Opinion Volume 5 - Issue 4 - October 2019 DOI: 10.19080/CTFTTE.2019.05.555667 Curr Trends Fashion Technol Textile Eng Copyright © All rights are reserved by Massimo Canevacci Syncretisms Massimo Canevacci* Department of Native Cultures and digital arts, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil Submission: October 01, 2019; Published: October 29, 2019 *Corresponding author: Massimo Canevacci, Department of Native Cultures and digital arts, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil Curr Trends Fashion Technol Textile Eng 5(4): CTFTTE.MS.ID.555667 (2019) 0099 Opinion My anthropology assumes syncretism as a key word for understanding the transformation in the relationship between cultures and ethnography. Within the conflictual processes of globalisation and localisation, syncretism involves, disturbs, and overwhelms the traditional ways of producing ubiquitous culture, fetish consumption, and digital communication. The term ‘syncretism’ not only helps with the comprehension of a context of accelerated and confused transformations, but also addresses growing communicative disorders alongside a creative, decentralised, and open movement of the term. The paradox of being an instable word inhabits syncretism, due to its continuous change of meanings. Often, the word syncretism is embellished with elegant or more conflicting synonyms, such as pastiche, patchwork, marronisation, hybridism, blending, mulattism, and acculturation: all related to the ambiguous game played by so-called cross-cultural contamination. As part of this game´s excessive inconsistency, vulgarity and indigenisation, all the clichés of the trio aesthetic-ethic-ethnic are broken and stirred up, as are everyday’s behaviours and lifestyles. Ultimately, through digital mixing, syncretism invests, dissolves, and reshapes the relationship between strange and familiar levels; and the liaisons among elite, mass, and avant-garde cultures. Syncretisms are dislocating worldwide scenarios and trying to relegate the obscure clarity of binary oppositions into a boring and excessively simplified past. The anguish of homologation so long battled by the political left (or not) and now wearily stressed by a certain right wing (and some residues of the traditional left) can be now relegated to the vault of forgotten ideas. Now the word syncretism, after its philosophical and religious use, both in the superficial and derogatory sense, may be re-invented by anthropology, challenging any mutations as a restless experimentation in the name of xenophile communication. Syncretism is an ethnographically reshaped concept that spans the arts, despite (or simply due to) its inability to self-regulate or to be regulated. Syncretism is ready to launch itself as an applied ethnographic project for exact political imagination and expanded arts: as a mixture of codes that recombine ethnic and cultural differences, apparently considered as incongruous assets. Let me now clarify some specific methodological criteria. What was considered during the 1920s and 1930s in France as an extraordinary meeting point between surrealism and ethnography now appears as a possible crossroads, regarding innovative research, distorted experimentation and ubiquitous critique. Even earlier, in 1907, Pablo Picasso, who (like Modigliani, Braque, and others) was able to see African masks in several marché aux puces (‘flea markets’) painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and shaped an inventive syncretic art movement, cubism. Faces and bodies inspired by Africans were displayed next to European faces and bodies, bringing to the world another perspective, a multi-faceted one. This mix did not seem like any final synthesis of eugenics standards, but rather, the display of explosive traits opposed to each other in the very same frame. The change was radical for the European arts and will have an increasing influence in non-European contexts. In the 1980s, even the nascent cyberpunk movement showed syncretic traces of voodoo and cyberspace codes in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a novel about ethno-cyber navigation within cyber-punk counterculture. Recently, David Cronenberg, another Canadian, has attempted to connect his fetish movies with erotic literature, digital anthropophagy, and out-of-body existence with his first novel, Consumed: So many women have cancer now. Do you think a new aesthetic can develop? Cancer beauty? I mean, if there could be heroin chic, the aesthetic of death-wishing drug addict? Will non-cancerous women be begging this cosmetic surgeon to give them fake node implants under their chins and around their necks? Under their arms? In their groins? So sexy, that fullness. And it works so well as an anti-aging technique, to fill out that sagging turkey neck. Who wouldn’t want it? And the jewellery, the titanium pellets piercing those tits [1]. As we have already seen, anthropophagy was an avant-garde movement in the Brazilian cultural- political urban context. Perhaps now it will be possible to outline a new literary genre: cyberphagy-A cyber-anthropophagy through which the author liberates his compulsion to devour his lover or himself. The interlacing between syncretism and fetishism is my basic Current Trends in Fashion Technology & Textile Engineering ISSN: 2577-2929