopia, and farther remote enclaves in Asia, Africa, and the Arabian peninsula. Whether through the witness of monuments still existing or mrough the testimony of written texts, inscriptions, and other archaeological finds, the reconstruction of this world done by Dr. White in his solid chapters is impressive first of all for its accuracy; secondly, it is very instructive in comparative methodology. This is perhaps the moment to recall that the author had already published a prior volume; in his words, "The present study is based on the collection of archaeological and documentary materials first assembled in the author's Yale dissertation and now published separately under the tide Christian Dotnus Ecclesiae and Its Environment' (p. xi) (with the subtitle A Collection of Texts andMonuments in "Harvard Theological Studies," Vol. 36, in association with the American Schools of Oriental Research [Minneapolis: AugsburgFortress , 1990]). So the environment of the Christian Domus Ecclesiae is given here in the exposition of God's house in the early adaptations among pagans, Jews, and Christians from Dura-Europos to Roman Brittany. A sample of the whole matter is given in these words...

Enchevêtrement de voies: Au carrefour de la polyphonie et des musiques improvisées contemporaines

The author’s reflections on the concept of polyphony are based on the practices of improvisation of modern jazz, but they also take into account various attempts to tear down the walls separating different musical traditions, such as Western classical music and traditional or popular music. After addressing the difference between monody and polyphony, the author focusses on improvisation and its links with polyphony. He also considers polyphony from the symbolic angle: the autonomy of each part represents a micro-society whose members constitute a whole while maintaining their autonomy. On the other hand, the wealth of forms of polyphonic interaction presupposes complex modes of thought extending over various levels, reaching many horizons. Nowadays, the multiplication of musical roots and the many syncretic forms thus created has fostered a polyphony of musics.

Power and the portrait: The influence of the ruling elite on the visual text in western India

This paper traces the development of the visual tradition as represented in painting, photographs and posters in western India and illustrates the role of the succession of elite and dominant elements of societies in effecting stylistic change in local and traditional systems of visual representation. In doing so the paper explores the structure of the process of indigenous transformations and how a new element could pass through different stages, such as introduction, induction, modification, sedimentation, traditionalization, marginalization, revitalization, periodization, eclipse and reformalization. In the dynamic of this cauldron of co‐existing influences syncretic forms emerge that demonstrate the mixed parentage of historical inheritances and which prompt the question as to how might the term “indigenous visual text” or “indigenous tradition” be employed with clarity.

Vodou: A Faith for Individual, Family, and Community From Dieu dans le vaudou haitien

This chapter is not the result of meticulous ethnological observations that we have made on Haitian soil. It does not pretend to dispense with the study of works such as those of J. P. Price-Mars, Metraux, Emmanuel, and C. Paul.1 Our debt to these authors and to certain works of the Bureau of Ethnology in Port-au-Prince is great. It would have been preferable to present our own observations, but the Church and our own education were hindrances to our participation in Vodou ceremonies. Having lived in the country and having traveled through a number of rural areas such as that of Jacmel, however, we became aware of the vitality of Vodou in its syncretic form with Catholicism. We visited ounfb and were welcomed by the families of Catholic peasants, where we discussed their Vodou practice with them. Apart from ethnological details on the rites and ceremonies, we tried, whenever possible, to apply our own observations, as insufficient as they might be, to this syncretism. Although it is practiced clandestinely, Vodou so informs everyday life that it is difficult for a Haitian (from the country at least) not to encounter it. In this study, our principal aim is to go beyond the descriptions generally presented by ethnographers, although they will serve when seen with a critical eye.2 We will show how, in Vodou, we are dealing with an authentic religious experience, a valid cultural language like any other language -one which satisfies the Haitian practitioner in the quest for an understanding of things in this world and in the attempt to give meaning to human existence.

David Hare: A Magician's Game in Context

Working as a primitive artist-magician, David Hare typified his generation by producing syncretic forms in a “magician's game.” Of his 1944 sculpture of that name (Fig. 1), he said:

Une indo-portugaise sur la route du poivre : Goa

An indo-portuguese territory on the pepper route : Goa Conquered in 1510, Goa went through stunning prosperity. It became the privileged place for exchanges between the East and the West and at the end of the 16th century it lived on high-class trade : spices from the Moluccas, precious stones, brocade from the Indies and Arabian horses ... The evangelization which went with Portuguese colonization suddenly transformed the culture of the local populations who became Christians but kept, in a simplified way, the fundamental structure of Hinduism, the system of castes as well as Hindu customs concerning marriage or everyday life. A new aesthetic style appeared at first in religious architecture, much influenced by baroque but also in literature and music in which the nostalgia of old India was maintained in syncretic forms. The catholic and latin implant took hold in Goa but it did not succeed in eradicating the major features of Hindu culture.

Dorovės ir religinių vaizdinių ryšio atsiradimas

Straipsnyje siekiama atskleisti dorovės ir religinių vaizdinių ryšio pirmykštėje visuomenėje atsiradimą, nagrinėtą lietuvių autorių XX a. pradžioje bei sovietiniu laikotarpiu. Pateikiamos dvi koncepcijos: pirmoji teigia, kad moralė atsirado anksčiau nei religija. Moralė yra objektyvus socialinis reiškinys, atsiradęs kartu su visuomene. Kita nuomonė teigia, jog moralė atsirado dėl religijos. Šios dvi koncepcijos nėra griežtai alternatyvios viena kitai, nes pirmoji turėjo tikslą ateistiškai pagrįsti moralės pirmumą ir autonomiškumą prieš religiją, o antroji, kaip socialinė filosofija, šį klausimą sprendė grynai teoriškai. Vienu atveju moralė kaip socialinis reiškinys nagrinėjama genetiškai, kitu – traktuojama kaip jau esamas reiškinys. Straipsnyje laikomasi nuomonės, jog moralė primityvia forma egzistavusi ir pirmykštės visuomenės sąlygomis. Pirmykščio žmogaus mąstymo ir dvasinio gyvenimo sinkretizmą marksistinės socialinės metodologijos rėmuose vienu ar kitu aspektu pripažįsta dauguma filosofų. Visi reiškiniai, kurie nebuvo teisingai suvokiami, bet turėjo didelę reikšmę pirmykščio žmogaus gyvenime ir visuomenėje, buvo aiškinami fantastiškai, magiškai ir antgamtiškai.