The world in the text and the text in the world: A study of Old Regular Baptist discourse.

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation examines a religious culture as it is constituted in the various discourse contexts implied within a single apocalyptic hymn text produced by the culture. The culture is that of the Michigan Old Regular Baptists, whose oral and literate traditions data back to the 1600s, when their spiritual ancestors arrived in Rhode Island from Wales and began settling in Kentucky. In the 1940s and 1950s, many Old Regular Baptists migrated in search of work with other Southerners to Northern industrial centers such as Detroit. Although there have been several studies of Old Regular Baptist preaching and hymn-singing in the Appalachian region, the discourse traditions of the group in Michigan have not yet been considered in terms of their interconnectedness. The theoretical framework for the study is the concept of intertextuality, by which a given text implies a multiplicity of texts or contextual levels. The four contextual levels of the hymn which I examine are: its performance context, or the interactional situation by which it was realized; its prior texts, or its Biblical antecedents and the traditions to which it belongs; the rest of the texts within the hymn repertoire; and its texture--or capacity to produce ideology through the interworking of form and content--which informs the three other contexts. The hymn and the various oral and written contexts which it evokes function dialogically in relation to one another. That is, they refer to one another in their imagery, symbolism, structure, underlying script, or metaphors owing to a common rhetorical purpose, shared textual antecedents, or the history of the Old Regular Baptists in America. The study has implications for the scholarship which views oral and literate practices as incompatible within a culture. Contrary to expectations that oral traditions are weakened by the presence of literate practices, Old Regular Baptist culture is marked by the interplay of the spoken and written word, orality and literacy bridged through the intertextuality of their discourse.