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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.
uting" often took place during or after a Christian prayer meeting or worship service.
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Encyclopedia
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.
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. 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. In the twentieth century some African-American churchgoers in the United States performed shouts by forming a circle around the pulpit.
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.
According to musicologist Robert Palmer, the first written accounts of the ring shout date 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.
Footnotes
External links
- in New Georgia Encyclopedia
- The group
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