Religious differentiations are as important as creolization processes in creole societies. Changing importance of and identification with religious practices are interrelated with political developments and power relations, ranging from the colonial context via departmentalization to regionalization, which come along with possibilities and felt expectations of cultural identification, including as French, Indian, Hindu, Reunionese, and Creole.
Religious practices also reflect changing images of Hindus, such as from indentured laborers to successful entrepreneurs, as well as their aspirations for recognition and status. At the same time, creolization has been criticized for being used extensively without enough precision. Instead of taking it as an analytical tool, scholars have suggested to study how creolization was used and imagined in socio-political discourses in particular places at particular historical moments cf.
Similarly, rather than thinking about religious creolization or syncretism as analytical tools, which would imply examining the mixing of assumed religious entities as defined by authors or authorizing institutions, some scholars see more value in examining such concepts as discursive tools that are used to define religious communities either negatively, as corrupting assumed religious truths, or positively, as tolerant and plural Van der Veer, I suggest to pay even more attention to differentiation processes, such as resistance to religious creolization, marking religious boundaries, and claiming recognition of a minority religion.
As Frank J. Korom demonstrates for the case of Trinidad, decreolization can serve as a strategy of a minority group to resist full submersion into a majority population, for example by pursuing external creolization but internal decreolization.
As this article illustrates, the interplay between religious creolization and differentiation processes can become apparent on different levels, including among groups, in rituals, or even within the life courses of individuals. Finally, creolization itself can imply differentiation, linguistic, religious, or cultural purity claims, and hierarchies Benoist Reunionese today are French citizens with ancestors from different parts of the world, including Africa, Madagascar, India, China, and France.
