- Ring shout
A shout or ring shout is an ecstatic dance ritual, first practiced by African slaves in the
West Indies and theUnited 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.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 andTrinidad the shout was usually performed around a special second altar near the center of a church building. In theSea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, shouters formed a circle outdoors, around the church building itself. [Sylviane A. Diouf, "Servants of Allah", 68-9.] 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. [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] In the twentieth century someAfrican-American churchgoers in the United States performed shouts by forming a circle around thepulpit . [Lydia Parrish, "Slave Songs", 54, quoted in Diouf, "Servants of Allah", 68.]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 theKaaba 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. [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.]According to Robert Palmer, the first accounts of the ring shout come from the 1840s. The stamping and clapping in a circle was described as a kind of "drumming," and 19th-century observers associated it with the conversion of slaves to Christianity.Citation| last = Palmer| first = Robert
title = Deep Blues
place = Penguin Books Ltd.
publisher = Middlesex, Eng.
year = 1981
page= 38
isbn = 0140062238 .]Footnotes
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.External links
* [http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-520 McIntosh County Shouters] in "New Georgia Encyclopedia"
* [http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5759/ "Run Old Jeremiah": Echoes of the Ring Shout]
*cite web
url=http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rUKKfDgpsfEC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=ring+shout&ots=mPaRF18_A2&sig=44TcR_WtzThFJaZXg9qsSJXYmcw#PPP1,M1
title=Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia
publisher=books.google.com
accessdate=2008-07-19
last= Carla Gardina Pestana
first=Sharon V. Salinger
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