· Please read the following article excerpt, and view the video clips below.  Listen carefully in order to understand as much of the Spanish as you can, using the images and contextual clues to help you get a sense of the gist of the video content.

· Next, write a 200-word response in English to the issues raised. Make sure to address the following questions:

1.  What is syncretism and how does it differ from the concept of the melting pot?  2.  How is Latin America’s (specifically Brazil and Cuba) experience with racial and cultural mixture different from that of the U.S.? 3.  Can you give a couple of examples of syncretism in your own culture or in the U.S.?

Article

SYNCRETISM AND ITS SYNONYMS: REFLECTIONS ON CULTURAL MIXTURE by CHARLES STEWART

(If you would like to read the article from which this excerpt was taken, you can find it in Doc Sharing.)

The subject matter of anthropology has gradually changed over the last twenty years. Nowadays ethnographers rarely search for a stable or original form of cultures; they are usually more concerned with revealing how local communities respond to historical change and global influences. The burgeoning literature on transnational flows of ideas, global institutions, and cultural mixture reflects this shift of attention. This increased awareness of cultural penetration has, furthermore, been instrumental in the critique of earlier conceptions of “culture” that cast it as too stable: bounded, and homogeneous to be useful in a world characterized by migrations (voluntary or forced), cheap travel, international marketing, and telecommunications… In this body of literature the word syncretism has begun to reappear alongside such related concepts as hybridization and creolization as a means of portraying the dynamics of global social developments.

My purpose in considering the history of syncretism up to the present is not to enforce a standard usage conformed to the domain of religion; nor is it my goal to promote syncretism to a position of primus inter pares in the company of all other terms for mixture. I see my approach instead as an attempt to illustrate historically that syncretism has an objectionable but nevertheless instructive past…

Current Discussions of Mixture

Cultures, if we still wish to retain this term (and I do), are porous; they are open to intermixture with other, different cultures and they are subject to historical change precisely on account of these influences. This has no doubt always been the case…

Cultural borrowing and interpenetration are today seen as part of the very nature of cultures… To phrase it more accurately, syncretism describes the process by which cultures constitute themselves at any given point in time. Today's hybridization will simply give way to tomorrow's hybridization, the form of which will be dictated by historical-political events and contingencies… As [Edward] Said expresses it: all cultures are involved in one another, none is simple and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic" [xxv]. Even traditionalist movements mounted by minority groups or peripheral, postcolonial societies in the conscious, nativist effort to resist "Westernization" or "Americanization" cannot escape cultural hybridity…

The Meanings of Syncretism

The term syncretism, originally coined with a positive sense… acquired overriding negative connotations in the seventeenth century… This negative view of syncretism would remain very much in place during the ensuing period of missionary expansion lasting well into the present century. Syncretism became a term of abuse often applied to castigate colonial local churches that had burst out of the sphere of mission control and begun to "illegitimately" indigenize Christianity instead of properly reproducing the European form of Christianity they had originally been offered…

In the New World a much more positive attitude toward the concept of syncretism has long prevailed among social scientists… Whereas most sub-Saharan African societies were still under colonial rule up through the 1950s, most New World societies had already gained independence in the preceding century and had long been engaged in attempts to consolidate national cultural identities. Many North and South American countries publicly espoused versions of a "melting pot" ideology as a strategy of nation-building. The melting pot is the analogue of syncretism in the ethno-political domain, and it would have been difficult to criticize the one without simultaneously undermining the other…

The Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, expressed broadly similar views. Freyre considered Brazilian society to be fundamentally a synthesis of different "races" and cultures [xiii; Skidmore, "Racial Ideas" 22]. This synthesis was facilitated by the fact that the Portuguese colonizers were themselves the mixed outcome of a contact with a more advanced and darker people-the Moors-and hence amenable to cultural borrowing and racial mixture…

Public acknowledgment and discussion of racial mixture was much more developed in Latin America than in the United States, where many states still had miscegenation laws on their books in the middle of this century… Nevertheless, in popular and political usage the Spanish term mestizaje, for example, embraced both racial and cultural syntheses, and its political valorization was a necessary nation-building strategy throughout Latin America.

The Cuban historical experience provides yet another illuminating example to contrast with the North American melting pot. Cuban culture developed as various exogenous cultures (primarily Spanish and African) met and mingled. There were only creoles. The indigenas disappeared entirely early on. This situation prompted Fernando Ortiz, a Cuban lawyer, folklorist, and historian, to develop the idea of trans-culturation to depict the Cuban experience of mixture [97-103; Coronil]. Transculturation differed from acculturation in stressing that all cultures change in a situation of contact; it involves a simultaneous loss and acquisition of culture and, in the case of Cuba, it is a matter of a continuing, creative flux, never a finished synthesis. The Cuban example thus did not indicate assimilation to a cultural or ethnic dominant standard as was the case in the US, nor did it have a teleology of whiteness as did other parts of Latin America.

In less well-known essays brought to light by Stephan Palmié ["Out of Place"] Ortiz explicitly dismissed the applicability of the "melting pot" concept for Cuba and likened it rather to an ajiaco, a stew of meats and vegetables seasoned with hot pepper (aji). "The characteristic thing about Cuba," Ortiz contended, " is that since it is an ajiaco, its people are not a finished stew, but a constant [process of] cooking .... Hence the change of its composition, and [the fact] that cubanidad has a different flavor and consistency depending on whether one tastes what is at the middle [of the pot], or at its surface, where the foods (viandas) are still raw. and the bubbling liquid still clear" [qtd. in Palmié, "Out of Place" 35].

Ex. 6-4

Exercise 6-4 Name:
Section:
Enter the appropriate amount or label in the shaded cells.
An asterisk (*) will appear next to an incorrect item or amount in the outlined cells.
a. WEDGEFORTH COMPANY
Schedule of Cost of Goods Sold
For the Year Ended November 30, 2010
November 30, 2010
Cost of merchandise sold:
Purchases
Purchases discounts
Less:
Craig Pence: Enter the subtractions as positive amounts.

Peggy Hussey: Enter the period of time covered by this statement.

cpence: Enter the larger of the two subtractions on this line.
Purchases returns and allowances
Freight in
Net Purchases Merchandise Inventory, November 30, 2010
Add: Merchandise Inventory, December 1, 2009
Cost of merchandise purchased Cost of merchandise sold
Merchandise available for sale
Less:
Cost of merchandise sold
b.
Gross profit reported for the year ended November 30, 2010:

Ex. 6-7

Exercise 6-7 Name:
Section:
Enter the appropriate amount or item in the shaded cells.
An asterisk (*) will appear next to or below an incorrect entry in the outlined cells.
Account Worksheet Column
1. Advertising expense Selling expense
Administrative expense
2. Depreciation expense on store equipment Other expense
3. Insurance expense on office equipment
4. Interest expense on notes payable
5. Rent expense on office building
6. Salaries of office personnel
7. Salary of sales manager
8. Sales supplies used

Ex. 6-23

Exercise 6-23 Name:
Section:
Enter the appropriate amount or item in the shaded cells.
An asterisk (*) will appear next to an incorrect amount in the outlined cells.
Schedule of Invoice Payments
Returns and Allowances Net Cost Discount for Early Payment Net Cost Freight Paid by Seller Amount to be Paid
Merchandise
a. $ 15,000.00
Craig Pence: This amount is equal to the original invoice cost of the merchandise, less the returns and allowances and less the discount.

Craig Pence: This amount is equal to the invoice price of the merchandise less the returns and allowances.
b. 10,000.00
c. 8,250.00
d. 2,900.00
e. 3,850.00

Pr. 6-5A

Problem 6-5A Name:
Section:
Enter the appropriate amount or account in the shaded cells.
An asterisk (*) will appear next to an incorrect item or amount in the outlined cells.
JOURNAL
Date Description Debit Credit
Dec. 3
5
6
6
7
13
15

Peggy Hussey: Record the larger of the two credits on this line.

Craig Pence: Always record the sale in the first entry, then record the cost of the inventory in the second entry.
16
Craig Pence: Record the larger of the two debits on this line.
19
19
22
22
23
Craig Pence: Always record the sale in the first entry, then record the cost of the inventory in the second entry.

Craig Pence: Always record the sale in the first entry, then record the cost of the inventory in the second entry.
23
28
Craig Pence: Record the adjustment to sales revenue first, before recording the adjustment to inventory.

Peggy Hussey: Record the larger of the two credits on this line.

Craig Pence: Always record the sale in the first entry, then record the cost of the inventory in the second entry.
28
31
Accounts Receivable - Smith River Co.
Accounts Receivable - Zion Co.
Accounts Payable - Deepwater Co..
Accounts Payable - Hillsboro Co.
Cash
Cost of Merchandise Sold
Credit Card Expense
Merchandise Inventory
Sales
Sales Discounts
Sales Returns and Allowances

Continued on next page

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