Holy Hands: An Investigation of Ritual Gesture Use by Black and White Baptist Preachers in Durham, NC
Abstract
Recently many researchers have labored to put the linguistic body back together. Historically,
linguistic study has focused on the sounds produced by the mouth, but more recently
work has emphasized the importance of body language and gesture in the act of communication.
Some even go so far as to posit that gesture preceded spoken language in the phylogeny
of communication. Over time, the twin ideas that gesture is used to aid communicative
acts and that such gestures are socially and culturally bound has become more and
more acceptable.
This work attempts to see if and how gestural variance occurs by analyzing the ritual
gestures of White and Black preachers in Durham, North Carolina region. It is known
that the Baptist denomination, established around 1846, has a history of evangelical
preachers and a strong Christian culture tied to it. It is also common to the social
sciences that African American culture is distinct as juxtaposed to standard white
culture, and this trend extends into the realm of religion as well. In the study of
verbal language, ethnicity is seen as a cultural variable that influences language
differentiation. The principal question for this study is if ethnicity correlates
with a variance in the ritual gesture of preachers.
This particular work will focus on ritual gestures employed by Black and White preachers
during the sermon. Ritual gestures are those movements associated with common Christian
ceremonies such as communion and baptism and those acts taught in this particular
denomination as having time-honored biblical value. The product of this study is the
illumination of four outstanding points:
* Gestural studies done by psychologists and linguists over the last several decades
have shown that verbal articulation and the gestures that accompany them form a continuum
of convention.
* Ritual gestures inhabit a space in the human mind that lies between conscious and
unconscious thought.
* Even though both Black and White Baptist preachers belong to a single religious
tradition there are marked gestural differences.
* That these differences relay some sort of cultural information about church/sermon
style and the social space of religion within the two ethnic groups.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
EnglishPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2514Citation
Anderson, Jasmine (2010). Holy Hands: An Investigation of Ritual Gesture Use by Black and White Baptist Preachers
in Durham, NC. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2514.Collections
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