Hybridity again

Great to see old stuff taken up in religious studies – where after all, I had my first job, thanks max Charlesworth and Purushottoma Billimoria, so a sort of return:

This below is from:

Peter Taehoon Lee and Godfrey Harold 2019

‘Potential or Threat?: Adopting Cultural Hybridity as a Concept for Diaspora Missiology’
October 2019, Project: Reflexivity and Missiology

One of the main concerns about hybridity is that the concept is too ambiguous and yet loaded with too many different ideas that its usage, if not careful, can easily become inconsistent and contradictory (Hutnyk 2015, 2005; Kraidy 2005, 2002; van der Veer 2015). It means that hybridity if covering too many angles at once, can become what John Hutnyk (2005:79–80) calls “a usefully slippery category” which is conveniently invoked to be an easy answer for all kinds of social and cultural situations. For example, if we state that everything is hybridised and everyone is hybrid, we are making the term lose much of its currency as a tool for social analysis. The same mistake can be made in missions if we conclude that certain religious traditions or cultural practices are hybrid without
looking at particularities of the specific hybrid phenomenon and how it differs from other hybrids and why it may be different.

 

And in case it is at all useful. Some texts discussing hybridity are:

Hybridity from Ethnic and Racial Studies 2005;

The chapatti story: how hybridity as theory displaced Maoism as politics in Subaltern Studies  from Contemporary South Asia 2003;

Hybridity Saves: Authenticity and the Critique of Appropriation Amer-Asia 1999;

Adorno at Womad from Postcolonial Studies 1998;

and you can get the book Diaspora and Hybridity, by Raminder Kaur, Virinder Kalra and me (its on book4you.org for example).