Hallie Gammon - DANC 0163 - Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance

I was somewhat unclear on what exactly this article was trying to show. As far as I can tell, the author wants to make the point that the ring shout as a religious ritual was simultaneously in competition with Christianity (from the point of view of white Christians) and symbiotic with Christianity (from the point of view of the converted slaves). The long tangent about foot crossing or lack thereof I found to be somewhat pointless, of its own admission (the author spends a large section of the article offering evidence against a point she seems to have discredited in a few sentences). The author seems to want to prove that the form of the ring shout was not influenced by slaves conforming to the dictates of their white masters, and he offers some sound reasons for thinking this, but he seems preoccupied with the idea to the extent that it renders the rest of his argument somewhat incoherent.

I am also somewhat perplexed by the choice of title: although the article does address conflict between Christian slaves and their white masters, the article focuses much more on the evolution and spread of the ring shout dance itself and says almost nothing about the process of Christian conversion in the lives of slaves. I think that entering into the details of how slaves converted to Christianity and blended its beliefs with their own religions would give this article a good deal more focus, especially as the title points to just such a discussion. The article does in some measure express the challenges slaves faced in incorporating dance into their worship, but in the end the article is far more about the dance itself than about the worship it was a part of. While I understand that this is a reasonable focus for a dance history article, I think that exploring the history of the intersection of Christianity and dance more thoroughly would have contributed to a better understanding of the phenomenon the author describes.

This article does provide an answer of a sort to an earlier question I had, brought up by the first article we read. I wondered whether a culture in which dance became so central was unique to black Americans through the oppression of slavery, or whether such a culture would develop in any similarly oppressed group no matter their ethnicity. The author of this article states that "there is no indication that any other group of workers in modern history brought such reliance on dance...to their daily lives." I also appreciate that this article, perhaps the first of the ones we've read to explicitly do so, acknowledges the diversity of cultures that eventually came to be known as "African" because of the slave trade. The universality of the circle dance is particularly interesting, and this too makes me wonder whether it is something that is universal only to African cultures or whether it is simply one of the basic forms of dance common to every human community (the circle being a useful metaphor for bringing a group of people together while excluding everything outside).