“If you caint get the boat, take a log”: cultural reinterpretation in the Afro‐Baptist ritual

The theory of cultural reinterpretation was Melville J. Herskovits' explanation for the retention of African elements in black cultures in the western hemisphere. Although this theory conflicted with prevailing sociopolitical ideas of racial integration when he first introduced it, Herskovits nevertheless provided African Americans with a cross‐cultural framework of analysis for evaluating their cultural past. This paper reexamines the validity of his theory in light of the religious ritual in a southern Afro‐Baptist church. Using James Fernandez's concept of the metaphoric frame as the basis of religious ritual, I demonstrate that the Afro‐Baptist ritual exploits speech and song variety to preserve a structure inherited from an African past. Reinterpretation becomes a feasible explanation for the similarities between the Afro‐Baptist ritual in the United States and those in other Afro‐American societies. Sociopolitical and economic factors found in diverse slave systems determined the morphology of various African‐derived religious rituals in different regions of the diaspora.[Afro‐American studies, ritual performance, ethnomusicology, sociolinguistics, Creole languages]