A Field Guide to Creative Syncretism, or, How People Make and Remake Institutions.

This paper is a first effort to broach a discussion of institutions and institutional change in the United States and the developing world. Facing the challenges of research on the politics of economic development in the US and local adaptations to centrally imposed development projects in Senegal, we noticed we were thinking about institutions and human agency in similar ways. In spite of the obvious differences in our subjects of study, we independently came to the idea that the very different institutions we puzzled over were complex bundles of elements that could be combined and recombined in unpredictable ways. We both called this process ?syncretism.? We also noticed that our subjects often manipulated institutional pieces in ways unexpected by conventional theories of human agency. Drawing upon structuralist anthropology, Galvan came to call this capacity ?bricolage??the ability of people to assemble available materials to solve pressing problems. Drawing upon pragmatist social theory, Berk called this capacity the ?creativity of action,? that is, the collective ability of people to reimagine parts of their world anew and experiment with means to alter it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]