Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora

by Walter F. Pitts

Book Overview

This major new study of the African origins of African-American forms of worship is based on extensive fieldwork in black Baptist churches in rural Texas. Pitts, a scholar of anthropology and linguistics and a church pianist, played at and recorded numerous worship services over a period of five years. Through historical comparisons and linguistic analysis of this material, Pitts uncovers striking parallels between "Afro-Baptist" services and the religious rituals of Western and Central Africa, as well as other African-derived rituals in the United States Sea Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Raising the concept of ritual frame, he reveals the binary structure underlying African and African-American worship: the somber melancholy of the first frame and the high emotion of the second frame are both essential to the fulfillment of that structure. In the process, Pitts creates a memorable portrait of this vital yet misunderstood aspect of African-American culture. With a Foreword by Vincent Wimbush.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195075099
• ISBN13: 9780195075090
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Connectin' The Dots

People of African descent in North America came into a Baptist religious experience. The African Ancestors who survived the Maafa remembered and applied some of their African patterning and awareness to their 'forced faith'. These acts of cultural retention held within the Baptist Church are largely ignored by most researchers because so many of the retained Africanisms were assimilated and their origin occulted in what we know today as "American" culture. This book is well written and informative, as it speaks of and compares elements of the Afro- Baptist ritual to similiar concepts preserved in Afro-Cuban and Afro-Haitian experience in the Catholic Church, finally discussing them on an equal footing.