Ring shout

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A shout or ring shout is an ecstatic dance ritual, first practiced by African slaves in the West Indies and the United States, in which worshippers move in a circle while shuffling their feet and clapping their hands. Despite the name, shouting aloud is not an essential part of the ritual.

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[edit] Description

"Shouting" often took place during or after a Christian prayer meeting or worship service. Men and women moved in a circle in a counterclockwise direction, shuffling their feet, clapping, and often spontaneously singing or praying aloud. In Jamaica and Trinidad the shout was usually performed around a special second altar near the center of a church building. In the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, shouters formed a circle outdoors, around the church building itself.[1] In some cases, slaves retreated into the woods at night to perform shouts, often for hours at a time, with participants leaving the circle as they became exhausted.[2] In the twentieth century some African-American churchgoers in the United States performed shouts by forming a circle around the pulpit.[3]

[edit] Origin

The origins of the ring shout are obscure, and it is usually assumed to be derived from African dance. The ritual may have originated among enslaved Muslims from West Africa as an imitation of tawaf, the mass procession around the Kaaba that is an essential part of the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. If so, the word "shout" may come from Arabic sha'wt, meaning a single circumambulation of the Kaaba.[4] The movement of the ring shout is exactly parallel to that of Zimbawean women who dance their part in the Muchongoyo, with teh entire body being involved with the weight of the torso and legs being driven into the feet as they shift from side to side. Men dance apart from the women and perform high knee lifts in this same dance.[5]

[edit] References

  • Diouf, Sylviane. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 1998. ISBN 0814719058
  • Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Islands. 1942. Reprint, Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
  • Turner, Lorenzo Dow. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. 1949. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969.
  1. ^ Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah, 68-9.
  2. ^ Silvia King, quoted in Zita Allen, "From Slave Ships to Center Stage", http://www.pbs.org/wnet/freetodance/behind/behind_slaveships.html, 2001, accessed 8 July 2007
  3. ^ Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs, 54, quoted in Diouf, Servants of Allah, 68.
  4. ^ Diouf, Servants of Allah, 69. Lorenzo Dow Turner proposed the theory, and Lydia Parrish first reported it in 1942. Turner's translation of shaut (sic) as "to move around the Kaaba ... until exhausted" is inaccurate, according to Diouf, as neither sha'wt nor tawaf implies exhaustion.
  5. ^ Zimbabwe Dance. Kariamu Welsh Asante. African World Press, Inc. 2000. page 98. ISBN 0-86543-492-1

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