Academic literature on the topic 'Rastafari'

The globalisation of reggae continues to engender a wide range of highly poignant re-inscriptions and re-interpretations of reggae's sound and of Rastafarian thought. One of the most compelling of these has been the negotiation of Rastafarian and Christian ideologies within the context of Protestant reggae bands and artists. The application of Rastafarian thought, dress and language to the evangelical concerns of Protestants – at times paradoxical, at others ingenious – signals an important moment of inter-religious contact that opens a window onto the complexities and multiple meanings that attach to music and to religious systems as they travel between the local and the global. This essay considers music by Christafari (United States), Sherwin Gardner (Trinidad and Tobago), and Stitchie (Jamaica), and considers questions related to the parallel globalisation of reggae and Rastafari. It does this by interrogating the extent to which authenticity, positionality, and religious context inform the use of and interpretation of Rastafari symbols within gospel reggae. In so doing, I introduce a concept that I call the negotiation of proximity, and offer some reflections on the ways that the Rastafari elements within gospel reggae might be understood in new, global (and newly localised) contexts.

Discusses the spread of the Rastafarian movement in the British Caribbean, North America, Europe, Africa, New Zealand, and the Pacific. In the vast majority of cases it has been reggae music which has functioned as the primary catalyst for spreading the religion and culture of Rastafari beyond Jamaica.

Rastafari is a Pan-African socio-spiritual movement and way of life that was created by indigent Black people in the grip of British colonialism in 1930s Jamaica. Although Rastafari is often studied as a Jamaican phenomenon, I center the ways the movement has articulated itself in the Ghanaian polity. Ghana has become the epicenter of the movement on the continent through its representatives’ leadership in the Rastafari Continental Council. Based on fourteen years of ethnography with Rastafari in Ghana and with special emphasis on an interview with one Ghanaian Rastafari woman, this paper analyzes some of the reasons Ghanaians choose to “trod the path” of Rastafari and the long-term consequences of their choices. While some scholars use the term “conversion” to refer to the ways people become Rastafari, I choose to use “trodding the path” to center the ways Rastafari theorize their own understanding of becoming. In the context of this essay, trodding the path of Rastafari denotes the orientations and world-sensorial life ways that Rastafari provides for communal and self-making practices. I argue that Ghanaians trod the path of Rastafari to affirm their African identity and participate in Pan-African anti-colonial politics despite adverse social consequences.

Study of the formative stage in the development of the Rastafarian movement. It was a time of rapid radicalization and heightened expectations of an imminent return to Africa. It ended, after a series of violent incidents, with an abortive repatriation effort in 1959. Focuses on the ways the colonial government reacted to Rastafari and the social unrest it created.

Résumé L’article se penche sur le rôle de guérison que jouent les plantes à l’intérieur du mouvement rastafari sud-africain dans les townships de Cape Town, notamment sous l’angle de l’anthropologie de la santé, des sciences et des technologies. Par une recherche plus globale, l’auteure procédera au suivi ethnographique de la trajectoire de la plante médicinale indigène sud-africaine Artemisia afra (A. afra) alors que celle-ci traverse diverses étapes préparatoires conduisant aux essais cliniques. Le double objectif de vérification scientifique et de promotion des savoirs traditionnels que poursuit le projet d’essais précliniques relatif à l’A. afra soulève divers enjeux épistémologiques alors que les scientifiques et les amagqirhas (guérisseurs) et inyangas (herboristes) Xhosa profilent diverses notions d’efficacité. Aux côtés de ces derniers se retrouvent les herboristes rastafaris qui défendent également leurs savoirs traditionnels au sujet des plantes médicinales, dont ceux portant sur l’A. afra. Le parcours des herboristes rastafaris et leur herbe sacrée, la dagga (cannabis sativa, ganja), occupent un rôle particulier en lien avec l’A. afra, lequel sera ici esquissé. L’étude met en lumière les relations unificatrices qu’exerce la dagga au sein des pratiques phytothérapeutiques rastafaris, relations paradoxalement intensifiées par des rapports antagonistes avec le système bio-médico-légal sud-africain, et ce, dans un contexte de mondialisation. Il ne s’agit donc pas de rendre exotique le mouvement rastafari, mais bien d’en comprendre les articulations et les propositions qui puissent informer et défier les épistémologies scientifiques et biopolitiques dominantes actuelles. En conclusion, la façon de promouvoir les savoirs traditionnels sur les plantes en utilisant le parcours des essais cliniques scientifiques demeure très limitative. L’exploration de nouvelles voies de compréhension de l’efficacité des remèdes est plutôt suggérée.

This paper explores the concept of “livity,” the ground of Rastafari subjectivity. In its multifaceted nuances, “livity” represents the Rastafari invention of a religious tradition and discourse, whose ethos was fundamentally sacred, signified the immanence of the Absolute in dialectic with the Rastafari worldview and life world. Innovatively, the Rastafari coined the term “livity” to a discourse to combat despair, damnation, social death, and the existential chaos-monde they referred to as Babylon. In the process, the Rastafari reclaimed their power to name their world. The Rastafari neologism “livity” articulated a mysticism, alternative spatial visions, and a positive technology of the self that revalorized blackness, explored, and interrogated profound dimensions of the human condition, from within the Jamaican context, that inevitably brought them into conflict with the local colonial authorities and implicitly shifted the model of social relations between the master and slave.

Rastafari is an Afro-Jamaican religious and social movement, which has since the 1970s spread outside of the Caribbean mainly through reggae music. This paper contributes to the academic discussion on the localization processes of Rastafari and reggae with an ethnographic account from the Nordic context, asking how Finnish reggae artists with Rastafarian conviction mobilize this identification in their performance. The paper focuses on one prominent Finnish reggae sound system group, Intergalaktik Sound.The author sees reggae in Finland as divided between contemporary musical innovation and the preservation of musical tradition. In this field, Intergalaktik Sound attempts to preserve what they consider to be the traditional Jamaican form of reggae sound system performance. For the Intergalaktik Sound vocalists, this specific form of performance becomes an enchanted space within a secular Finnish society, where otherwise marginal Rastafarian convictions can be acted out in public. The author connects the aesthetic of this performance to the Jamaican dub-music tradition, and to the concept of a ‘natural life’, which is a central spiritual concept for many Finnish Rastafarians. The article concludes that these sound system performances constitute a polycentric site where events can be experienced and articulated simultaneously as religious and secular by different individuals in the same space.

Twenty-eight years ago, F.J. van Dijk published in the New West Indian Guide what remained for a long time the only scholarly paper on the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Undoubtedly the largest Rastafari organization both in terms of membership and international expansion, the Twelve Tribes of Israel remains little known in public and academic circles. This article fills two major but closely related gaps in Van Dijk’s seminal article. The first is information on the formation and history of the Twelve Tribes, and the second is how the organization mobilized the return of members to Africa, a cornerstone of Rastafari belief. This article argues that the issue of return to the continent determined the very genesis of the organization and subsequently the development of its eighteen international branches. In its turn, this focus on return to Africa offers another perspective on the internal dynamics of the Rastafari movement, namely the structuring role of Rastafari organizations, a role which challenges the common image of Rastafari as an “acephalous” movement. Exploring the tangible relationship of Rastafari with Ethiopia, through the return to Ethiopia of members of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, offers new insight into the history of the Rastafari movement.

Abstract:This article is concerned with the ways in which discourses of rights serve to destabilize indigenous logics when used for gains in the market. It does so through examining a Rastafarian tour group who uses their participation in the tourism market to challenge what they believe are infringed cultural property rights. As a means of commercially defending these rights, the group employs a discourse of indigeneity. In this process, they have gained partial recognition from the World Intellectual Property Organization and increasing acknowledgement from the Jamaican government. However, while the basis of indigeneity strongly supports the case of intellectual and cultural property rights, this recognition ultimately further identifies the group, and Rastafari in general, with Jamaica.