| Original Full Text | Open Research OnlineCitationCapparella, Hilde (2024). Rastafari and the glocalisation of identities. PhD thesis The Open University. URLhttps://oro.open.ac.uk/100752/ License(CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/PolicyThis document has been downloaded from Open Research Online, The Open University's repository of research publications. This version is being made available in accordance with Open Research Online policies available from Open Research Online (ORO) Policies VersionsIf this document is identified as the Author Accepted Manuscript it is the version after peer review but before type setting, copy editing or publisher branding1 Rastafari and the glocalisation of identities Figure 1 Rastafari artwork representing Babylon by Ras Ed Jones (Public Fb picture, written authorisation). Rastafari and the glocalisation of identities Hilde Capparella Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the subject area of: Religious Studies Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The Open University Submitted for examination: December 2023 2 Acknowledgments Words cannot express my gratitude to my supervisors Paul-François Tremlett and Graham Harvey for their invaluable help, feedback, and support during the whole thesis process. I would also like to thank all the Rastafari who participated and contributed to this research with their testimonies without whom this research could not have been possible. Special gratitude goes to Jah Blue, Sista Stella Harvey, Dr Haile Mariam Sober and Sista Sheba for their guidance and support. My appreciation goes also to all my friends and family who supported me in this long and amazing journey. 3 Abstract My thesis explores how Rastafari religious identities, practices, and beliefs are produced through creative everyday life performances and experiences. I focus on the Rastafari movement, specifically investigating new Rastafari identities and performances outside Jamaica. From the 1980s onward, Rastafari has grown in visibility worldwide, particularly through identification with its iconic material and performance culture such as dreadlocks, the Ethiopian flag and reggae music. The fact that Rastafari is lived both as a social movement for black liberation and as a religious movement leads Rastafari identities to be very complex in their manifestations. Today, many Rastafari are not from the Caribbean but from different cultures and religious backgrounds around the world. This thesis argues that these followers constitute new Rastafari religious identities and communities. To grip this complexity, I have focused particularly on Rastafari as a lived religion comparing Rastafari in diasporic and transnational contexts that is Britain and Italy respectively. Findings indicate that generally in the diasporic context, Rastafari root their practices in relation to Jamaica; while in the transnational one, they typically root their practices in relation to Ethiopia. As the fieldwork chapters reveal, these two contexts are shaping Rastafari’s identities, performances, and ideas of authority and authenticity insofar as they concern what it means to ‘be Rasta’ in different ways. This shows how important it has been for the theoretical framework to compare the diasporic and transnational contexts to identify different ways to experience, live, and be Rastafari. The conclusion of this thesis boils down to what Sista Fyah told me, ‘there is not one single way to be Rasta’. This thesis contributes in four ways to the religious studies field. Firstly, it offers an ethnographic snapshot of contemporary Rastafari a religion largely overlooked by scholars in religious studies. The research therefore addresses an empirical gap in contemporary scholarship. Secondly, it proposes the first comparative analysis of diasporic 4 and transnational Rastafari identities and therefore it creates a new strategy and opens up new debates for the theoretical and methodological study of religions in general. Thirdly, it enhances debates about religious mobility, creolisation, bricolage, and related critical terms. Lastly, this thesis contributes to the decolonisation of the field of religious studies. By deploying Rastafari and African concepts and practices in the research methodology it provides a template for how other researchers can take steps to decolonise the research process. Equally, by attending to the experiences and voices of primarily ordinary Rastafari, it privileges a bottom-up approach to religion that seeks to represent marginalised Rastafari voices. 5 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................................... 2 Table of Contents .................................................................................................................................... 5 Table of Figures ...................................................................................................................................... 9 1.0 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 12 2.0 Development, history of African Caribbean creole religions, and Rastafari identities. .................. 21 2.1 The Development and Creolisation of African-Caribbean Religions ......................................... 22 2.1.1 African Religious Traditions Creolisation in the Caribbean ................................................ 25 2.1.2 Jamaica From Slavery to Post-Emancipation: Obeah, Revival Zion, Hinduism and Rastafari ...................................................................................................................................................... 27 2.2 Rastafari ...................................................................................................................................... 31 2.2.1 A Brief History of Rastafari ................................................................................................. 31 2.2.2. Leadership and Organisations ............................................................................................. 39 2.2.3. Rastafari Ideas, Concepts and Symbols, a General Overview ............................................ 47 Jah ................................................................................................................................................. 47 Haile Selassie and the Lion of Judah ............................................................................................ 49 The Israelites ................................................................................................................................. 50 Ethiopia and Zion .......................................................................................................................... 51 Repatriation and Reparation.......................................................................................................... 52 Babylon ......................................................................................................................................... 53 The Rastafari Flag ......................................................................................................................... 54 The Dread Talk ............................................................................................................................. 54 Reasoning ...................................................................................................................................... 55 InI .................................................................................................................................................. 56 Overstanding ................................................................................................................................. 57 Livity ............................................................................................................................................. 58 2.2.4 Rastafari practices ................................................................................................................ 59 Ital Food ........................................................................................................................................ 59 Dreadlocks .................................................................................................................................... 60 Marijuana (ganja) .......................................................................................................................... 61 Life and Death ............................................................................................................................... 62 Rastafari Books ............................................................................................................................. 62 Days of observance ....................................................................................................................... 63 6 Gender ........................................................................................................................................... 64 Reggae Music ................................................................................................................................ 65 3.0 Literature Review ............................................................................................................................ 66 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 66 3.1 Caribbean religious identities and critical terms ......................................................................... 68 3.1.1. Hybridity and Syncretism ................................................................................................... 68 3.1.2 Bricolage .............................................................................................................................. 71 3.2 The Creation and Creolisation of Caribbean Identities ............................................................... 72 3.2.1 Cultural, social and psychological factors ........................................................................... 72 3.2.2 Caribbean and trans-Caribbean Creolisation ....................................................................... 74 3.2.3 Lived Creole religions .......................................................................................................... 78 3.3 Transnational and Diasporic Religions ....................................................................................... 79 3.3.1 Diasporic Religions .............................................................................................................. 80 3.3.2 Transnational Religions ....................................................................................................... 82 3.3.3 Glocalisation and Rastafari .................................................................................................. 82 3.4 Diasporic and Transnational Rastafari ........................................................................................ 84 3.4.1 A Concise Comparison ........................................................................................................ 84 3.5 Chapter Outlines ......................................................................................................................... 87 4.0 Method in Motion ........................................................................................................................... 89 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 89 4.1 Reasoning, Overstanding, and InI as emic and decolonialising research method ...................... 99 4.1.1 Decolonising Ethnography ................................................................................................. 107 4.1.2 Decolonising Through the De-Essentialisation of Language, Materiality and Bodily Practices .................................................................................................................................................... 111 4.2. InI Positionality and Reflexivity on intersectionality .............................................................. 113 4.2.1 The intersectional dance ..................................................................................................... 113 4.2.2 InI and Gender ................................................................................................................... 120 4.2.3 InI as self-reflection on Ethnic Self-identity Construction ................................................ 123 4.3 On-life Fieldwork and Covid Challenges ................................................................................. 127 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 130 5.0 Word-Sound-Power in Motion: from Creative ‘Trans-languaging’ to Textual Authority and Back again .................................................................................................................................................... 132 5.1 Nommo as a Tool to Reframe Languaging ............................................................................... 132 5.2 ‘Trans-languaging’ the Field ..................................................................................................... 134 7 5.3 Chanting Down Babylon ........................................................................................................... 138 5.3.1 Toasting and ‘Poetizing’ .................................................................................................... 144 5.4 The power of Naming ............................................................................................................... 146 5.4.1 Rastafari Words from the West to the East ........................................................................ 152 5.5 Reversing ‘Trans-languaging’: the Authenticity of Texts ........................................................ 155 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 160 6.0 Living Material Culture ................................................................................................................ 163 6.1 Ashe and Material Culture ........................................................................................................ 163 6.2 The Intimacy of Things ............................................................................................................. 165 6.2.1 Materialising Rastafari ....................................................................................................... 165 6.2.2 Touching Ethiopia .............................................................................................................. 175 6.3 Materialising Decolonisation .................................................................................................... 180 6.3.1 Haile Selassie and Ethiopian Objects ................................................................................. 180 6.3.2 Materialising Rastafari Presence ........................................................................................ 189 6.3.2.1 The Gift of the Emperor .............................................................................................. 197 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 200 7.0 Rastafari Embodied Practices ....................................................................................................... 201 7.1 Sankofa: Recovering the Body ................................................................................................. 201 7.2 Dreads: Death, Identities, and Stigma ....................................................................................... 203 7.2.1 The Nazirite Vow ............................................................................................................... 203 7.2.2 Dreadlocks as Embodied Practice ...................................................................................... 207 7.2.2.1 Dreadlocks and Death ................................................................................................. 209 7.2.2.2 Dreadlocks and Identity .............................................................................................. 212 7.2.2.3 Dreadlocks and Stigma ............................................................................................... 217 7.3 Fashioning Rastafari ................................................................................................................. 220 7.4 A Journey through Ital Material: Food, Herbalism, and Earthical Bodily Practices................. 227 7.4.1 An Immersive Journey into Ital Food ................................................................................ 227 7.4.2 Healing Practices and Views during Covid 19 .................................................................. 244 7.4.2.1 Covid and vaccine efficacy ......................................................................................... 247 7.4.3 The Value of Earthical Practices, Gardening Roots, and Culture ...................................... 253 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 259 8.0 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 262 8. 1 My contribution to academic knowledge ................................................................................. 262 8.2 Fieldwork’s Decolonisation Practices ....................................................................................... 267 8 8.3 Future possibilities .................................................................................................................... 270 8.4 An overview of my research journey ........................................................................................ 278 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 287 Further Resources ............................................................................................................................... 302 Appendix 1: Guide for Semi-structured interviews ........................................................................ 302 Appendix 2: Rasta’s Chronology .................................................................................................... 304 9 Table of Figures Figure 1 Rastafari artwork representing Babylon by Ras Ed Jones (Public Fb picture, written authorisation). ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Figure 2 Rastafari Movement UK during a march for reparations organised in London in 2015 (online source). .................................................................................................................................................. 15 Figure 3 Rastafari in Italy during a Rastafari celebration (Picture shared with me by F.A.R.I., written authorisation). ....................................................................................................................................... 15 Figure 4 Rastafari in Motion exhibition London (My own picture). .................................................... 18 Figure 5 Leaflet of Rastafari in Motion exhibition (on-line source). .................................................... 19 Figure 6 West African ethnic groups (Image of S. Baptista from D. M. Steward, 2005). .................... 22 Figure 7 Embarkation (Image of S. Baptista from D. M. Steward, 2005). ........................................... 23 Figure 8 Disembarkation (Image of S. Baptista from D. M. Steward, 2005). ...................................... 23 Figure 9 The development of Caribbean religions (Image of S. Baptista from D. M. Steward, 2005). 24 Figure 10 Rastafari in Cuba (personal fieldwork) 2010 (My own picture, verbal consent). ................ 86 Figure 11 Rastafari in Israel –working time in the farm (My own picture, verbal consent). ................ 86 Figure 12 Flyer about Genna celebration London 2019 (front) (My own picture). ............................ 140 Figure 13 Flyer about Genna celebration London 2019 (back) (My own picture). ............................ 141 Figure 14 Genna celebration at the Ethiopic Church of Rome (2020) (My own picture). ................. 157 Figure 15 The Ethiopian corner at Ras Jonas home (My own picture, verbally authorised). ............. 166 Figure 16 Bibles on Ras Jonas’s altar (My own picture, verbally authorised). .................................. 167 Figure 17 Ras Mikael spiritual space (my own picture). .................................................................... 169 Figure 18 Ras Marsh’s Egyptian shrine (My own picture, verbally authorised). ............................... 171 Figure 19 Ras Marsh’s collection of Egyptian figures (My own picture, verbally authorised). ......... 172 Figure 20 Sista Amina's home (My own picture, verbally authorised). .............................................. 173 Figure 21 The statement under the Egyptian obelisk in Vatican City. Rastafari making the globally known Rastafari symbol with their hands, a gesture often done by Haile Selassie (Public Fb picture, verbally authorised). ........................................................................................................................... 182 Figure 22 The throne of Haile Selassie in Naples. Sista Amina and a friend visit the throne (Public Fb -picture, authorised verbally). .............................................................................................................. 184 10 Figure 23 Sista Fatuma in Turin at the grave of Romaneworq Haile Selassie’s daughter (Public Fb picture, verbally authorised). .............................................................................................................. 185 Figure 24 Ras Seymour (public picture). ............................................................................................ 190 Figure 25 The school ceiling where the ‘fascio’ symbol is still visible in the centre between the two big white frames (My own picture). On the right the ‘fascio’ symbol, the fasces (Latin: fasces littoriæ) was, in Ancient Rome, the weapon carried by lictors, which consisted of a bundle of wooden sticks tied with leather strips, normally around an axe, to represent the power of life and death on Roman convicts. The main function of the lictors was to protect the magistrate, who ordered them to carry out death sentences. ............................................................................................................................................................ 192 Figure 26 The speakers’ desk (My own picture, verbally authorised). ............................................... 192 Figure 27 Ethiopian flag on which is written ‘Exodus: Ethiopian Cultural Service’ (my own picture). ............................................................................................................................................................ 193 Figure 28 The reconstruction of the massacre of Debre Libanos, Addis Ababa and others, carried out by the viceroy Rodolfo Graziani (My own picture, verbally authorised). .......................................... 194 Figure 29 Documenting Graziani’s massacres (My own picture, verbally authorised). ..................... 195 Figure 30 Documenting Graziani’s use of gas in Ethiopia (My own picture, verbally authorised). .. 195 Figure 31 The patriots and defenders of the Ethiopian homeland and their King Haile Selassie I (My own picture, verbally authorised)........................................................................................................ 196 Figure 32 The Catholic Church’s complicity with Mussolini (My own picture, verbally authorised). ............................................................................................................................................................ 196 Figure 33 A Catholic priest, blessing the army before their departure to Ethiopia (My own picture, verbally authorised). ........................................................................................................................... 197 Figure 34 Twelve Tribes Greetings used during celebrations (My own picture, verbally authorised). ............................................................................................................................................................ 205 Figure 35 Ras Gabriel’s trimmed dreadlocks (Private Fb picture, written authorisation). ................ 215 Figure 36 The Twelve Tribes chart (my own picture, verbal authorisation). ..................................... 222 Figure 37 Italian Rastafari women’s style, doing the Rastafari symbol (my own picture, verbally authorised)........................................................................................................................................... 226 Figure 38 Biblical quotes in Ras Wise’s allotment (verbally authorised)........................................... 230 Figure 39 Ras Wise Biblical quotes around his allotment (verbally authorised). ............................... 231 Figure 40 RMUK fb post about Pepys social market (public picture, verbally authorised) .............. 233 Figure 41 RMUK social market activities during Covid 19 (Fb public picture, verbally authorised). ............................................................................................................................................................ 234 11 Figure 42 Sista Amina’s Ethiopian food (My own picture). ............................................................... 236 Figure 43 Ethiopian restaurant in Rome (My own picture). .............................................................. 238 Figure 44 Vegetarian injera (My own picture). .................................................................................. 239 Figure 45 Ethiopian restaurant in Rome (My own picture). .............................................................. 240 Figure 46 Haile Selassie portrait at the Ethiopian restaurant in Rome (My own picture). ................. 241 Figure 47 Jamaican cake soap sold in Britain (My own picture taken in Harlesden-London). .......... 246 Figure 48 Rastafari art about the ‘plandemic’ by Ras Ed Jones (Public Fb picture, written authorisation). ............................................................................................................................................................ 248 Figure 49 Sista Stella’s statue in London (Public Fb picture, verbal authorisation). .......................... 254 Figure 50 Rastafari garden in Haile Selassie house in Bath (Public Fb picture). ............................... 258 Figure 51 Ras Negasi’s Garden (public Fb picture, verbal authorisation). ......................................... 259 Figure 52 The seven ways of well-being according to Rastafari livity (Public picture, verbally authorised)........................................................................................................................................... 271 12 1.0 Introduction This thesis explores how Rastafari’s religious identities, practices, and beliefs are produced through creative everyday life performances and experiences. This study argues that Rastafari religious creativity is always on the move, never stable but involved in constant social motion. However, religious creativity and motion are not a new phenomenon. Religious traditions and identities have always been intertwined with social processes of cultural blending, bricolage and creolisation throughout centuries of cultural encounters or clashes. Nowadays, what is making religious creativity distinctive from the past is the speed through which intercultural exchanges and global connectedness spread through social processes of globalisation, such as migration and mediation. Massive mass migrations and the development of new technologies, such as the internet, are connecting people, mobilising local traditions, cultures and religions to cross national borders and glocalise in different places. The phenomenon of glocalisation is a consequence and a product of globalization and it is understood as the ‘interconnection between the local and the global and their mutual dependence’ (Robertson, 1995: 173). In the light of this global cultural blending, I focus on the Rastafari movement, investigating new Rastafari identities and performances outside Jamaica. From the 1980s onward, despite its relatively low numbers, Rastafari has had a ‘strong social impact worldwide’ (Bedasse, 2017: 17) particularly through identification with its iconic material and performative cultures such as dreadlocks, the drums, the Ethiopian flag, Haile Selassie and reggae music and its message of ‘One Love’. 13 Nowadays, Rastafari cultural influences are global, and many people identify as Rastafari through the internationalisation and globalisation of reggae music. The US State Department suggests that 1% of Jamaicans are Rasta, about 30,000 (https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom/jamaica/#:~:text=Policy%20and%20Engagement-,Executive%20Summary,effect%20but%20is%20not%20enforced -U.S. Department of State accessed 24/10/2024). While, the 2021 England and Wales Census recorded 6,000 people identifying as Rastafari (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/bulletins/religionenglandandwales/census2021- Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021, last accessed 24/10/2024), unfortunately, there are no data about the presence of Rastafari in Italy. According to King, ‘on one hand, reggae’s international popularity increased the visibility of the Rastafari movement around the world; on the other hand, international reggae also exacerbated the split between ‘“religious” and “political” Rastafari’ (King, 1998: 40). The fact that Rastafari is lived both as a social movement for black liberation and as a religious movement leads Rastafari identities to be very complex in their manifestations. As a result, Rastafari material culture has different meanings for people living in different contexts. When people worldwide started to be conscious of the existence of this new movement (through the mediation of reggae music and the internet), the Rastafari movement became global and wittingly or not, the movement experienced a form of global or international conscientisation (Salter, 2008). Today, many Rastafari are not from the Caribbean but from different cultures and religious backgrounds around the world. This thesis argues that these followers constitute new Rastafari religious identities and communities. In order to grip this complexity, I have 14 investigated Rastafari focusing particularly on Rastafari’s lived reality using recent sociological and anthropological studies on lived religion carried out by Orsi (1985, 1997), McGuire (2008), Ammerman (2007) and others as a point of orientation. This body of work emphasises that ordinary people are the creative adaptors, performers and improvisers of religion. As McGuire highlights, religious identities develop through a creative process of ‘choosing, combining and assembling’ (2008: 196) different cultural elements with each other. Importantly, I was also able to re-use certain Rastafari social practices and African concepts as part of my ethnographic and methodological toolkit. This allowed me to transform my fieldwork from a method of the colonial encounter (Asad 1973) to a vehicle to decolonise religious studies, by working with lived experience and using it to help frame the research process. Lived religions is a bottom-up approach to religious studies which gives voice not to religious institutions but to the too often marginalised ordinary people. Although lived religions involves also the study of religious institutions, it engages with them differently by recognising their limits as the keepers or the definers of religion. I decided to investigate the development and lived reality of new Rastafari identities by comparing a diasporic context and a transnational one, choosing respectively Britain and Italy as locations for the research. 15 Figure 2 Rastafari Movement UK during a march for reparations organised in London in 2015 (online source). Figure 3 Rastafari in Italy during a Rastafari celebration (Picture shared with me by F.A.R.I., written authorisation). This thesis investigates the Rastafari diasporic dimension specifically concerning Rastafari living in Britain with a Caribbean background rooting their practice in relation to Jamaica and the Caribbean; while the transnational dimension focuses on Italian Rastafari from more varied backgrounds who typically root their practice in relation to Ethiopia. Furthermore, this research is not only an ethnographic and comparative analysis but also a test to explore if the diasporic 16 and transnational contexts and dimensions are creating more and new Rastafari identities. This test will be carried out through the analysis of Rastafari’s language, materiality, and embodied practices. As the fieldwork chapters reveal, these two contexts are differently shaping Rastafari identities, their performances and their ideas of authority and authenticity insofar as they concern what it means to ‘be Rasta’. While comparative analysis shows some of the general tendencies adopted by Rastafari in these two different contexts, the conclusions of this research boil down to what sista Fyah told me, ‘there is not one single way to be Rasta.’ On that occasion, she was responding to my concerns about a talk given by MutaBaruka online (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mutabaruka+white+rastas, MutaBaruka talk on I Never Know TV, last accessed 24/10/2024) in which he argued that only black people can be Rastafari because it is a movement for black liberation. According to MutaBaruka, ‘white European Rastafari’ are misappropriating Jamaican Rastafari culture and transforming it into something else. In the interview, he emphasised that for ‘white European Rasta’, Rastafari is about ‘one love, one heart’ and not about African liberation, which is why he calls them ‘cultural pirates.’ Many Rastafari follow MutaBaruka and like him, they adopt strategic essentialist narratives to counter ‘cultural appropriation’. They do so by stressing that white Rastafari never experienced the slave trade, are not Africans, and should have nothing to do with Rastafari. Although in his speech MutaBaruka is trying to define, essentialise the borders of Rastafari against cultural appropriation, I argue that processes of globalisation have set Rastafari identities in a state of constant and creative motion, reflected in various forms of glocalisation. For instance, Rastafari in Italy are explicitly responding to the legacy of Italian fascism in their identification with Rastafari. Therefore, while MutaBaruka challenges coloniality and cultural appropriation through a strategic essentialist narrative toward Rastafari and blackness, in this thesis I am aiming to challenge coloniality and cultural appropriation 17 through strategic de-essentialism, that draws from theories and social practices of glocalisation, bricolage and creolisation. Together with MutaBaruka, we are foreshadowing Hall’s (1992) discussion in ‘What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?’ (1992), to which I will come back to later in chapter 7. In a few words, Hall argues that although strategic essentialism can be important for people to articulate autonomy and identity, he also stresses that the Western notions of Black, African, and tradition must be de-essentialised to avoid stereotyping people, traditions and black cultures, including Rastafari. This thesis argues and demonstrates that the power of Rastafari’s sounds, ideas and performances are mobilising people globally for diverse social, political and contingent reasons and generating new, diverse and complex Rasta identities. While exploring Rastafari lived reality in Britain and Italy, I have approached their identities not as single entities or identities but as Rastafari in its plurality of expressions in motion. ‘In motion’ signals that these identities are associated with the movement of Rastafari in different corners of the globe and the processes through which these new Rastafarian identities are being generated. Although the movement is widely known as ‘Rastafarianism’ among scholars, members of the movement and sympathisers prefer to refer to it as ‘Rastafari’. This term will be used throughout this thesis to decolonise the academy by using an insider term and to respect Rastafari followers who tend to reject the idea of being labelled by any ‘ism’ – as they feel that such language is an oppressive tool of ‘Babylon’ and Western society. Furthermore, the term Rastafari is one of those words that can be used to denote both singular and plural, reflecting both the individuals and the movement at the same time. In addition, in light that this research is very much about decolonisation, the use of the word Rastafarianism would make the 18 movement sound like a systematic religion in a fixed box, and it would not represent or reflect its motion and lived reality. The inspiration to conduct this research arrived seven years ago, on completion of my MA degree in social anthropology, at Goldsmith University in London. My final dissertation was about Rastafari in Israel. In June 2016 I went to an exhibition in London called ‘Rastafari in Motion’ at the Black Cultural Archives, organised by the RMUK (Rastafari Movement UK). Figure 4 Rastafari in Motion exhibition London (My own picture). 19 Figure 5 Leaflet of Rastafari in Motion exhibition (on-line source). 20 Attending this exhibition made me reflect on Rastafari cultural and religious changes, and I decided that I wanted to pursue further research by gathering everyday life experiences and histories about Rastafari living in Britain and Italy. A further reason that motivated me to embark upon this research was the historical narrative surrounding Rastafari, which has portrayed them as criminals and gangsters and of lazy disposition. Through this research, I hope to correct these narratives by addressing the stigmatisation of Rastafari and by highlighting Rastafari as a creative culture. The starting point in this journey was the realisation that the negative meta-narrative concerning Rastafari today is the outcome of centuries of colonialism, and cultural ‘whitening’ of anything concerning Africa. Indeed, one of the aims of this thesis is to demonstrate that Rastafari is deeply embedded in practices of decolonisation, self-determination, and self-empowerment. Nowadays, Rastafari plays an active part in society in many countries holding senior positions such as teachers, academics, doctors and lawyers among other roles. In addition, although many Rastafari support MutaBaruka’s message and views about cultural appropriation, the Rastafari message of one love, the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood, of being one with creation, of equal rights and justice, as well as decolonial activities also resonate globally amongst often marginalised people worldwide, helping to generate new Rastafari identities. 21 2.0 Development, history of African Caribbean creole religions, and Rastafari identities. This chapter is divided into two parts. Firstly, to understand the historical and social factors behind the development and the consequent global spread of Rastafari, the first part of this chapter explores the history and development of African-Caribbean religions and religious identities, during the transatlantic slave trade. Although this is a violent and sad history, it is also a history of resistance, and an essential prelude to highlight the cultural complexity behind the development of Rastafari as a creole phenomenon. Through the work of different authors such as, Price (1973), Barnet (2001), Olmo-Geber (2003), Stewart (2005), Mitchell (2006), Murrell (2010), and Hucks (2023), I will explore how the cultural, ethnic and linguistic collisions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Arawak (local indigenous) and African traditional religions influenced and shaped the inception and creation of transatlantic religions such as Santeria in Cuba, Vodou in Haiti, Obeah and Revivalism in Jamaica. These sketches of the historical, social and political context of transatlantic religions, will shape and highlight the background for the study of Rastafari. The second part of this chapter will highlight the historical background and the early history of Rastafari and will provide a general overview of Rastafari leadership, beliefs, language, symbolism, and practices. I must strongly emphasise that this is a general overview of something which is, as argued by this thesis, in reality in constant motion. 22 2.1 The Development and Creolisation of African-Caribbean Religions It is pivotal to highlight that the development of African-Caribbean Creole religions was influenced by three main factors: firstly, by the transatlantic slave trade; secondly by European political and religious hegemony; and finally, by the responses of enslaved and indigenous peoples to it. When the Western slave trade began in the middle of the 16th century, millions of Western and Central Africans were deported from Africa to the New World as slaves. Those Africans belonged to different ethnic groups, they spoke different languages, embraced and practised not only different African religious traditions but also Islam and Christianity, as shown by the following images. 1 Figure 6 West African ethnic groups (Image of S. Baptista from D. M. Steward, 2005). 1 Christianity was introduced in Western and Central Africa by the Portuguese in the 15th century, while in East Africa it was introduced in the fourth century CE. 23 Figure 7 Embarkation (Image of S. Baptista from D. M. Steward, 2005). Figure 8 Disembarkation (Image of S. Baptista from D. M. Steward, 2005). 24 Figure 9 The development of Caribbean religions (Image of S. Baptista from D. M. Steward, 2005). As Partridge (2010) states, the fact that African-Caribbean religions draw significantly on their African cultural heritage, blending it with European politics and religious practices and languages, is what makes these new religions and identities creole. Nevertheless, it must be said that in Central and Western Africa, religious creolisation was already happening. In fact, it was common to find Islamic rituals and practices synthesised with African religious traditions, customs and ceremonies (Afroz, 1995). As recorded by Price Mars, ‘the majority of Africans brought to Santo Domingo were pious people attached simultaneously to the Muslim and Dahomean faith and even slightly Catholic’ (Price-Mars, 1930:126-127). Accordingly, Africans were already culturally and religiously creole. This tendency among Africans to embrace multiple religious identities is important to this thesis, and it can be linked to the concept of ‘double consciousness’ coined by Du Bois (1903) and creolisation (Cohen, 2007), which will be explored later. 25 2.1.1 African Religious Traditions Creolisation in the Caribbean Although the African population in the Caribbean was culturally, linguistically and tribally varied, the colonial documents analysed by Stewart (2005) indicated that the dominant cultural groups were the Yoruba from Nigeria, the Ashanti from Ghana and the Congolese from Congo. The tendency among the enslaved to unify under the strongest African ethnicity or religion inspired Bisnauth’s (1989) assertion, that in all the Caribbean islands only the God/Gods of the dominant tribal groups survived. According to Stewart (2005), Africans in the Caribbean shared a similar African perception of divinity and power, despite their ethnic and religious differences. The sharing of similar practices and beliefs served to create and reinforce their sense of unity as Africans and helped to keep their traditions partially alive (Mitchell, 2006; Stewart, 2005; Price, 1973; Murrell, 2010). According to Stewart (2005), amongst the enslaved the role of leadership and conception of power had a religious dimension always held by a Vodou priest (in Haiti), an Obeah practitioner (in Jamaica) or a Babalawo (in Cuba). These men and women were believed to possess divine power over the visible and invisible worlds (Stewart, 2005). They were often the ones who through their spiritual charisma, had the ability to gather slaves for rebellions or retaliation against the colonial authorities. According to Olmo and Gebert (2003), although these religions developed in secrecy, they posed a challenge to official Christian practices and political hegemony. These authors stress that, The complex system of African Caribbean religions, developed in symbiotic relationships to the social, linguistic, religious, and natural environments of the various islands…taking their form and characteristics from the subtle blend and clashes between different cultural, political and spiritual practices. The flexibility, eclecticism, 26 and malleability of African religions allowed practitioners to adapt to the new environments, drawing spiritual power from wherever it originated (2003: 3). However, despite their ethnic and religious diversities in beliefs and practices, Africans in the Caribbean all shared a number of practices including the veneration of ancestors; possession and trance mediumship; food offerings and animal sacrifice; divination and herbalism; use of drums; dancing as a form of prayer; and belief in a ‘neutral mystical power’ (Stewart, 2005). As such, the African diaspora was not only about a forced exodus of people, but also a translation of beliefs, objects and practices to the new world. However, once in the Caribbean, African beliefs and practices creolised by clash and encounter with the Europeans. Catholic and Protestant organisations and values influenced and shaped the development of African-Caribbean religions differently. For example, on the day of their arrival in Cuba and Haiti, enslaved African were obliged to convert to Catholicism, according to the imposed ‘Code Noir’.2 The Catholic Church had a strong influence on the enslaved in the Spanish and French islands. As a result, on arrival, the enslaved were forbidden to practice any African religious tradition. It is documented that Spanish and French colonial and Catholic authorities considered any African religious practices to be witchcraft punishable by death. As a consequence, Africans living on these islands creolised their beliefs, practices and cosmology with Catholic ones, associating African deities to the Catholic saints (Murrell, 2010).3 According to Barnet (2001), the saints for Catholics and the deities for Africans were 2 The ‘Code Noir’ (1685) governed the lives of the slaves. As documented by Laguerre, (1974), the Code Noir stated that ‘all slaves brought to the French possessions in America must receive instruction and baptism within eight days of arrival’ (Mitchell, 2006: 64). 3 It is important to mention that during the sixteenth century, the cult of the saints became very strong within Catholicism in Europe and consequently in the Caribbean. This cult developed in European Catholic countries, as a reaffirmation of belonging to Catholicism during the time of the Reformation. 27 seen respectively as mediators between the believers and God. In adapting and mixing with Catholicism and especially with the cult of saints, the African traditional religions in Cuba and Haiti modified to the point of losing some of their features while incorporating new ones (Barnet, 2001). In Haiti and Cuba, according to Ortiz (1995), African traditional religions and Catholicism underwent a process of ‘transculturation’. In changing and mixing with each other, they became independent new religious-cultural forms in their own right. Caribbean religions such as Santeria and Vodou thus developed through four hundred years of creative bricolage of African ontology and rituals, transplanted and mixed with Catholicism within a Western colonial context. They can be seen and analysed sociologically as new religions. Furthermore, these religions have shaped the history of the Caribbean. For example, Vodou has forged the history and culture of Haiti especially considering the Maroons and Vodou collaboration, which was essential to the Haitian Revolution and through which Haiti became the first black Republic in 1804 (Murrell, 2010). Like all the African-Caribbean religions, Vodou is also a Caribbean creation. Haitian Vodou is ‘neither a pure African religion nor American; it is Creole, a recreation and blending of African traditional religions, Christianity, and Native Caribbean religions’ (Murrell, 2010: 69). Today, Santeria and Vodou are not practised and lived only in the Caribbean, but also abroad in Canada, the USA, Europe, and the UK. During the 1950s and 1960s, people migrated from the Caribbean and took with them their beliefs and practices. 2.1.2 Jamaica From Slavery to Post-Emancipation: Obeah, Revival Zion, Hinduism and Rastafari As mentioned earlier, the African population deported to Jamaica first by the Spanish and later by the British was a real mixture of different African peoples (Mandinka, Yoruba, Susa, Fula, Ashanti, and Hausa). In Jamaica, the encounter between Christianity and African religions 28 developed in different ways than in Cuba and Haiti. According to colonial documents studied by Stewart (2005), Christianity was not imposed in Jamaica by the British at least until the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, as in other Caribbean islands, diverse African ethnic groups tended to unify in order to survive slavery. According to scholars such as Murrell (2010), Stewart (2005), and Chevannes (1994), most of Jamaican’s African-Caribbean religions such as Myal, Obeah and Kumina have their roots in the Yoruba, Ashanti (Akan) and Congo religions. They developed from the unification of many different African beliefs, practices and languages. However, among scholars there is a tendency to associate Obeah, Myal and Kumina particularly with the practices of the Ashanti Kingdom. According to Bastide (2010), the term Obeah signifies ‘magic’ and finds its etymology in the Ashanti (Akan) word ‘Obayfo’ which carries the same meaning. Furthermore, the practices of the ‘Obeah man’ or ‘Obeah woman’ are based on a magic ritual in which objects (called Obi) are given the power to curse or cure someone. However, according to other scholars of Caribbean religions, many of the ‘terms, rituals, beliefs and practices of Myal point to a Central West Africa origin’, especially in its expression of the African Jonkunno dance and Gumbay Play (Murrell, 2010: 254). The Jonkunno dance is well documented in many colonial sources and is nowadays performed in most Caribbean islands during the Christmas holiday.4 According to colonial documents analysed by Stewart (2005), at the beginning of the seventeenth century there was no clear distinction between Obeah and Myal. Myal was considered to represent the Obeah spiritual dance, which led to possession. Nevertheless, it 4 This performance is held every Christmas holiday around nearly all Caribbean islands since slavery time and it consist in a dancing masquerade parade of people singing, drumming, dancing and asking for contributions to family circles and spectators (Cassidy, Le Page, 2002). 29 seems that in contrast with Myal and Kumina, Obeah has always been seen as devil magic and feared by both white colonialists and the deported Africans themselves. According to colonial documents, Obeah and Myal were practised around the whole island and were publicly visible, especially during African funerals and burial rituals. As reported by Stewart (2005), the enslaveds’ public rituals such as funerals testifies that Africans used to see death as a sacred occasion, a relief from slavery and a passport to Africa (it was believed that once dead, their souls would return to Africa) (Stewart, 2005). According to Hucks, The early African understanding of Obeah in the eighteenth-century Jamaica and Barbados, unveil a complex system of spiritual doctoring mastered by priests whose principal role in the communities was healing physical, mental, spiritual, social and cosmic disease…rather than considered to be a criminal and malevolent sorcerers (2022: 15). According to colonial records, Obeah and Myal were depicted by missionaries and Europeans as devilish and linked to slave revolts, to the extent that the colonial government around the 1760s imposed laws banning these practices. In 1815, the Jamaican government started to recognise the right of slaves to receive Christian religious instructions (Bisnauth, 1989). However, the Africans who were forced by necessity to convert to Christianity were not fully recognised as Christians by their European masters or by missionaries. As Stewart (2005) argues, despite their conversion to Christianity the enslaved were still performing African healing and possession practices. As a result, the type of religion that has developed from the encounter between Protestantism and African religions in Jamaica is quite different from Santeria or Vodou and their encounter with Catholicism. According to Stewart, the conversion of Africans to Protestantism led to the formation of new types of African-Christian movements, such as the Native Baptists (1830), 30 Revival Zion (1860), and Rastafari (1930) (Stewart, 2005; Mitchell, 2006). These new African-Christian religions were from the outset linked to anti-slavery and anti-colonial activities. For instance, the 1831/2 rebellion inspired by the native Baptist Church leader Samuel Sharpe, led to the abolition of slavery in Jamaica in 1834 (Stewart, 2005). Native Baptist Church practices and beliefs were, as with Revival Zion, a mix of Myal stirred with Christianity and Biblical texts. Then in 1860, Jamaica experienced a major change due to the so-called ‘great revival’, which as explained by Stewart (2005) and Barnet (2001), saw a resurgence of African rituals and practices which were absorbed and shaped by the Africans, creating new forms of Christianity. Rituals such as spirit possession, dancing, drumming, divination, vision, prophecy, bathing and healing, became part of the new African-Christian Caribbean religion called Revival Zion. Alongside the advent of these African-Christian religions, Chevannes recognises the development of a Black Christian theology based less on Jesus’ redemptive power or the cult of Saints, as in Cuba or Haiti, and more on the power of the Holy Spirit (Chevannes, 1994). It is also important to recall that many Indians were taken to the Caribbean bringing Islam and Hinduism with them. The majority of Indians were shipped to the Caribbean and Jamaica around 1838 as labourers. As with other religions in the Caribbean, Hinduism in Jamaica was affected and was in turn influenced by other religions such as Islam, Obeah and Christianity, creating new Hindu identities and religiosities (Mitchell, 2006: 36). For instance, during the Caribbean experience, the Hindu Gods were ‘creolised’ (Mitchell, 2006: 44). According to some Rastafari scholars, Hinduism influenced the inception of Rastafari, particularly early on. As reported by Lee (2003) during the 1930s one of the main Rastafari leaders, Leonard Howell, although he was a Christian preacher, adopted words and rituals from 31 the Jamaican Hindu community in the making of the first Rastafarian community, the Pinnacle (Lee, 2003). 2.2 Rastafari 2.2.1 A Brief History of Rastafari As with other Caribbean religions, the inception of Rastafari was influenced by the historically specific context of slavery and colonialism. On the one hand, the inception of Rastafari can be viewed as the expression and evolution of the idea of resistance of Jamaican society to slavery and colonialism; on the other hand, it could be perceived as the evolution and adaptation of Revivalist Christian ideas such as Ethiopianism, which strongly influenced Jamaica in the nineteenth century. According to Bruder, By the end of the XIX century, the doctrine of Ethiopianism posited that Africans were the people chosen by God for the redemption of the black race. From the sufferings of African Americans would come the restoration of the greatness of Africa, and the spiritual and social uplifting of African people (2008: 81-2). As emphasised by Rastafarian scholars, both slavery and the plantation system have shaped Jamaican society and consciousness for centuries and consequently Rastafari too (Chevannes, 1994, Partridge, 2010). In fact, the thematic which characterised the plantation society such as Ethiopianism, Zion and black resistance to colonial political and religious hegemony, together with practices such as gathering and playing the drums, have been present and emphasised within Rastafari since its inception. The early history of Rastafari has been partially reconstructed by oral testimonies such as the ones recorded by Nettleford in the 1960s and Homiak during the 1980s (Yawney and Homiak, 32 2001). As Homiak states, these testimonies draw ‘upon the understandings and experiences of individuals who have lived and created the history of Rastafari’ (Yawney and Homiak, 2001: 259). Fortunately, due to the documented testimonies and research conducted by Simpson (1954), Nettleford et al. (1960), Campbell (1987), Chevannes (1994), and Murrell (2010), it is possible to discover part of the early history of this modern and young religious and political movement. According to the scholars mentioned above, Marcus Garvey was the ‘charismatic’ leader who influenced, with his ideology ‘Africa for the Africans’, the inception of Rastafari. Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), preacher and politician devoted his life to black emancipation in Jamaica and the USA (Wilkinson, 2008). Between 1920 and 1935, Garvey nicknamed ‘the black Moses’ founded the first Universal Pan-African association called U.N.I.A. (The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League) and proclaimed that all black people were of African and Hebrew descent (Boykin, 1996). This view was shared and embraced by many people in Jamaica. It is important not to forget that the context, in which Garvey’s philosophy was embraced and where Rastafari developed, was the ghetto of Kingston which could be considered the metamorphosis of the plantation society in an urban setting (Chevannes, 1994). Nettleford et al. (1960) and Simpson (1954) reported that in the 1920s many Jamaicans viewed Garvey not only as a preacher but also as a prophet. In 1921, Garvey together with George Alexander McGuire founded The African Orthodox Church (AOC). The purpose of the new group was originally to create a church for the UNIA and to promote black nationalist religious symbolism. However, the AOC never became an official part of the UNIA (Newman, 1977). In 1927 having returned to Jamaica from the USA, Garvey started preaching and staged a play, in Kingston, about the coming of a black King or Messiah. The play stated: ‘Look to Africa, when a black king shall be crowned, for the day of delivery is near’ 33 (Nettleford, 1960: 5). Interestingly, although Garvey is remembered for the play, he is not the author of it. When in the 1930s Haile Selassie was crowned in Ethiopia as the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the tribe of Judah and the elect of God, it sounded to many Jamaicans as a prophecy, the fulfilment of Garvey’s preaching, which was confirmed to them by Biblical texts such as Revelation 5: 2- 5 and 19:19 (Nettleford,1960).5 Haile Selassie’s title was Ras Tafari before being crowned as Emperor of Ethiopia. It is only after the coronation as emperor that he took the name given to him by the Towahedo Orthodox Church of Haile Selassie (Power of Trinity). The King of Kings, the Messiah coming for black liberation had finally been crowned. After this event, the many Jamaicans who started worshipping the King of Ethiopia called themselves Rastafari, which meant the worshippers of Ras Tafari (Barrett, 1988). Many of these worshippers saw in Haile Selassie ‘the living God, the returned Messiah and the representative of God the father on earth’ (Nettleford, 1960: 18). Indeed, ‘the crowning of Selassie was the global catalytic event that called the Rastafari movement into existence’ (Barrett, 1988: 81). According to Campbell, ‘the crowning of Selassie finally replaced both the White-God and the White-British King with a Coptic version of a black God who was both divine and human, Ras 5 Revelation 5:2-5, ‘2 And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, “Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll?” 3 But no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth could open the scroll or even look inside it. 4 I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside. 5 Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.” Revelation 19:19, ‘19 Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth, and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army.’ Rastafari sees in this passage the realisation of WW2 when Haile Selassie (the King of the earth) was fighting against the beast (Fascism and Nazism). 34 Tafari’ (Campbell, 1987: 65). Furthermore, while many Rastafari experienced Haile Selassie as God, or the returned Messiah, for others he became the symbol of black liberation from colonialism and slavery.6 The idea that Ras Tafari was the living God, or the black liberator, developed in Jamaica through the preaching of several Revival leaders during the 1930s and 1940s. The most prominent advocates were Leonard Howell, Archibald Dunkley, Joseph Hibbert and Robert Hinds (Nettleford et al., 1960). Although they shared the same beliefs regarding the holy Ethiopian King, their preaching and activities were very different. However, these kinds of leaders framed in religious terms the repatriation narrative which led Rastafari to find not in the plantation but in Africa (Ethiopia) their source of identity production (Bedasse, 2017). Leonard Howell, born in 1898 in the parish of Clarendon (Jamaica), is considered by many to have been the first Rastafari (Lee, 2003; Yawney and Homiak, 2001). While very young he migrated to the United States, where he joined Garvey's UNIA. He was intellectually and religiously influenced by Garvey and his global Pan-Africanism. While in the USA he was an activist within Garvey’s movement, and it was only once he moved back to Jamaica that Howell switched from Garveyism to worshipping Haile Selassie. Howell was keen to expose the Rastafari doctrine to the whole of Jamaica, and he was the first to preach about the divinity of Selassie and the first to establish in St. Catherine (Jamaica), in the 1940s, a Rastafari self-sufficient commune, called the Pinnacle (Chevannes, 1994; Campbell, 1987) with about 4,500 members 6 In 1942 Haile Selassie abolished slavery in Ethiopia, while in 1948 granted the land of Shashamane to the diasporic people in the USA and Caribbean who wanted to repatriate to Africa. 35 (http://www.jnht.com/site_pinnacle_great_house_ruin.php#:~:text=At%20its%20zenith%2C%20Pinnacle%20was,and%20communities%20in%20West%20Kingston –Website title site_pinnacle_great_house_ruin, Jamaica National Heritage Trust, copyright 2011, last accessed 24/10/2024). Several farmers were living and working there, producing a variety of fruits, vegetables and staples. According to Barrett, life in the Pinnacle was ‘strictly patterned after the Maroons communities of Jamaica’ (1988: 86).7 At the Pinnacle, Howell reworked a host of diasporic resources that infused Rastafari with both African and East Indian influences.8 These influences included Kikongo and South Asian languages and culture, the Congo-derived drumming tradition known as Kumina and both African and Christian-derived chants (Yawney and Homiak, 2001: 260). 9 The Pinnacle lasted for about fifteen years. When the Pinnacle was 7 The term Maroon originated from the word Cimarron used in Hispaniola to ‘refer to the Spaniards’ federal castle, then to enslaved Amerindians who escaped to the hills and by the 1530s mainly to the many Africans who were escaping from slavery on the island’ (Price, 1973: xii). While this term developed on Spanish islands from the XVIII century, the term started to be used in all Caribbean islands to refer to slave communities generally living on the hills and which were raising often violent revolts against European slavery and hegemony (Price, 1973; Cassidy and Le Page, 1961). 8 According to Lee, Howell borrowed many words from Hindi-Urdu such as his own Rastafarian nickname Gangunguru Maragh (from gyan, knowledge; guna, virtue; guru, teacher; and Maharadj, King). Howell adopted from the Hindu Jamaican community, Hindu words for his prayers; the concept of a King-God; the sacramental use of Ganja; meditation practices; and a vegetarian diet. Howell also embraced part of the Hindu theology such as the beliefs in Karma and reincarnation (2003). 9 Point 1: Kikongo is one of the Bantu languages and is spoken by the Kongo and Ndundu people living in the tropical forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Edward Seaga in his book Folk Music of Jamaica has identified about forty Kikongo words in the Kumina ritual songs (Morrish, 1982). This language was spoken by many of those who were taken from the region and sold as slaves in the Americas and Caribbean. Point 2: Kumina is a Jamaican folk religion, coming from Africa (Ghana) and influenced by the Ashanti tradition (Barrett, 1988:17). The word comes from the Ashanti tongue called Twi and is made up of two words: Akom which means ‘to be possessed’ and Ana which means ‘by an ancestor’ (Barrett, 1988:17). This religion is therefore based on spirit possession and the Gods invoked are the old African tribal gods (Morrish, 1982). The Kumina ceremonies are always accompanied by drums with a specific rhythm. 36 raided and destroyed by the police and colonial authorities in 1954, Rastafari changed significantly (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). Between the 1950s-1960s, Rastafari developed further, by creating and introducing their own language the ‘Dread Talk’ and adopting the so-called ‘Livity code’. Despite diversities within the movement, the 1960s saw the introduction, within the various Rastafari branches (mansions, houses) of symbols such as: ‘the flag, the lion, the drum, the chalice, the locks and the distinctive language [which] were reflections of a style of resistance’ (Campbell, 1987: 89). Simpson (1954) and Nettleford et al. (1960) reported that since the beginning Rastafari were persecuted by the Jamaican government and police, because they were perceived as a violent movement that was a threat to the government’s colonial system. From a Rastafari perspective, the Jamaican police and colonial authorities were agents of Babylon (Nettleford et al., 1960). Among the many clashes between Rastafari, and the Jamaican police and government, the most remembered are the Coronation Market riot (1959), the Henry Affair (1960) and the Coral Garden Massacre (1963) (Yawney and Homiak, 2001: 261). As Edmonds (2003) states, the Coronation market incident started as a riot between Rastafari and the police in Kingston. The event ended with a police raid at the Rastafari quarter known as Black O’Wall and many Rastafari were arrested. Black O’Wall was destroyed by the government and police in 1966. However, as stressed by Edmonds (2003), the ‘Henry Affair’ marked the highest point in the tension between the authorities and the Rastafari movement. As recorded by the Jamaican Observer newspaper, 37 In 1959, the Rastafari leader, Reverend Claudius Henry, was found with a letter to Fidel Castro discussing plans to take over Jamaica. Castro had just successfully overthrown the Batista Government by armed revolution in Cuba. Then in 1960, Reverend Henry’s son, Reynold Henry, led a group of black nationalists in an uprising. He and his co-conspirators were arrested after a large manhunt involving police and soldiers in Sligoville, St Catherine. It was believed that Henry and his group were planning to overthrow the Government of Jamaica (https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/2015/12/15/rastas-beaten-forcibly-trimmed-of-their-locks-after-coral-gardens/). The government and police used this event as an excuse to perform arbitrary acts against Rastafari, such as the Coral Garden massacre (Edmonds, 2003). On the 11th of April 1963, the state’s military and police carried out a mass arrest of Rastafari women, men and children in Rose Hall a Georgian plantation house. As many as 150 Rastafari were rounded up, arrested, beaten and abused, three were killed; their dreadlocks, which have religious significance, were cut (https://web.archive.org/web/20190418222936/https://atlantablackstar.com/2017/04/09/jamaican-government-issues-apology-reparations-1963-brutal-attack-rastas/). The people involved in this event were trying to defend their rights to walk through and farm the Rose Hall area, where they were living. The government wanted to close the Rose Hall estate in order to redevelop the site for tourism (Campbell, 1987).10 The riots while lasted days between Rastafari and the police ended with the death of seven people. The majority of 10 The Estate on which Rose Hall sits now also includes a championship golf course, a Hilton resort and high-end real estate. 38 Rastafari arrested were charged for smoking marijuana and not for their resistance to the government’s decision to close the area. After these events, the Jamaican government stated that the war on Rastafari and the war on marijuana was one (Campbell, 1987). The Coral Garden massacre is still remembered amongst Rastafari and is considered a pivotal part of Rastafari history. These terrible events in Rastafari history demonstrated the connections and clash between Rastafari and British colonial rule in Jamaica. The Coral Garden massacre or ‘Bad Friday’ was acknowledged for the first time in 2017, by the Jamaican government, in a speech given by First Minister Andrew Holness. He presented apologies to Rastafari for the oppression they suffered during the 1960s and noted the positive cultural impact that Rastafari had on Jamaican society (Balford, 2017: 11). From the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s, the Rastafari movement experienced further changes and development. The negative images and narratives about Rastafari changed drastically thanks to Bob Marley’s music. Marley became the prototype of the ‘Rastaman’ globally. According to Steffens, ‘Bob Marley is the most famous Rastaman who ever lived’ (Steffens, 1998: 253; Mazzoni, 2009). Marley used the power of his music to inspire, mobilise and spread Rastafari messages, practices, and beliefs internationally (Campbell, 1987). In his songs, Marley used dreadtalk, believing as a Rastafari that words and sounds can have a powerful effect on people’s minds and souls. Although Marley could be seen as a facilitator of Rastafari cultural appropriation, he is well respected by the whole Rastafari community. As reported by Hepner (1998), by the 1970s thanks to Marley’s music Rastafari started to be described and viewed by the many people who embraced reggae as ‘warriors fighting for rights, economic justice, and racial pride’ (Hepner, 1998: 201). Furthermore, from my experience with transnational Rastafari, encountering reggae served as a really important early point of 39 attraction to Rastafari. For example, while Reasoning with Ras Jam, an Italian Rastafari who has lived in Jamaica for nearly fourteen years told me, ‘Mi sono avvicinato al movimento Rastafari quando avevo sedici anni con la musica reggae. Ho studiato i testi delle varie canzoni, ed ho visto che Selassie veniva menzionato sempre, e sono andato a cercare chi era quest’uomo’ (I approached the Rastafari movement when I was sixteen through Reggae music. I studied the lyrics of the various songs, and I saw that Selassie was always mentioned, and I went to look for who this man was). 2.2.2. Leadership and Organisations Today, Rastafari does not have a centralised organisational structure (Yawney and Homiak, 2001: 257) but is composed of many different heterogeneous mansions or houses. The terms house or mansions were borrowed from the Biblical passage, ‘In my Father's house are many mansions’ (John, 14:2). Nevertheless, many Rastafari do not belong to any of these formal organisations. The most widely known Rastafari mansions are the Bobo Dread, the House of Nyabinghi (or Nyabinghi Order), the Ethiopian World Federation, the Church of Haile Selassie I (CHSI), the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). The Bobo Dread (or Bobo Shanti) mansion was founded in the mid-1950s. This Rastafarian branch developed from a disagreement among Rastafari of the Black Youth Faith concerning the wearing of dreadlocks (Murrell, 2010). The movement split into two groups: the ‘House of the Cumbersome’ and the ‘House of Dreadlocks’; the latter divided further into regular dreads and Boboshanti (or Dread) whose leader became Prince Emanuel (Murrell, 40 2010). As reported by Murrell, for the Boboshanti, ‘Selassie is the father, Garvey is a prophet, and Emmanuel is the Priest’ (2010: 305). They established a community in Bull Bay (western Jamaica) resembling the Pinnacle community model (Murrell, 2010). The turban that they wear is their most expressive symbol and distinguishes them from other Rastafari (Murrell, 2010). They believe themselves to be the Biblical Israelites, a Priesthood order and in their everyday lives they respect a strict social code, based on the Bible such as the celebration of the Sabbath (Murrell, 2010). During rituals such as Reasoning on the Bible or theology, politics and ganja smoking, women and men are separated (Murrell, 2010). The House of Nyabinghi was founded after King Selassie visited Jamaica in the 1960s and is today considered by many as the largest orthodox branch within Rastafari (Murrell, 2010). The house of Nyabinghi comes out from the Black Youth faith. In 1949 Ras Boanerges founded the Black Youth Faith and despite his Christian nickname11, he pushed Rastafari away from Revivalist Christian attitudes. Furthermore, he introduced ‘dreadlocks’ as a Rastafarian symbol which from the 1970s would be adopted by many Rastafari worldwide (Chevannes, 1994; Yawney & Homiak in Stephen, 2001; Edmonds, 2003). Murrell summarised the words of Ras Pidow and Ras Sam Brown, recorded by Jah Ahkell regarding Nyabinghi beliefs and practices, We are vegetarians; we worship and observe not God but Ras Tafari, outlawing any form of paganism; we love and respect the brotherhood of mankind yet our first love is to the sons of Ham; we disapprove and utterly hate jealousy, envy, deceit, guile, treachery; we are avowed to create a world order of one brotherhood; our duty is to 11 The name Boanerges was the name given by Jesus Christ to two of his appointed, James and John, sons of Zebedee. According to the Bible, Mark (3:17), this name means ‘Sons of thunder’. 41 extend the hands of charity to any brother in distress to any human, animals, plants (Murrell, 2010: 306). The Boboshanti and the Nyabinghi share a priestly ‘Churchical’ orientation with respect to other Rastafari (Yawney and Homiak, 2001: 266), as they preach the ideals of a global theocracy led by Emperor Haile Selassie whom they declare to be the promised Messiah and/or incarnation of Jah. A further mansion is The Ethiopian World Federation (EWF) which was founded in 1937 in New York to aid Ethiopia in the struggle against Italian colonialism. The EWF has been linked to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church since its foundation (Barrett, 1988). Although this organisation was not founded by Rastafari, many Rasta belong to it because since 1955 the EWF has supported the efforts of many Rastafari to repatriate to Ethiopia. The EWF is closely linked to the Church of Haile Selassie I (CHSI) and as Hepner (1998) suggests, they work together and are complementary, representing respectively the political and religious side. The founding father of the CHSI was Asento Fox (known among Rastafari as ‘Emmanuel’ Fox). Born in Jamaica during the 1950s Fox moved to London where he emerged as a Rastafari leader and founded the Universal Black Improvement Organisation with a political branch called the People Democratic Party (Hepner, 1998: 203). He founded the Church of Haile Selassie I in Kingston (Jamaica) in 1987 (Hepner: 1998). According to Hepner, the CHSI has gone further than any other mansion in developing a standardised liturgical practice and in ‘the construction of a distinct congregational formation’ (Hepner, 1998: 208). Among all the Rastafari mansions the one considered the most inclusive and progressive is the Twelve Tribes founded by Vernon Carrington in 1968 (Murrell, 2010). Carrington or Prophet Gad was a revivalist leader who reinterpreted the Bible by including 42 African history, Egyptian and Ethiopian myths and ‘Jewish mystical Kabbalah numerology to frame the sect’s beliefs’ (Murrell, 2010: 307). This branch, as distinct from those previously mentioned, celebrates its middle-class and international views (Murrell, 2010) by including western and middle-class people; it is open to outsiders and inclusive of women and its members are free to worship in any church. This mansion supports the development of Rastafari internationally and has opened branches worldwide. It is important to highlight that many Rastafari are also followers of the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church, which was introduced in Jamaica in the 1960s by Haile Selassie and in England in the 1970s by Norman Adams (Jah Blue). During his reign, the Emperor was the head and reformer of the Tewahedo Orthodox Church and in 1959, the Emperor made the Church independent from the Orthodox Coptic Egyptian Church. Among Rastafari the ones close to the Church strongly believe that Haile Selassie is still its head, although the majority of the Abuna (priests) were killed during the Derg coup in 1974. However, today the Tewahedo church often does not acknowledge Rastafari within the congregation because the church neglects, in opposition to Rastafari, the divinity of Haile Selassie. Regardless of this discrepancy, many Rastafari continue to follow the Tewahedo Church and their festivities. According to Edmonds, Rastafari mansions are distinguished between ‘Churchical’ and ‘statical’ forms (Edmonds, 2003: 70). In contrast with the ‘Churchical’ Rastafari, the ‘statical’ Rastafari, such as the Rastafari Movement Association UK, tend to be more committed to political and social goals (Edmonds, 2003). According to the study conducted by Yawney and Homiak, Rastafari ‘statical’ organisations tend to form ‘social groups in order to serve certain purposes and when their usefulness is done, outdated organisations disappear, and new ones arise’ (2001: 257). Yet, many Rastafari do not belong to any Churchical or statical groups 43 rejecting any idea of leadership. This refusal is based on the Rastafari ideology for which ‘Jah Rastafari is their only leader’ (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). Charts 1 Main Rastafari houses or mansions 44 45 46 47 2.2.3. Rastafari Ideas, Concepts and Symbols, a General Overview The Rastafari beliefs, symbols and practices described below can be considered as a list of the general and ‘official’ Rastafari teachings. Nevertheless, in what follows, it is important to keep in mind that this thesis is based on the study of Rastafari as a ‘lived reality’ in motion, rather than as a static and unchanging movement. Jah For Rastafari, Jah is the name of God and when spoken, it is often accompanied by the utterance ‘Jah Rastafari’. This emphasis is not just done in order to praise Jah (God) and Ras Tafari (King Selassie), but also to emphasise oneness or unity between the two. For Rastafari a personal 48 relationship with Jah is vital, and believers perceive the divine as ‘something internal, as part of the individual self’ (Wilkinson, 2008: 284). Biblical references, such as John 10: 31-35 and Psalm 82: 6, establish the believe that God lives within, and therefore, we are Gods.12 Furthermore, although Rastafari stresses ‘Africaness’ and African roots, any sort of spirit possessions, divination, Obeah and Myal practices are forbidden within the movement. The Rastafari opposition to the cult of the ancestors or spirits, divination, or possession, is based on the idea that God is one, and is within us. Consequently, Rastafari do not need to ‘call on or in’ any mediator such as Saints, Deities, or ancestors in order to make contact with the divine as in the case of Obeah, Voodoo, Myal or Santeria. However, Rastafari uses other instruments of mediation to achieve vicinity to Jah, such as, the drum, ganja smoking, Bible reading and dancing. The Rastafari view of the divine could be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, the fact that God is one and does not need mediators could be interpreted as a strong Judaic-Christian Protestant feature absorbed within the movement; on the other hand, the view that God is within all things could be interpreted as a constant instead of a temporal possession by the divinity. This could be related to the classical African Yoruba and Ashanti belief that the divine energy (Ashe) pervades the entire universe (Mitchell, 2006) and therefore, humans. However, the aim of Rastafari practices is not merely to believe in God but ‘to know God’ (Wilkinson, 2008: 284). According to Chevannes, Rastafari claim to be the ‘one who has the consciousness of the God within, and thus directly linked to the source of truth and 12 John 10: 34,36, ‘ Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods”’[d]? 35 If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be set aside—36 what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world?’ Psalm 82: 6, ‘I said, ‘You are “gods” you are all sons of the Most High.’ 49 life’ (Chevannes, 2003: 71). Rastafari are duty bound to serve Jah, they have to work for him and be his expression on earth (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). Haile Selassie and the Lion of Judah For many Rastafari, Emperor Haile Selassie is the living God, the returned Messiah (or Christ reincarnated) and the representative of God on earth. According to the testimonies collected, Rastafari rely on Biblical passages such as Psalm 87, John 14-16, Jeremiah 26:5-6, Revelations 5:2-5, to prove and establish that Ras Tafari is the Living God, the Lion of Judah and the redeemer of black people.13 Rastafari believe that Ras Tafari is the Living God, dismissing the reports of Selassie’s death in 1975 and affirming that Selassie cannot die and hence any report of his death is a fabrication of Babylon (Edmonds, 2003: 55). The Rastafari act of deifying Selassie was an attempt to ‘reject the white European religion and the whole cultural system it legitimated’ (Barrett, 1988: 84) but in reality, it borrows very much from Abrahamic Western religions. 13 Psalm 87: 1,4 , ‘1He has founded his city on the holy mountain.2 The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the other dwellings of Jacob.3 Glorious things are said of you, city of God 4 I will record Rahab and Babylon among those who acknowledge me Philistia too, and Tyre, along with Cush and will say, This one was born in Zion.’ John14: 16, ‘And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.’ Jeremiah 2: 5,6, ‘5The days are coming, declares the Lord when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. 6 In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The Lord Our Righteous Savior.’ Revelations 5:2, 5, ‘2 And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to lose the seals thereof? 3 And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon.4 And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon.5 And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to lose the seven seals thereof.’ To Rastafari these are some of the Biblical passages that prof that Haile Selassie, crowned as the Lion of Judah and descending from David’s roots, is the redeemer and comforter of black people. 50 Alongside this, Rastafari adopted the symbol of the Lion to proclaim their identity and links to Haile Selassie and as an ‘attempt to construct a new and noble identity’, an antithesis of the local Jamaican and Akan folk hero Anancy (Austin-Broos, 1987: 21). Anancy is a spider protagonist of Jamaican tales and folklore. In these stories, Anancy seems to be at the mercy of other animals which are physically superior but eventually is almost always able to trick them with his craftiness (Edmonds, 2003). In Jamaican culture, this spider is considered to be the archetype of someone who is dishonest in order to survive often at the expense of the poor (Campbell, 1987; Edmonds, 2003). However, despite the importance of Anancy’s status in Jamaican folklore, Rastafari often refuses this image because it symbolises betrayal and backstabbing (Edmonds, 2003). To create a different symbol for Jamaican society, Rastafari ‘declared their identification with the lion in its roar, its hair, its body strength, intelligence and total movements’ (Campbell, 1987: 99). The Israelites The belief that Rastafari are Hebrews is not shared by the whole community. However, by relying on the Kebra Nagast (see section Rastafari book), all Rastafari consider Haile Selassie as the 225th direct descendant from King Solomon’s dynasty (Nettleford et al., 1960). This knowledge is supported by the display of the Davidic star on clothes and accessories. Moreover, according to their interpretation of the Bible (Lamentation 5: 10), God is black, Solomon was black and so are the true Israelites (Nettleford et al., 1960).14 For many Rastafari, ‘Israelites and Ethiopians are one and the same name, simply referring to holy [black] people’ 14 Lamentations 5: 10, ‘Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.’ 51 (Barrett, 1988: 111). Marcus Garvey whose nickname was ‘the black Moshes’ was the one who proclaimed that all Africans were Hebrews (Bruder, 1996: 77). The idea of being the ‘Black Hebrew’ was even supported and promoted by an article that appeared in the newspaper Voice of Ethiopia (1937) and stated that the true Israelites were black (Campbell, 1987: 77). For Rastafari, ‘the Ethiopia’s emperor Haile Selassie became a major symbol in these group’ ideology whose members claimed to be of Ethiopian Jewish extraction’ (Bruder, 2008: 84). According to Murrell & Williams (1998), the fact ‘that people known as the Falasha exist in Ethiopia and that they claim their roots in the Jewish stock’ will be very important for Rastafari who will claim to be Hebrew Israelite. Ethiopia and Zion Rastafari, in ‘rejecting modern civilisation which it calls “Babylon” embraces a vision of an ideal African society known as “Zion”’ (Wilkinson, 2008: 284) heaven on earth (Menelik, 2009). According to Psalm 48: 2, Zion is ‘on the side of the North, the city of the Great King’ (Nettleford et al., 1960: 20) which Rastafari interpreted to be Ethiopia.15 Ethiopia’s importance seems ‘to begin the moment the Christian Bible was introduced into Jamaican society in the eighteenth century’ (Macleod, 2014: 11). As soon as the Bible was introduced the ‘black community began to seek its own reflection in the Bible texts’ (Hebdige, 1979: 33). In fact, as underlined by Hebdige, the Bible ‘had its dark side too: an “Africa” which lay dormant and forgotten inside the language of the white Master’ (1979: 33). As a result, the concept of Ethiopianism was coined by George Liele and developed during the ‘great revival’. Liele was 15 Psalm 48:1, 2, ‘1Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of his holiness. 2Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King.’ 52 a preacher and founded the island’s first Baptist church in 1794. This church was characterised by a combination of various African and Christian traditions (Barrett, 1988). Furthermore, the concept of Ethiopianism was based on the beliefs that African Americans would help forge the restoration of the greatness of Africa (Bruder, 2008) and that Ethiopia was the black promised land [Zion] (Bruder, 2008: 81). On the one hand, Rastafari see Ethiopia as the promised land in light that it is the birthplace of Haile Selassie, however, on the other hand, they believe Ethiopia to be ‘the present domicile of the Jewish ark of the covenant’ (Chisholm, 1998: 166). The identification with Ethiopian civilisation provided a strategy for the creation of a historical heritage for the black diaspora (Bruder, 2008) and a starting point for the creation of new identities and religions, such as Rastafari. The fact that Ethiopia is seen by Rasta as the black Promised Land is the outcome of a desire to reassemble fragments of a lost identity and to provide an account for their origins (Macleod, 2014). Furthermore, as Mwakikagile assesses, ‘the Rastafari connection with Ethiopia constituted (in reality) a denial of origin in West Africa’ (2007: 64). However, this view could be contested by some Rastafari stating that in the past all Africa was called Ethiopia or Cush. Nevertheless, many Rastafari perceive Zion also as a spiritual and mystic state of inner peace, while others consider it as their primary aim, to make Zion on earth by overcoming Babylon. Repatriation and Reparation According to Campbell, ‘Back to Africa as a philosophy among Africans in the West is as old as slavery’ (1987: 211). In fact, the concept of Ethiopia as the Promised Land and the idea of repatriation had been emphasised by many Revival preachers in Jamaica since the eighteenth century. From the end of the 1960s, many Caribbean Rastafari repatriated to Ethiopia and settled in Shashamane. Shashamane is the Ethiopian land given in 1966 by Haile Selassie to African’s 53 descendent, from the Caribbeans and America, who wished to repatriate to Africa (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). Nevertheless, even though the importance of repatriation to Ethiopia is still one of the main aims of Rastafari, from the 1960s there was a schism leading some Rastafari to support repatriation and others to advocate reparation (Nettleford et al., 1960). While on the one hand, for Rastafari the term ‘reparation’ means material and economic compensation for those deported to the Caribbean by the colonial authorities, on the other hand, it also signifies a reappropriation and revaluation of black spirituality and culture, neglected by the Western hegemony during four hundred years of slavery. Babylon Babylon is the source of all evil and ‘its destruction would presage the start of what Rastafari called “the new age, the entry into Zion”’ (Cashmore, 1979: 129). The term Babylon is full of meaning for Rastafari and its symbolism cannot be understood without taking into account the Jamaican context and history of slavery, suffering and struggle (Edmonds, 2003). According to Edmonds, ‘escaping, overcoming or “beating down Babylon” is paramount in the agenda of Rastafari’ (Edmonds, 2003: 42). The term Babylon has its origin in Genesis 11 and the story of the Tower of Babel. In the Bible, the Babylonian civilisation inaugurated the first Jewish diaspora and exile (Edmonds, 2003). Metaphorically for Rastafari, Babylon represents ‘violence, sexual and moral degeneracy’ and its leaders are characterised by egomania (Edmonds, 2003: 43). In the early stages of the movement, Babylon was associated with the British colonial system, the Jamaican police and the Catholic Church (Nettleford et al, 1960). For Rastafari, the term Babylon has both religious and political significance. According to the Nyabinghi order, Babylon also represents ‘the oppressive condition of “exile” in the Black diaspora; the cosmic domain 54 presided over by the pope of Rome and his Anglo-European political cohorts; the source of death-dealing and destructive spiritual power’ (Homiak, 1985: 510). However, from the 1970s the meaning of Babylon developed further as it spread around the world. Rastafari started to see Babylon as an international entity representing not only elements of Jamaican society, but also the complex economic, political, religious and educational institutions that evolved from colonialism (Edmonds, 2003). Nowadays, Babylon does not represent a ‘specific society or a specific social system but any “system of thought and behaviour” or any “general cultural pattern in which men find themselves trapped” and out of touch with Jah (God or Haile Selassie) and the reality of Rastafari’ (Owens, 1976: 74-80). Today, many Rastafari regard themselves as the ‘agents of Babylon’s destruction’ (Jah Army) and ‘reggae music as their primary weapon’ (Edmonds, 2003: 51). The Rastafari Flag When in 1966 Emperor Haile Selassie visited Jamaica, the many Rastafari who attended the event were wearing and waving the Ethiopian flag and colours (red, gold and green) as a symbol of their allegiance to Ethiopia’s Emperor and of African unity. According to Edmonds, these colours function as a Rastafari membership card declaring to the world a loyalty to Africa (Edmonds, 2003). The Ethiopian colours have a meaning for Rastafari, ‘the green represents the pasture of Africa; the yellow (gold) represents the wealth of the land; and the red the Church Triumphant’ (Nettleford 1960: 22). Today the colour of the Ethiopian flag is ubiquitous in the material culture of reggae music. The Dread Talk Jamaican language (Patois) is itself a combination of English words put into a modified African structure (Cassidy, 1961). According to Chevannes (1994), Rastafari developed a subdialect of 55 Patois which carries both religious and moral implications (Chevannes, 1994) and is known as the dreadtalk (Pollard, 1982). This language developed among Rastafari in order to hide their conversations and consequently, it became a ‘weapon in the Rastafarian ideological and symbolic war against Babylon’ (Edmonds, 2003: 62). By adopting a different language than English, Rastafari created a linguistic medium that expresses their philosophical concepts and outlook (Edmonds, 2003). As will be highlighted in chapter five, in fashioning the dreadtalk Rastafari rely on a theory ‘called “word, sound and power”, which claims that certain words and sounds carry a special power’ (Price, 2003: 18). Nowadays, the dreadtalk is still used among Rastafari and only people part or close to the movement achieve fluency in the multi-layered aspects of this way of communicating. Knowing dreadtalk is essential to Reasoning. Reasoning According to Chevannes (1994), Rastafari ‘Reasoning has two levels of meaning, one situated at the level of form, the other at the level of content’ (1994: 224). This relates to Turner’s (1968) theory of ritual drama, but whereas Turner focused on action, Chevannes focused on speech and words (1968). For instance, while the creative act of naming and use of Dreadtalk is Reasoning situated at the level of (linguistic) form, the narrative about Babylon, Zion and such like, is Reasoning situated at the level of content. Therefore, I was seeking mutual understanding by giving space to the testimonies of my conversation partners and listening, from the content (the subject matter under discussion). This meant that during fieldwork instead of just asking questions and recording responses, I was drawn into conversations that created new spaces to understand my research subjects and for them to understand me. This predilection toward the spoken word is part of Jamaican tradition and according to Brathwaite it is based on the Bantu tradition of Nommo (1971: 237-239), ‘the life force, which produces 56 all life, which influences “things” in the shape of word’ (Jahn, 1961, 124). As I will show in chapter five, for Rastafari naming is a creative act and the names’ sound contains a certain degree of power which can create but also can destroy (Chevannes, 1994: 226). According to Chevannes the ‘ritual of words represents an arena of verbal competition between Dreadlocks.’ Reasoning in fact, can be ‘competitive and generally it is run by the person whose ability is to support an argument and entertain’ (Chevannes, 1994: 226). However, other Rastafari scholars such as Yawney and Homiak described Reasoning as a ‘collective and visionary discourse’ in which everyone has the opportunity to speak. They suggest that Reasoning is ‘a cooperative affair, not a competitive one’ (2001: 263) as highlighted by Chevannes. To Yawney and Homiak, ‘the purpose of reasoning is to reach ever-higher heights, accrediting layer upon layer of meaning, until a satisfactory view of reality in the Light of Jah! Rastafari is reached’ (2001: 263). These different views and experiences recorded by Chevannes, Yawney and Homiak, shows how Rastafari themselves practice Reasoning in various ways. The practice of Reasoning is so important within Rastafari to the extent that I have applied it to my methodology. The way in which I have experienced and practiced Reasoning is actually close to what Onura calls ‘Reasoning circles’ (2012: 146). Early Rastafari leaders ‘transmitted their pedagogy of Black/African liberation’ through Reasoning circles and in this way ‘the idea of taking education to the streets was actualized by Rastas’ (2012: 146). Therefore, in my research, I approached and practised Reasoning as an informal, independent, and significant pedagogical practice within Rastafari that I could use to decolonise my ethnographic method and increase my knowledge about Rastafari. InI InI is a further concept which is pivotal to Rastafari Reasoning and which I used as part of my methodology during fieldwork. InI can be considered the most important word within the 57 Rastafari dictionary, because the personal pronoun ‘I’ is considered to be the sound of the divinity in itself. According to Rastafari beliefs, God’s presence, ‘I’, is in every living thing, including flowers, rivers and humans. According to Hutton and Murrell, the term ‘I’ qualifies Rasta speeches (1998: 50) and therefore, Reasoning. For instance, in Rastafari speeches the word ‘vibration’ is replaced and changed to ‘I-ration’; ‘divinity’ is replaced by ‘I-vinity’; ‘natural’ by ‘I-tal’. The word ‘I’ is used by Rastafari to give what they consider to be the correct meaning to things and to not neglect their divine essence. Hence, for Rastafari the concept of InI is very important because it refers to their ontology and the relationship between the divine and humanity. The Rastafari view of the divine contained in the ‘I’ could be strictly related to African traditional views for which the divine energy (Ashe) is present in everything even in objects and words. According to Williams, InI is used by Rastafari as ‘indicative of the divine essence in all people, for this reason, everyone is potentially a Rasta because everyone is born with the divine principle and God within’ (Williams, 1981: 22). Furthermore, the term InI is used also as a replacement of ‘we, us, me’ and resembles the spirit of unity and fraternity within the movement for which there is not a ‘me’ or ‘you’, but only InI. It is, therefore, a term that expresses ‘oneness’ between two (or more) persons or between the person and God (Edmonds, 1998: 33) and the whole creation. Overstanding An essential word/concept employed in Rastafari Reasonings and which I have engaged with as part of my methodology is Overstanding. This is a term coined by Rastafari to signal, that the metropolitan English term “understanding” implies a positionality of inferiority and passivity. [Slade (2018)] shows that overstandings are particular word-formation processes in global Rastafarian language by means of which Babylonian, colonial forms 58 (i.e., metropolitan English terms) are re-analysed and inverted into Zionic, postcolonial opposites (Singh, 2010: 4). While Reasoning with Rastafari, we often employed this word to highlight mutual comprehension, especially culturally speaking. As reported by Slade, to Rastafari, [the word understand], is perceived to be composed of under in the sense of “below, lesser, lacking” … and stand. Under stands in a binary opposition to over and thus the word is reformed as overstand as if understanding meant “a lesser, lacking comprehension” and overstanding thus “a higher, full [decolonised] comprehension” (2009: 7). Therefore, Rastafari by ‘replacing the colonial meaning with one that proclaims liberation and positivity: “understanding” becomes “overstanding,” for example, in a speech act that rejects the placement of a human mind “under” a concept’ (Bean, 2014: 7). However, according to Slade, ‘overstand does not mean the opposite of understand, rather it ‘corrects’ the putative negative connotations of understand’ (2009: 7). In my experience, overstand represents the positionality of the interlocutors during Reasoning and their willingness to comprehend each other, despite sometimes sharing diverse views. Livity According to Yawney and Homiak (2001: 265), Livity is applied as a system of rules to Rastafari everyday life, and it is the most important, complex and contested practice within Rastafari. Practices and beliefs may vary within different Rastafari groups and Livity is no exception. For example, while Nyabinghi Livity includes food practices, reading and singing or reflecting on Bible passages, Livity within the Ethiopian World Federation is more oriented 59 to addressing political issues, the study of Amharic and in supporting the Ethiopian monarchy (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). Livity means for Rastafari ‘living according to the strict principle of Rastafari’ (Edmonds, 2003: 60). According to Yawney and Homiak during the 1950s and 1960s some Rastafari started to link Livity to the Biblical ‘Nazarite-like code of separation from wider society’ (2001: 261), while other simply referred to it as a ‘natural way of life’. Indeed, Livity ‘refers to the daily life practice of Rastafari’, thus many Rastafari do not perceive their practices as religious but as Livity, ‘contending that Rastafari is a way of life informed by theocratic principle’ (Yawney and Homiak, 2001: 257). This theocratic principle is based on the claim that the divinity ‘Jah Rastafari’ is the only leader. Hence, Livity is characterised by diverse norms and religious practices followed by Rastafari with the attempt to create a sort of fixity. However, these practices are far from being homogeneous in Rastafari everyday life. In fact, as Salter underlines, Livity is the Rastafari ‘practical relationship to the world’ which ‘resonates with the term lived religion’ and is always related and adapted to the context (2020: 134). 2.2.4 Rastafari practices Ital Food Ital refers to Rastafari food practices which requires Rastafari to consume those things ‘that are in their natural state’ (Barrett, 1988: 141). The Rastafari diet could be seen as quite rigid. For example, it is forbidden to eat meat which is considered ‘injurious to the body’ (Barrett, 1988: 140); food has to be cooked without salt, it should not be processed and only coconut oil should be used. Ital food refers to natural products such as vegetables and fruit, while coffee and milk are taboo (Barrett, 1988). Rastafari believe that through eating Ital food, any human can feel divine energy, reconnect with nature and return to a spiritual and mental state called ‘natural 60 mystic’. Moreover, Rastafari do not generally use mainstream medicine but instead use traditional herbal mixtures to cure illnesses (Barrett, 1988). Today, not all Rastafari eat purely Ital food or follow strict diets such as avoiding alcohol and tobacco. Dreadlocks The origin of the adoption of dreadlocks by Rastafari is disputed. According to Lee (2003), Rastafari started to wear locks at the Pinnacle community due to the presence within the community of Indian Saddhus. Campbell (1987) has a different view, claiming that the adoption of dreadlocks by Rastafari was an imitation of the hairstyle of the Mau-Mau, who led the fight for freedom in Kenya against British colonialism. Mastalia and Pagano (1999) take a different view suggesting that, because since the fifth century Bahetowie priests of the Ethiopian Coptic Church had been locking their hair, Rastafari copied their style. Other Rastafari supports the idea that dreadlocks were introduced into Rastafari by the Black Youth Faith in 1949 (see the section on Leadership and Organisations). According to Nettleford informants, ‘the men of Dreadlocks first began to appear in Kingston around 1947’ (1960: 9). Rastafari rely also on Biblical resources for what concern the wearing of the Dreadlocks such as Number 6:5, Leviticus 21:5 and Ezekiel 44:20.16 Besides the various historical and Biblical reasons for the adoption of dreadlocks, it is clear that for Rastafari they have both religious and political significance. This hairstyle was adopted by Rastafari not only as a religious duty but also as a political symbol of resistance to 16 Number 6:5, ‘All the days of the vow of his separation there shall no razor come upon his head: until the days be fulfilled, in the which he separates himself unto the LORD, he shall be holy and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow.’ Leviticus 21:5, ‘They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh.’ Ezekiel 44:20, ‘Neither shall they shave their heads, nor suffer their locks to grow long; they shall only poll their heads.’ 61 colonialism (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). Dreadlocks have multiple levels of significance for Rastafari, ‘aesthetically, ideologically and spiritually’ (Edmonds, 2003: 59). As Edmonds (2003) explains, the wearing of dreadlocks aesthetically signifies the Rastafari rejection of Babylon’s (or Western) definition of beauty. He also suggests that ideologically dreadlocks denote the Rastafari commitment to a natural life because the hair is allowed to grow freely and is never cut. Furthermore, spiritually they are regarded as holy and powerful because they can be used as an instrument (receptor) of telepathic communication with Jah (Yawney and Homiak, 2001; Edmonds, 2003). Today, dreadlocks are worn by people worldwide as a symbol of Rastafari identity, African unity and also as a political hairstyle representing left-wing political sympathies. Marijuana (ganja) Although in this thesis I did not focus on marijuana usage, I think it’s important to acknowledge its use among Rastafari. I chose consciously to avoid this topic because smoking marijuana is illegal in Britain. As reported by Barrett, Rastafari seems to have started to use marijuana as a religious practice during the early days of the movement at the Pinnacle (1988: 128) and as stated by Lee, probably influenced by the many Jamaican Hindus who joined the Pinnacle community (Lee, 2003). Although some Rastafari are against the use of marijuana, for others smoking ganja is a holy sacrament. Rastafari consumption of ganja is considered by some to be pivotal to Rastafari spiritual practice of ‘achieving personal divine inspiration’ (Yawney and Homiak, 2001: 264). According to Yawney, smoking marijuana ‘induces a visionary state which facilitates transcending Babylon’s categories, boundaries and returning home to the reality of Jah’ (1978:169). According to Mastalia and Pagano, for ‘Rastas, a burning pipe of ganja is a sweet, sacrificial cup, akin to the Christian communion chalice’ (1999: 13). 62 Life and Death Some Rastafari believes in reincarnation, and it is for this reason that many hold the belief that Haile Selassie is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. However, as reported by Nettleford (et al., 1960), they have different views on this subject. Some believe for example, that men and women are reincarnated through the male line, while others do not believe in reincarnation at all. Yet, some Rastafari do not believe in death, as they affirm ‘only the evil of the earth dies’ referring to the Biblical passage in Romans 6:23 (Barrett, 1988: 112). Within Rastafari, there are no fixed ways to celebrate rites of passage such as birth, marriage and death. For instance, while for some Rastafari as the Twelve Tribes there is no problem to participate in a funeral; for other groups as the Nyabinghi, it is forbidden because the corpses are believed to be spiritually impure and pollute the soul. Rastafari Books The first book regarding the early ideas and theology of Rastafari is the Promise Key written by Howell in 1935 (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). The ideas expressed in the book include ‘the concepts of Black Supremacy, theocracy and the Solomonic dynasty’ (Yawney and Homiak, 2001: 260). The book also introduced the symbolic opposition between Zion and Babylon which were imagined politically as ‘two opposed domains ruled over by Emperor Selassie I and the Pope of Rome’ (Yawney and Homiak, 2001: 260). In fact, ‘as a voice for irate Africans against Italian aggression in Ethiopia, the book launched an assault on Italy’s Papacy’ (Murrell, 2010: 291). Furthermore, to Rastafari the most precious source of information and book is the Kebra Nagast. The Kebra Nagast was compiled during the ‘late thirteenth or early fourteenth century C.E. and convey two basic themes: the descent of Ethiopian Kings from Solomon and the 63 Queen of Sheba and the transfer of the Jewish ark of the covenant to Ethiopia by Menelik I’ (Chisholm, 1998: 168). This book testifies to Rastafari, Haile Selassie Davidic lineage and that Ethiopia is Zion. However, the most important and consulted book among Rastafari is the Bible, although not every Rasta read it and the interpretations of the various passages vary. Different Bibles are adopted among the diverse Rastafari mansions, notably the King James Bible and the Coptic Bible. Rastafari uses the Bible as a guidebook about their history which they say is a modern-day replication of the ancient Israelite exodus (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). Biblical history is read allegorically and symbolically. This is visible through the adoption in dreadtalk of Biblical terms and symbols such as Babylon or Zion. However, Rastafari also stress orality which represents a choice to seek an autonomous intellectual space against any Babylonian archive (Bedasse, 2017: 7). Days of observance The most important day of observance among Rastafarians is the Sabbath, starting every Friday at sunset and ending on Saturday at the same time (Smith et al., 1960), exactly as is in Judaism and Islam. Rastafari days of observance are generally linked to the Ethiopian Coptic Calendar which is commonly used among them. Rastafarian holy days are: the Ethiopian Christmas (7th of January); the anniversary of Haile Selassie’s visit to Jamaica (21st of April); African Liberation Day (26th of May); Selassie’s Birthday (23rd of July); the Ethiopian New year (11th of September); the anniversary of Selassie’s coronation (2nd of November); and the anniversary of slave emancipation in the British West Indies (1st of August) (Edmonds, 2003; Chevannes, 1994; Yawney and Homiak, 2001). 64 Gender Rastafari was born as a patriarchal movement mostly influenced by Revivalist Christian tendencies. Even though Rastafari is patriarchal, there is a strong emphasis on egalitarianism which is expressed by the fact that among each other they call themselves brother and sister or InI (Yawney and Homiak, 2001). However, the emphasis on egalitarianism amongst Rastafari is expressed more in rhetoric than in practice. In fact, while on the one hand, there are Rastafari mansions where the role of women is central and important to ritual practices, on the other hand, there are mansions where women are excluded from key rituals or are separated from men during worship and Reasoning. Dunkley (2021) in his book, Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement, reclaims the voices of women and their experiences during the early years of the movement at the Pinnacle, by uncovering their resistance to male domination and colonial societal opposition to their Rastafari identity. However, within modern society, and in recent decades, Rastafari women have more freedom of expression and have started to occupy leadership roles. This is mirrored in the recent rise of Rastafari women voices and activities. One of the most well-known globally Rastafari woman is Barbara Makeda Blake. She is the first Rastafari woman to be elected in the Jamaican parliament and she has written many books about the Rastafari way of life and philosophy. Furthermore, other Rasta women are involved in Rastafari knowledge production and Rastafari studies, such as Giulia Bonacci or Imani Tafari-Ama. The article written by Alhassan, ‘This Movement is Not About Man Alone’ highlights the progressive position of Rastafari women nowadays. She also underlines the lack of a balanced gender narrative within academic research and calls on academics to start to analyse Rastafari from women’s prospectives, which would change the way elements such as ‘Livity are conceptualised’ (2020: 9). According to Rowe, Rastafari women are recently challenging ‘some of the key dress codes and 65 guidelines…now many Rasta women are wearing their locks uncovered when in public, and they are wearing trousers [some play the drums]. This would be almost unthinkable thirty years ago’ (2012: 189). Furthermore, in recent years there is a new emphasis within the movement toward Empress Menen, Selassie’s wife. For example, the Rastafari greetings and prayers’ openings incorporate today also the name of Empress Menen beside Selassie I. I will expand the discussion about gender and Rastafari on section 4.2.1. Reggae Music Even though reggae is considered amongst Rastafari to be their music, among traditional groups the original Rastafari music is known as Nyabinghi drumming. There is an open debate within the movement concerning this matter. While reggae music conveys the political aims and values of Rastafari, it is Nyabinghi drumming and chanting that accompanies religious or spiritual activities. Nevertheless, Rastafari believes that reggae music is the tool through which people are restored to self-awareness, the medium through which people learn the truth about the system under which they live and the instrument through which poor people express their frustrations (Edmonds, 2003). Many consider reggae as a musical and mystical weapon to be used against ‘oppressors and Babylon’s agents’ (Edmonds, 2003: 110). Not all reggae artists are committed to Rastafari beliefs and practices, many are just artists and supporters dressed in Rastafari style. However, their lyrics are ‘saturated with Rastafarian perspectives and clothed in Rastafarian ideological language’ (Edmonds, 2003: 111) which have spread the Rastafari message worldwide. Reggae music is the primary source for the globalisation and glocalisation of Rastafari. 66 3.0 Literature Review Introduction This chapter dedicated to the literature review is composed of four parts. Part one will focus on debates about hybridity, syncretism, and bricolage. I will highlight how these terms have been used to frame religions in two categories, pure and hybrid, and I explain why I favour creolisation. Authors such as Canclini (1990), Balutansky and Sourieau (1998), Hanke (2008), McGuire (2008), and Schmidt (2023), contest the usage of terms such as hybridity and syncretism within academic discourse arguing it is a continuation of colonial oppression. As such, it is pivotal to create a new and decolonial view of religious identities which deconstruct Western binary oppositions such as savage/civilised; pure/hybrid; traditional/modern. Consequently, through the work of Du Bois (1903), Hall (1990), Gilroy (1993) and Fanon (1967) later I will highlight the cultural Western construction about the ‘Other’ and its psychological effect on the development of Caribbean cultural and religious identities through Du Bois’s idea of ‘double consciousness’. Theories about cultural representation i.e., Clifford and Marcus (1986) and decolonisation i.e., Smith (2021) with which I will engage in my methodology chapter, highlight that decolonisation is essential in religious studies (but not limited to it) to reevaluate cultures, experiences and to challenge Western hierarchical practices in the representation of Others. In part two, I will continue by explaining why I favour the concept of creolisation, developed and applied by Hannerz (1987), Bauman (1991), Eriksen (2003) and Cohen (2007) as a key concept central to the understanding of global and glocal Rastafari identities, performances and creativities. This concept is pivotal to this research in the light that traditions, cultures and religious identities are neither pure nor stable, but constantly influenced and 67 differentiated by local contextual, diasporic and transnational creative, subjective experiences. Furthermore, creolisation takes into consideration the cultural and religious lived reality of people such as their context, language, materiality (i.e., food, objects) and embodied practices. This concept meshes with the notion of lived religion which, as I will show below and in my methodology chapter, is an important tool to decolonise religious studies because it attends not only to the study of religious hegemonic institutions, but to the complex and creative cultural motion which involves ordinary people in their everyday lives. Considering that the creation of new identities within processes of globalisation is a vital point in this research, part three will focus on theories concerning transnational and diasporic religions in the era of globalisation. Through the work of Olmos and Gebert (2003), Henke et al. (2008), Tweed (2006), Schmidt (2008) and Matory (2009), I will explore these dimensions of Rastafari and their implication in processes of glocalisation. As will be shown in the fieldwork chapters, while on the one hand some Rastafari are involved in performances related to strategic essentialism in the creation, development or preservation of their identities and as agent of decolonisation, on the other hand, other Rastafari rely on performances of strategic creolisation to create, preserve and decolonise their identities within processes of glocalisation. This part will highlight also how processes of glocalisation are instrumental for the development of new Rastafari creole identities. Part four will acknowledge Rastafari in its current position as a lived religion and more specifically its relationship with glocalisation and therefore, its re-configuration in contexts outside Jamaica. This section will focus on and compare previous literature on diasporic and transnational Rastafari, based on the work of Hepner in the USA (1998), Hansing in Cuba 68 (2006) and my fieldwork conducted in Israel in 2014, prior to the inception of this research project. 3.1 Caribbean religious identities and critical terms In order to study African Caribbean religious identities in their diasporic and transnational manifestations, it is important to participate in the debate within academia concerning contested terms such as hybridity, syncretism, bricolage and double consciousness. The use of these words/concepts within academic narratives have tended to assume the existence of ‘pure’ and ‘finished’ objects of religion and culture. Scholars of African Caribbean religions often have found themselves obliged to deal with these concepts in order to define or capture the creativity and complexity of Caribbean’s religious identities. Consequently, in this thesis I argue that concepts such as syncretism and hybridity must be avoided by Caribbean or religious scholars in general for the following reasons. Firstly, these terms seem to assume the existence of pure religions, cultures or identities; secondly, they create a space where colonial discourses of purity can still circulate; thirdly, they limit a deep and real understanding of religious identities, religions as lived in their complexity and creativity. I will analyse these concepts to demonstrate how they are able to create cultural dominant binary oppositions that hierarchically classify religions and identities in the academy and in the popular imagination and propose alternatives for understanding religious identities and lived realities and experiences in all their complexity. 3.1.1. Hybridity and Syncretism African Traditional Caribbean religions have been for a long time considered and classified as mestizaje, hybrid or syncretic. As such they fitted within the parameters of 69 Western hegemonic discourse concerning the ‘Other’. In this and the next section, I will highlight how the Western employment of certain specific concepts and discourses was able to create an imaginary of ‘Other’ cultures, identities and religions, in order to construct and maintain Western cultural supremacy and purity. As I will show, this narrative impacted psychologically and culturally on Caribbean people. Let’s begin by analysing the term hybridity which has haunted Caribbean religions as much as other terms such as mestizaje and syncretism. In his book Hybrid cultures Canclini (1990) employed the term hybrid to describe Caribbean religions, in order to reject the term ‘mestizaje and syncretism because the first one refers only to racial mixture and the latter characterises the mixing of religious or tradition symbolic movements’ (Schmidt, 2008: 95). Therefore, these are unsatisfactory terms to use in the study of Caribbean religions as they imply racial and homogeneous boundaries. By replacing these terms with ‘hybridity,’ he wanted to include in his description of African Caribbean religions the intercultural and modern forms and mixtures and the ‘simultaneous existence of homogeneous and heterogeneous trajectories’ (Schmidt, 2008: 102). However, the term hybridity wrongly suggests the prior existence of a pure religion or tradition, when in reality religions and cultures have always been in motion, adapting and changing as they go. In fact, the violent encounter of African traditional religions and Christianity in the Caribbean led to the formation of new Caribbean religious identities through the amalgamation of heterogeneous religions that clashed in the Americas (Schmidt, 2023: 130). Furthermore, as highlighted by Schmidt, the term syncretism also raises the issue of representation. She states, ‘another misleading problem with the concept of syncretism is that it implies a hierarchical order of one dominant and pure religion (i.e. Christianity) and other secondary impure traditions (i.e. Indigenous religions)’ (2023: 130). Likewise, Olmos and 70 Gebert underlines that, ‘the identification of Creole religions as “syncretic” is problematical and disparaging: there is a Euro-centric bias in limiting the definition to non-European religions, negating their full legitimacy’ (2003: 7). The use of this term led to the persistent ‘rhetorical division between “pure” faiths and illicit or “contaminated” syncretic belief systems’ (2003: 8). Critically reflecting on the terms and concepts that populate academic discourse is essential to decolonise religious studies and avoid superficial and homogenous binary oppositions. As highlighted by Balutansky and Sourieau, The cultural, political, and literary discourse about Caribbean identity…had almost limited itself to binary opposites: white/black, master/slave, civilised/primitive etc... this dynamic was embedded in Europe’s academic rhetoric of identity. Europe’s obsession with linear origins, and especially with “being” a stable category of integrity and purity, resulted directly from its concept of ethnic difference and racial classification as well as from his sense of a God-given right to dominate the inferior “Other” (2017: 3). As highlighted by scholars such as Canclini (1990), Balutansky and Sourieau (1998), Henke (2008), McGuire (2008), and Schmidt (2023), the usage of terms/concepts such as hybridity and syncretism within the academy and the main cultural Western narrative related to Caribbean religious identities, is a continuation of the colonial discourse (Schmidt, 2023). For instance, Bhabha describes hybridity as a ‘sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities…the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority)’ (Bhabha 1985: 154-155). Long (1986) argues that these terms fail to recognise the creative sphere of humanity, specifically of African Caribbean 71 religions which developed as a form of resistance and survival during enslavement to reverse the master-slave narrative. 3.1.2 Bricolage The concept of religious bricolage introduced by Lévi-Strauss (1962) and adopted by Bastide (1970), Schmidt (2023), and McGuire (2008) is a functional tool to apply to the study of Caribbean religions. While Lévi-Strauss uses this term as a metaphor to describe ‘the mythical thinking of traditional society’ (Schmidt, 2023: 146), the following authors employ the term as a metaphor to describe the creativity and complexity behind the formation of Caribbean religious identities. For instance, Bastide (1970) uses the term bricolage in his work on Caribbean religions to highlight the process of cultural transformation that happened during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He argues that ‘bricolage illustrates the changes to the collective memory due to the transplantation of people during the slave trade, the opposition during the time of slavery and the adaptation of Africans in the Americas’ (Bastide, 1970: 100). It is important to highlight, once again, that Caribbean religions are an Atlantic creation developed during four hundred years of encounter, cultural clash and physical and psychological violence in particular (but not only) between Africans, Indigenous people and Europeans. In fact, in the Caribbean context, bricolage occurred not only through the exercise of individual choice but in the context of colonialism. Schmidt underlines that applying the term ‘bricolage’ to African Caribbean religions emphasises the fact that they are ‘the result of creativity and innovation’ (2023: 132). She states that ‘adding elements from different traditions helped to fill the gaps created by the brutality of the slave trade by preserving the collective memory while…reacting to the new environment and local influences’ (2023: 132). Therefore, while hybridity ‘implies a notion of purity and hierarchy, bricolage highlights continuity, creativity and change…reflecting the power of human imagination’ (Schmidt, 2023: 132-133). As McGuire 72 points out, religious bricolage is a valuable conceptual tool for scholars of religions because it ‘highlights the degree of agency ordinary people exercise in the construction of their lived religions’ (McGuire, 2008: 196) although once again, it is important to highlight that individual agency and creativity were not part of Lévi-Strauss’s thinking when he developed the term. 3.2 The Creation and Creolisation of Caribbean Identities 3.2.1 Cultural, social and psychological factors The creation and development of religious identities in the Caribbean have been strongly influenced by colonialism and slavery, not only religiously and politically but also culturally, socially and psychologically. Studies conducted by Roberts (2008) underline that the Caribbean cultural melting pot and its relationship with slavery and colonial rule have had social and psychological effects on Caribbean people and the development of their identities. As Adorno emphasised, the establishment by the European colonisers of a West and an Orient created a social hierarchy permitting ‘the establishment and fixing of the frontiers of identity’ (Adorno, 1988: 66). According to Said, Orientalism ‘an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and…the Occident’ (1985: 2) is a discursive formation, because of the regularity with which statements about the East and its peoples, societies and religions reproduce the dominance and superiority of the West over and against the Orient. As such, Said defines Orientalism in the following way, Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analysed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, 73 authorising views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said 1985:3). According to Fanon (1967), the internalisation of putative inferiority created by the West fashioned a ‘black prototype’ which developed within the black community as a sort of psychological inferior, which is still visible today. In his book Black Skin White Masks (1967), Fanon emphasised that the idea of ‘blackness’ is based on the Western negative metanarrative and attitude toward ‘black’ or generally the ‘other’, which proliferated for over four hundred years, and which had social and psychological effects on the whole black community, especially in the development of their identities. Western denigration of blackness accompanied with the violence of the slave trade, created a ‘dependency complex’ within the psychology of colonised people (Fanon, 1967). During the colonial period, people were forced to find new ways to deal with the new social, political, economic, and violent contexts in which they had been forcibly transported as slaves. Accordingly, while Black people today may have greater economic and political power and opportunities than in the past, this is arguably and sadly only achieved by emulating Western manners or adopting Western bodily tendencies (Fanon, 1967). However, as I will be show in chapter 7, Rastafari develop a strong resistance toward this attitude, by reversing this tendency by embracing African bodily practices and aesthetics. Furthermore, to understand the fashioning and development of Caribbean identities, it is important to consider the Caribbean as a creole space comprising of multiple and complex identities generated by centuries of European, Indigenous and African clashes and connections in the New World. The result of this multicultural encounter is what Gilroy called the Black Atlantic (1993). In his work, Gilroy saw the Atlantic as a space for cultural exchange and as a 74 web or network of connections between Africa, the Caribbean, America and Europe which continued over centuries. Du Bois (1903) and subsequently Hall (1990) underlined that from the onset of the slave trade to today, African people forced by the surrounding context of slavery and colonialism, developed what has been called ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois, 1903; Hall, 1990), which could be defined as a sort of imposed double identity. According to Du Bois (1903), ‘double consciousness’ can create new and complex identities. As Hall noticed, ‘we cannot speak for long, about “one experience, one [Black] identity”, without acknowledging its other side – the ruptures and discontinuities which constitute, precisely, the Caribbean’s “uniqueness”’ (Hall, 1990: 225). 3.2.2 Caribbean and trans-Caribbean Creolisation Although the concept of ‘double consciousness’ and bricolage, are useful words/concepts for researchers, in my view they limit the understanding behind the creativity, complexity and motion of Caribbean religious identities, to the point that they will be better replaced by the concepts of creolisation and creolised identities. The etymology of the word creole comes from the Latin word creare (create) or to create ‘anew’ (Cohen 2007). According to Olmos and Gebert, creolization ‘which is the malleability and mutability of various beliefs and practices as they adapt to new [local] understanding of class, race, gender, power, labour and sexuality- is one of the most significant phenomena in Caribbean religious history’ (2003: 4). Furthermore, recent sociological studies concerning globalisation undertaken by scholars such as Hannerz (1987), Bauman (1991), Eriksen (2003) and Cohen (2007), emphasised that we are living in a ‘creolised world’. According to these scholars, the word creole can be used to address the complexity, development and motion of the Caribbean’s cultural and religious identities. In fact, notwithstanding, this term can be applied also to Mediterranean identities (which are involved in this thesis) and their history of perpetual cultural motion. Cohen (2007) 75 explains that identities take different forms within processes of globalisation, these are classified as pure, hyphenated and creole. Eriksen (2003) argues, ‘whereas pure identities draw boundaries around one culture and hyphenated identities around two creole identities represent a degree of mixing that has reached a point where it is no longer possible to talk of hyphens and boundaries’ (2003: 23). In recent decades, scholars have created three paradigms to explain how cultural and social processes of globalisation are impacting societies and therefore, religious identities. Robertson (1992) stressed that through processes of globalisation, cultures could now see themselves in relation to other cultures and to a global whole. A second paradigm was raised by Tomlinson (1999) who stressed the ‘deterritorialization and intoxication’ of culture. This means that it is not possible anymore to perceive or study cultures within the limit of national borders, or as authentic and pure, because through social processes of globalisation, cultures are constantly influencing each other and recreating themselves. The third paradigm supported by Pieterse (2004) is what particularly concerns this research, namely creolisation. This means that people’s cultural and religious identities are involved in a constant process of cultural, creative renovation and recreation. However, amongst scholars there are different views regarding the effect of the third paradigm on societies and cultural identities. Eriksen (2003) for example, analyses and compares the works of S. Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul. She explains that, while on the one hand, writers such as Rushdie have a positive view of globalisation and see it as a catalytic social process which is giving life to many social creative formations; on the other hand, Naipaul argues that globalisation is bringing homogenization and destroys any monolithic form of culture and tradition. According to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, by the nature of the universe everything is created, nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed (550 BCE). 76 Heraclitus’ view could also easily be applied to these new sociological theories concerning the creolisation of religious identities in the era of globalisation. Yet, what may differ now from Heraclitus’ time is the potential of a global creolisation through the use and consumption of new global technologies. Cohen (2007) inspired by sociolinguistic studies in creole languages, proposed the use of creole as a sociological category. He suggested that this will allow scholars to include in their studies ‘all population groups including later migrant arrivals in addition to the original trichotomy (the colonial, Creole and indigene)’ (Cohen 2007: 379). Furthermore, scholars such as Henke et. al (2008) have tried to grip the complexity of African Caribbean religious identities in a trans-Caribbean space (i.e. Puerto Rico, Guyana, New York, Surinam, and the Netherlands), by emphasising that those identities develop and are constantly produced within two different spaces, the metropolitan space inhabited and lived, as well as the romanticized, imagined and colonialized homeland, in the Caribbean. Transnational Caribbean Religious identities and their cultural/vernacular performances are informed and influenced by the here and there (the Caribbean), past (colonial) and present (post-colonial), homogeneity and heterogeneity at the same time. Henke explains that the ‘Caribbean “transnational nationalism” constructs new expressions of familiar, communal, and national belonging, and a deterritorialized understanding of nation’ (Henke, 2008: xv). Matory unfolds this point by emphasising that devotees of Caribbean religions have ‘understood themselves as the simultaneous inhabitants of multiple nations, some territorial and some transoceanic’ (2009: 233) and therefore, embracing simultaneously multiple cultures. This highlights the degree of creolisation which crosses over binary oppositions and demonstrates that Caribbean identities have also transoceanic cultural dimensions, touching, even if only in imaginative and creative ways, lands such as Africa, China, and India. 77 However, in order to understand the complexity of Caribbean vernacular culture in the era of globalisation, Schmidt employ the concept of ‘polyphonic bricolage’, which takes into consideration the heterogeneity of migrating nations and cultures, and the diversity and creativity of trans-Caribbean models in different metropolitan spaces, such as ‘Caribbean New York’ and ‘Caribbean London’ (2008: 28). Nevertheless, this concept is limited applied to diasporic communities and does not take full consideration of people external to Caribbean culture who are embracing it, i.e. Rastafari in Italy. As Henke stresses, ‘Popular cultures of music, religion, and language are evidence of the deterritorialization of the Caribbean and have the potential to influence and transform the global imaginary and to articulate enduring affiliations with local cultures of resistance’ (2008: xx). Therefore, in this research, I privileged the word ‘creole identities’ which is a term that encompasses not only space and time but also cultures and nations. This implies that Caribbean religions are not only trans-temporal and trans-local (Tweed, 2006), but also trans-cultural by being characterised as boundarylessness and therefore, overcoming national, religious, linguistic and vernacular borders. As Bhabha underlines, in the ‘Creole world’ a dynamic ‘third space’ emerges, ‘the act of cultural translation... [which] denies the essentialism of a prior given or original culture’ (1990: 210), showing that all forms of culture are in a continuous process of creolisation and motion. Motion, therefore, is what characterises a creole world and religious identities. The first to recognise the process of creolisation which involves African Caribbean religions was Brathwaite in 1974. He understood the middle passage as a ‘pathway or channel between this [African] tradition and what is being evolved, on new soil, in the Caribbean’ (1974: 5). Rojo assesses that, ‘creolization is not merely a process but a discontinuous series of recurrences, of happenings, whole sole law is change’ (2017: 55). Therefore, creolised religious identities are the outcome of processes of creolisation, acts of translation that involve 78 constant and creative change from one kind of identity to another. As Balutansky and Sourieau stress, ‘Creolisation is thus defined as a syncretic process of transverse dynamics that endlessly reworks and transforms the cultural patterns of varied social and historical experiences and identities’ (2017: 3). Holmos and Gebert underline that in this era of globalisation this term is even more crucial to ‘reframe notions of past and present transnational and diasporic cultures and communities’ (2003: 6). 3.2.3 Lived Creole religions A way to decolonise and de-essentialise religious studies and understand the complexity of Creole religious identities is through the practice of studying religions as lived. As McGuire highlights it is misleading to represent any religious tradition as unitary, unchanging, or pure (2008). As McGuire suggests, the making of a religion is a creative process ‘that people may engage in as they go about their everyday lives’ (McGuire, 2008: 196) and this is perhaps particularly true of Caribbean religions. According to McGuire, in order to understand modern religious lives, ‘we need to try to grasp the complexity, diversity and fluidity of real individuals’ religion-as-practised in the context of their everyday lives’ (McGuire, 2008: 213). As stated by Ammerman, by looking at lived experiences instead of looking at hierarchical religious institutions ‘those voices that come from the margins (immigrants, women, Black, indigenous) can be heard’ (2016:84). The study of lived religions allows us to better understand ‘what religion is and when it occurs’ (Ammerman, 2016: 84). Ammerman underlines that lived religions often ‘may not coincide with institutionalized or collective definitions of the sacred…[and] it may not be focused on beliefs [or institutionalised definition of beliefs] at all’ (2016: 87). Religion, in this case, becomes ‘what individuals choose on their own authority’ (Ammerman, 2016: 88) or in Rastafari terms a subjective ‘way of life’ often not associated 79 with religious institutions, but related to cultural and personal-contextual and contingent historical experiences. As such, the study of lived religion is characterised by a bottom-up approach which goes beyond institutional religiosity and which is essential to the decolonisation of religious studies, due to its ability to provide space and voice to experiences and knowledge from the global South. 3.3 Transnational and Diasporic Religions Religions in order to be globalised have to be flexible and transportable in their practices and messages (Csordas, 2009). Through the mediation of reggae music, new technology and migration, Rastafari has become a global transportable movement. The use and adoption of symbolism and reggae music made Rastafari a portable practice with a portable message, available worldwide within the ‘spiritual global market.’ It is through the spread of reggae (sound), the usage of the dreadtalk (words), Christian, Judaic, Egyptian and Ethiopian symbols, objects, images, as well as through symbolic strategies and soft powers that Rastafari have revitalized and reinforced their identity (Edmonds, 2003) as a worldwide lived religion. Once localised, the movement changes absorbing and adapting to local culture, history and identity. Therefore, Rastafari within social processes of globalisation can be considered both as a diasporic as much as a transnational religion or movement. However, recent academic studies have shown that transnational and diasporic religions develop in different and diverse ways. There are clear distinctions and differences between a religion in its indigenous context and in its transnational and diasporic expression and space. There is a necessity to distinguish between diasporic and transnational Rastafari. This distinction will be used to highlight the diverse historical and cultural backgrounds which 80 characterised Rastafari development out of Jamaica. Nevertheless, according to Vasquez, ‘the distinction between global, transnational and diasporic religions discourses, practices and institutions can only be heuristic, serving to provide more finely tuned tools for studying the different modalities which mobile religions assume’ (2008: 165). Although the distinction between local, transnational, and diasporic religions is important for the development of generalised comparative analysis in religious studies, it must be sensitive to the particularisation which takes place once a religion localises. Therefore, although I am distinguishing diasporic from transnational Rastafari as two distinctive categories to create a framework for my research, the term glocalism and the study of Rastafari glocalisation will highlight what happen at the crossroads, when and where the global and the local meet. The ‘Cultural creolisation’ of the world (Olmos and Gebert, 2003: 6) is a fact that cannot be neglected anymore. As stated by Glissant, ‘we must accustom our minds to these new world structures, in which the relationship between the centre and the periphery will be completely different. Everything will be central, and everything will be peripheral’ (2000) or, in other words, everything will be global, and everything will be local that is, glocal, from now on. 3.3.1 Diasporic Religions According to Vasquez, people in the diaspora often seek to preserve a distinctive identity ‘vis-à-vis the receiving society’ (2008: 161). This tendency seems to link people in the diaspora ‘to the homeland through desire, the unfulfilled longing for a paradise lost and the utopian dream of a future return to mythic origin’ (Vasquez, 2008: 161-162). The Rastafari feeling of being a diasporic religious movement since its inception, in light of their deportation from Africa, can be understood by Johnson’s definition of diasporic groups. According to Johnson (2007:31), diasporic people have the following tendencies: ‘dispersion from an original homeland’, in this case, perceived by Rastafari as Africa and Ethiopia, through the slave trade; ‘collective memory 81 of the homeland’, which for Rastafari is Ethiopia or Africa; ‘maintenance of ties with the homeland’, which is visible through the Rastafari predisposition for repatriation to Africa; and ‘an ongoing experience of difference with the new place of belonging’ which is visible in numerous practices such as dread talk. However, as Vasquez underlines, although diaspora shares a good deal with transnationalism, the former is trans-temporal and thus based on a kind of communitarian imagination that links past, present and future, creating a ‘mythical status’ (Vasquez, 2008: 162-163). For instance, diasporic Rastafari tend to recreate their history, culture, and identities by looking to African traditions, some of them identifying as Israelites, others as Ethiopians, other as Kemit, relying on an imaginative mythology to reconstruct and re-create their lost identities disrupted during the Transatlantic slave trade. This feeling to be part of the African diaspora is shared amongst the Caribbean and it is part of Caribbean identity. As highlighted by Hall, in the Caribbean everybody ‘comes from somewhere else’ (Hall, 1995: 6). Furthermore, according to Olmos and Gebert, ‘the complex dynamics of encounters, adaptations, assimilation, and syncretism that we call creolization are emblematic of the vibrant nature of diasporic cultures’ (2003:3). According to the authors, ‘the diasporic condition which is so fundamentally Caribbean is today a global concern, linking, through the encounter of peoples and cultures engaged in transnational movement, the ongoing (re)construction of identities that is itself a form of global creolization’ (2003: viii). This is not the first research about diasporic Caribbean religion. Other scholars such as Tweed (1997), Schmidt (2008), Henke (2008), to nominate some, have focused their studies on Caribbean diasporic religious identities outside the Caribbean. 82 3.3.2 Transnational Religions Rastafari transnationalism is acquired not through a re-imagination of a lost past as happens within the diaspora, but through mediatisation, which as Csordas (2009) stresses, is pivotal to globalisation, glocalisation and the spread of religious beliefs and practices worldwide. Mediatisation could be considered to be the tool through which religions are globalised (Csordas, 2009:6) by connecting the local and the global and glocalise. During the last 50 years, Rastafari has become strongly mediatised and therefore, it has spread worldwide thanks to the internet, radio and television. However, according to Matory, within transatlantic religions, transnationalism also is not a new concept, although it is quite different from the Western liberal view of nations. In fact, among Caribbean religions there is the tendency to separate and define the different forms of Vodou or Santeria such as ‘Lucumi, Queto, Nago, Ijexa, Efa, Carabali, Congo, Jeje, Rada Arara’ and Rastafari as ‘nations’ (Matory, in Csordas, 2009: 232). 3.3.3 Glocalisation and Rastafari The phenomenon of glocalisation is a consequence and a product of globalization and it is understood as the ‘interconnection between the local and the global and their mutual dependence’ (Robertson, 1995: 173). According to Robertson (1992), in the global context, ‘global consciousness’ is characterised by the possession of two contradictory trends within the processes of globalization: universalisation and particularisation – or ‘glocalisation’ (Robertson, 1992). The term glocalisation is very important to debate about globalisation, because focus on the ‘local’, demonstrating that globalisation does not override the local (Robertson, 1992) and it is actually essential to study how the local influences the global. While studies of globalisation focus on global homogeneity, glocalisation studies focus on local, particular and subjective performances of adaptation and creativity. In a few words, glocalisation is the study of how cultures move globally and adapt to different local contingent 83 conditions and contexts (Robertson, 1992). I believe that both globalisation and glocalisation are not new phenomenon, but today easy access to global cultures and the new emphasis on the local and its particularisation are making these social processes more interesting to study within the academia. However, as stressed by Csordas, in order to glocalise a religion must have particular characteristics, such as ‘having portable practices, messages and flexibility’ (2009:5). He explains that the degree of glocalisation of any religion depends on the above factors. In his book Transnational Transcendence, Csordas explains that, [Portable practices are] rites that can be easily learned, require relatively little esoteric knowledge or paraphernalia, are not held as proprietary or necessary linked to a specific cultural context, and can be performed without commitment to an elaborate ideological or institutional apparatus (2009: 4). Rastafari, as is acknowledged in its Jamaican indigenous manifestation possesses a high degree of portable practices such as the sacred rituals of smoking ganja, veganism, dreadlocks hairstyle, or dancing and embracing reggae music. Csordas highlights that the degree of transposability or mobility depends on ‘the basis of appeal contained in religious tenets, premises or promises’ and to what extent it ‘can find footing across diverse linguistic and cultural settings’ (Csordas, 2009: 5). Therefore, the degree of transposability of a religious message depends on ‘its plasticity (transformability) or its generalization (universality)’ (Csordas, 2009: 5). Rastafari seems to embrace both of these two characteristics. In fact, in light of its transformable practices and universal messages of ‘one love’ and ‘equal rights and justice’, Rastafari is becoming one of the most global religious movements of our time, especially among ‘those who perceive themselves as suffering from oppression and 84 marginalisation’ (Edmonds, 2003: 3). Rastafari messages, artefacts and images spread globally but take on local meanings and significance as they adapt to local conditions. 3.4 Diasporic and Transnational Rastafari This thesis is not the first academic study concerning diasporic or glocal (transnational) Rastafari. However, although many scholars have investigated and analysed the complexity of this new lived religion and its local manifestations, this is the first comparative analysis concerning Rastafari as a lived religion in its diasporic and transnational dimensions. Previous studies focus mainly on the indigenous or transnational settings. There is plenty of literature, books and articles about Rastafari in Japan (Sterling, 2010), Africa (Savishinsky, 1998), Europe and the Pacific (Van Dijk, 1998), New Zealand (Douglas, in Barnett, 2012), Ethiopia (Niaah, in Barnett, 2012; Macleod, 2014; Bonacci, 2015), Tanzania (Bedasse, 2017), South America (Romero Contreras, 2011) and in Brazil (Decosmo, 2012). All these studies show the different ways in which Rastafari has been adopted in different contexts by people with very different historical and cultural backgrounds. However, while in the U.S.A., Rastafari has developed as a diasporic movement due to migration from Jamaica and the Caribbean islands, in Cuba and Israel, the movement developed through transnational mediation generated largely by reggae music and the development of new technologies such as the internet (I refer to Cuban Rastafari as transnational because although they are Caribbean, they embrace Rastafari through the mediation of music not through Jamaican immigration in the island). 3.4.1 A Concise Comparison In this section, I will give a general and concise comparison of Rastafari in New York (U.S.A.), Cuba and Israel to demonstrate how Rastafari enculturate, localise and glocalise. In the U.S.A., Rastafari is characterised by formal diasporic communities establishing various Rastafari churches (Hepner, 1998). In New York for example, there are several Rastafari churches 85 (mansions) such as the Church of Haile Selassie (CHSI), The Twelve Tribes of Israel (Queens), the Nyabinghi Order of Divine Theocracy (Brooklyn) and The Ethiopian Orthodox Church (Bronx) (Hepner, 1998). By contrast, the Cuban and Israeli Rastafari generally do not rely on any Rastafari institutions or leaders as happens in the CHSI of New York where Rastafari follow the prophet Asento Fox. According to Hepner, in the USA, Asento Fox paved the way for a ‘modernist reconfiguration of the traditional Rastafari’ (Hepner, 1998: 198). He underlines how ‘the character of contemporary change within the global movement makes it possible to distinguish an older, ‘traditional’ form of Jamaican Rastafari from the newer, congregational oriented and transplanted varieties of North America’ (Hepner, 1998: 208). Hepner’s statement is very important in order to understand the complexity of Rastafari as a lived religion in its diasporic dimensions, its localisation and adaptation to new contexts. This complexity is emphasised by the work of Hansing in Cuba. During her fieldwork, she realised that in Cuba Rastafari has been ‘Cubanised’ (2006: 64). In other words, in Cuba, Rastafari has been recreated, fashioned and transformed by local conditions. For instance, although Cuban Rastafari speaks Spanish, they also use dreadtalk in their conversations (Hansing, 2006). Furthermore, many of them tend to mix their local religious identity (Santeria) with Rastafari, creating new creolised identities, which leads to the creation of new Rastafari identities. Hansing remarks that in Cuba, most Rastafari have modified elements from Rastafari and mixed them ‘with elements from other cultural systems, whether they be religious, philosophical, popular or cultural’ (Hansing, 2006: 71). Their Rastafari identities are characterised mainly by their bodily practices such as the growing of dreadlocks, the displaying of the Ethiopian flag on shirts and hats among other things (Capparella, personal fieldwork notes, December 2010, Havana, unpublished). 86 Figure 10 Rastafari in Cuba (personal fieldwork) 2010 (My own picture, verbal consent). The flexibility or ‘alterity’ (Csordas, 2004) of Rastafari is perceptible also in the study of Israeli Rastafari. The fieldwork I conducted in March 2014 in Ashdod (Israel), during my master’s degree, revealed that the majority of Israeli Rastafari interviewed chose to embrace the movement because they found it more flexible than Judaism. Figure 11 Rastafari in Israel –working time in the farm (My own picture, verbal consent). 87 Unlike Cuban Rastafari, Israeli Rastafari found it easier to adopt Rasta’s Livity because as they put it, Livity is already part of their Judaic culture. Nevertheless, Rastafari in Israel considers not Ethiopia but Israel as the Holy Land to which they have been already repatriated. For them, repatriation has already happened. Within the Israeli movement, the idea of reparation is linked with the ending of the war between Israel and Palestine. As the fieldwork done in 2014 shows for Israeli Rastafari the war between Israel and Palestine is produced, supported and enforced by Babylon. Rastafari in Israel promote peace and hopes to be an example for both Israelis and Palestinians (Capparella, 2016). Therefore, while in the U.S.A., Rastafari developed resembling the Jamaican indigenous communities and in Cuba embracing diverse religious landscapes, in Israel many emphasise that while Judaism is their religion, Rastafari is their way of life. Rastafari in Israel express their Livity through farming, food, listening to reggae music and taking the view that only through a natural way of life people can achieve spiritual consciousness. 3.5 Chapter Outlines The remainder of the thesis is structured and divided into five chapters, beginning with the methodology chapter followed by three fieldwork chapters and a conclusion. The methodology chapter explains the various ways in which I attempted to decolonise this research and fieldwork practices. Firstly, I decided to start each fieldwork chapter with an African concept, respectively Nommo, Ashe and Sankofa to help bring out different elements of Rastafari social practices from their use of words and approaches to language, to their material culture. In this chapter, I develop a ‘Rastafari methodology’ in part drawn from ethnography but also from Rastafari social practices specifically InI, Reasoning and 88 overstanding. This chapter is my response to the call within the academia to decolonise research, in part by drawing on Rastafari and African concepts, ideas and social practices, but also by drawing from lived religion, privileging ordinary voices and experiences and by being alert to different forms of essentialism and its consequences. Furthermore, I draw on insider-outsider debates in tandem with debates about methods in relation to the marginalised knowledge of the global South to reflect on my positionality. I show that these research practices enabled me to position myself as a learner and a Rastafari supporter, it also assisted me in passing Rastafari testing, creating trust and long-lasting relationships. I will also highlight some of the difficulties I faced and how the research was impacted during the Covid pandemic which forced me to move the fieldwork online. I will also demonstrate that in hard times, hybrid fieldwork is an essential tool for networking and gathering data. In chapter five which is dedicated to Rastafari languaging, I worked with Nye’s (2000) concept of ‘religioning’ to explore different language performances from the dreadtalk to chanting, to naming practices in which language play creates new meanings linked to identity and decolonising itself, particularly among diasporic Rastafari in Britain. For these Rastafari, language is something malleable but also powerful and a means to create links to Jamaica, the Caribbean and Africa. However, among transnational Rastafari in Italy, language takes on a different weight. Transnational Rastafari look to Ethiopia and its religious traditions to establish their authenticity as Rastafari. They privilege Ge’ez as a pure language of religious truth and as a conduit to God. In chapter six, I explore Rastafari material culture from collections of objects in the homes of my research participants, to collections of objects in museums and libraries. I will analyse the implications of things in Rastafari identities, decolonisation and imaginaries of 89 Africa. In chapter seven I explore Rastafari embodied practices including the Nazirite vow, dreadlocks, Ital food, gardening and well-being in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. Across all three fieldwork chapters, my analysis demonstrates the extent to which diasporic and transnational Rastafari experience their relationships to one another and to Rastafari as a by turns fixed and flexible tradition of practice, seeking out sources of authenticity and authority in different ways and with different consequences. In the conclusion, I summarise the key insights of the thesis and explore avenues and opportunities for further research. I also emphasise the importance of comparative analysis between diasporic and transnational Rastafari, in order to understand its local manifestations and complexities. I highlight the necessity within academia to decolonise research methods and fieldwork practices. Ultimately, I suggest further research concerning Rastafari in the black Mediterranean, food banks, radios and other social networks, and on the use of Biblical references related to Livity practices. 4.0 Method in Motion Introduction This project was inspired by my personal interest towards the Rastafari movement, my previous BA and MA studies on Rastafari and globalisation, and a Rastafari exhibition held in London at the Black Cultural archives in 2016, called ‘Rastafari in motion’. In the light that I was close to start this research, and that through my MA studies I had become very interested in the glocalisation of Rastafari, the title of the exhibition really intrigued me, as the word ‘motion’ reflected my views about Rastafari being glocalised, and therefore, being in motion around the 90 globe. The exhibition was historically and culturally very interesting, however, I remember that the lack of recent recorded history within the exhibition inspired and enhanced my enthusiasm and willingness to pursue this research. As for every academic work, in order to start this research, I needed ethical approval from the HREC committee. I presented this project to HREC as a comparative analysis of Rastafari identities in Italy and in Britain, accompanied by the central question: To what extent are social processes of glocalisation creating new religious Rastafari identities in Italy and in Britain? The project was approved on the 9th of September 2017 by the HREC committee with the number 2913. My decision to compare these two contexts was dictated by my interest and passion toward the movement, but it was also a political and decolonial choice, considering that to Rastafari these locations represent Babylon’s spiritual and political power respectively. According to Rastafari, Britain represents the Western political hegemony which physically and mentally enslaved African people in the Caribbean, while Italy symbolizes the Vatican’s religious authority during the slave trade which obliged Africans in the Caribbean to convert to Christianity. Furthermore, Italy also represents Mussolini’s fascist colonial regime which from 1936-1941 occupied Ethiopia and which caused Haile Selassie’s exile to Britain and the death of millions of Ethiopians. When I presented the project, the research methodology was largely based on two forms of data-gathering. The first was conducting semi-structured interviews to gather qualitative data by asking interviewees open-ended questions, recorded by audio and video tools (see appendix). The second research method was participant observation (Smith, 2021; Hammersley, 1983). This methodology is used by researchers to gather qualitative data through personal participation in the informant’s life and life events. What is pivotal is that during 91 observations, the researcher ‘not only observes but also participates in what they are studying’ (Delamont 1975: 14). To gather data and de-essentialise Rastafari material everyday practices, part of my fieldwork was based on what Harvey (2011) called ‘immersive participant observation’. According to Harvey, researchers must achieve a form of familiarity and a more ‘participative and more experiential presence’ (Harvey, 2011: 220) with the people studied and with their activities in their social and private contexts. The researcher observes the participants’ activities, cultural practices and tries to understand what ‘they are up to’ (Geertz 1973: 13). This was achieved by observing, participating and reflecting on what Rastafari were doing, how they were involved in their bodies and emotions in what they were doing, the meaning that they give to their words and actions, and my overstanding of them (Harvey, 2011). The fieldwork started in September 2018 and ended in September 2020. I conducted fieldwork in London (and surrounding areas) with the diasporic movement mostly from January to December 2019. During this period, I interviewed twenty Rastafari of which only four were women. In contrast, while carrying out fieldwork in Italy between January to September 2020, I had the opportunity to interview thirty-seven Rastafari of which twelve were women. The quality of the data analysed, the degree of intimacy and empathy created, along with the quality of fieldwork, gave me more than enough data to complete this project. What follows are two charts, one about Rastafari in Britain (Chart 1), one about Rastafari in Italy (Chart 2), completed with the pseudonyms of my participants, their ages, gender, nationalities, Rastafari house to which they belong to, their occupations, the place visited, and the interview location, which can be used as a guide throughout the thesis. Through the charts it is possible to distinguish the diasporic community from the transnational. At the 92 moment, there are no Rastafari houses or mansions in Italy, but there are some local associations. Chart 2 Rastafari participants in Britain Occupation 93 Occupation 94 Chart 3 Rastafari participants in Italy Occupation 95 Occupation 96 Although none of the mansions described in the previous chapter (see paragraph 2.2.2) are present on Italian soil, most of the Italian participants belong to the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox church, while a few others follow the Nyabinghi, Twelve Tribes way of life or are independent Rasta. In Britain, the scenario is completely different, with most Rastafari mansions present, except for the Bobo Shanti. My methodological approach in this research took inspiration from the Open University blog ‘Methods in Motion’ (https://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/research/methods-in-motion The Open University, Open learn, last accessed 24/10/2024), which provides a route for re-thinking the study of religions. This methodology includes elements from both the social sciences and religious studies, and it has been developed to decolonise religious studies, promoting equality, diversity and inclusion. This methodology focuses on studying religions not from a top-down standpoint which starts with an emphasis on institutional authority, but from the bottom-up which involves recording ordinary people and their experiences. This approach to religious Occupation 97 studies emphasises and explores how religions are lived and experienced by ordinary people in their everyday lives. Therefore, I chose to study Rastafari as a lived religion following the work of scholars such as Tweed (1997), Morgan (2009), McGuire (2008), Orsi (1985) Primiano (1995), and Vasquez (2011). These authors show that religions are not reducible to a holy book, the interpretation of which is institutionally authorised by religious specialists but are lived out via language performances, objects and embodied practices improvised in daily life (Vasquez, 2011). For instance, Tweed (1997) focused his research on Catholic Cuban devotionalism, spending five years investigating why people visited a Cuban local shrine dedicated to the Madonna of Cuba, in Miami. In his research, Tweed used both historical and ethnographic methods to acknowledge the history of the shrine and its development. To achieve knowledge about the shrine’s history and its publics, he consulted pamphlets, journals and devotional letters written to the shrine from various places (Cuba and the USA). According to Tweed (1997), the study of textual sources highlighted beliefs and devotional attitudes. Furthermore, because ‘artefacts also inscribe meanings’ (Tweed, 1997:6) Tweed’s approach is focused on the study of the community’s material culture and on the architecture of the shrine including ‘photographs, paintings, key chains, holy cards, and plastic statues’ (1997: 6). Studying the location of the sacred can help scholars of religions understand the development of the ‘diversity of belief, practice and experience within the same religion’ (McGuire, 2008: 25). A further example of methodology in the study of lived religion can be found in Orsi’s work. While studying Italian American devotionalism in Harlem (New York) toward the Madonna of Mount Carmel, Orsi (1985) emphasises the importance of developing field methods based on relationships between people. In his book The Madonna of the 115th Street (1985), Orsi like Tweed developed an approach that combines historiography and ethnography, 98 My method in telling the story of the Madonna and Italian Harlem was to bring voices from the archives and the voices from the street into relation, allowing them to challenge, amend, deepen, and correct each other, to let the present inform the past and the past the present (1985: xxvii). Authors such as Orsi, Tweed and McGuire advocate an approach to religions widely known as lived religion. As McGuire (2007) underlines, ‘each individual’s religion-as-lived is constituted by these often-mundane practices for remembering, sharing and creatively assembling their most vital religious narrative’ (McGuire, 2007: 187; Orsi 1985). Both McGuire (2007) and Orsi (1985) emphasise that mundane practices often travel beyond institutional religiosity. Popular religious practices and therefore, lived religiosity are habitually expressed within quotidian spaces such as home and work. During her studies on embodied practices, McGuire (2007) realised that ‘individual’s religions become lived only through involving their bodies (as well as minds) and their emotions (as well as their cognition)’ (McGuire, 2007: 198). I started to gather data about Rastafari language, objects, and embodied practices, whilst conducting interviews and going to events. Being an outsider to Rastafari communities did not make it easy to get invited to gatherings or celebrations. Things took time. I initially needed networking, meeting people and subsequently get eventually invited to gatherings or events. I am very glad that although I have finished the fieldwork I still get invited and involved in the activities of different communities. This allowed me to learn that fieldwork is never ending but it goes on deeper and deeper, through time. During fieldwork, I attended Rastafari celebrations, Sabbath schools, gatherings, nine-night wakes and reggae parties, in person or online. For every event that I participated in, I made detailed notes, reports and analyses. Participation in events 99 also helped me to collect data regarding both distinct and/or shared community languages, embodied practices, objects and rituals. I had many Reasonings with Rastafari during events and celebrations where I collected data, but I never interviewed people in these circumstances. The interviews were conducted in a variety of locations such as homes, coffee shops and parks. In public places if I asked, ‘have you got any special objects?’ they showed me something that they were wearing. However, I noticed that when Reasonings were conducted in Rastafari homes, the collection of data was different because in that context people were feeling free to show me their special objects or private sacred spaces. Expanding the research within Rastafari homes also gave me the opportunity to involve all my senses within the research, while analysing and experiencing multiple and diverse sounds, tastes, smells and objects. While Reasoning with Rastafari about objects, embodied practices and food, I was able to expand my questions and analysis. While Reasoning about material things, I often encouraged Rastafari to tell me more about their life histories before becoming Rasta and about their ‘call’ (Bonacci,2003: 79) which involved a shift from their previous identities. This shift involved not only a change in their beliefs but also their everyday life practices through the use of a new language, a new name, new objects, a new diet and a new dress code which reflected their new identities as Rastafari. 4.1 Reasoning, Overstanding, and InI as emic and decolonialising research method Throughout the next fieldwork chapters, I choose to commence every fieldwork section with an African philosophical term, while here, I have decided to conduct my methodology through 100 the use of Rastafari key terms, specifically overstanding, Reasoning and InI.17 When I started to write this chapter, reflecting on the methodology used whilst conducting the research, I realised that a large part of my fieldwork methodology was based on what I call a ‘Rastafari methodology’, which involves the verbal and practical use of Rastafari Reasoning, language and concepts. I use these terms here as agents of a decolonised ethnography for studying Rastafari and to register the experience of Rastafari as lived. Reasoning is a Rastafari oral practice or lived reality. While writing this chapter I realised that spontaneously presenting to Rastafari the fieldwork interview as a form of Reasoning helped me to gain their attention and willingness to participate in the research. It was a way to approach Rastafari on their own terms, implementing and performing Reasoning as a concept that they know, embrace and enjoy practising. Looking back, I realised that this term was not only employed as a non-Western or decolonial substitute for interviewing or conversing. Reasoning is a practical performance that includes speaking and understanding patois and dreadtalk, which together can help in reaching mutual overstanding. As highlighted by Salter (2008) ‘Rastafari Reasoning is a form of conscientization that attends particularly to the historical conditions of West Indian slavery and colonization’ (2008: 139). Therefore, it can be considered a decolonising performance. Reasoning is lived by Rastafari as a form of informal and independent education (Onura, 2012). In fact, it was a great tool through which I was able to position myself as a learner. Yawney and Homiak described Rastafari Reasoning as, 17 I have left Reasoning with capital R following Yawney and Homiak (2001). 101 A form of collective and visionary discourse in which individuals explore the implications of a particular insight, which could be based on subjects as diverse as a Bible passage, or an event in the day’s news. Reasoning is a cooperative affair, not a competitive one. It is designed not to entertain but to elucidate (2001: 263). What distinguishes Reasoning from normal conversation is that Reasoning requires the participants to emphasise or feel each other’s points of view, so the debate does not become an argument which moves back and forth but involves sincere attempts to explore different perspectives. While in a normal conversation expressing different opinions can lead to argument, Reasoning requires participants to move beyond their own comfort zone to reach genuine understanding. Reasoning is about choosing a topic, and Reasoning about it with mutual will to overstand each other. During fieldwork I become conscious that by conducting the interview as Reasoning, I could not always easily follow the prepared semi-structured interview format (see Appendix 1). What changed from the semi-structured interview format was that sometimes I was not able to cover all the interview questions in just one meeting, as the Reasoning extended. Reasoning could take very long time, and sometimes I spent hours or days, before I was able to pass from one question to another. Still, I saw it as a way to have an emic approach to the research, as practicing Reasoning allowed me to approach the culture from within and create more ‘intimacy’ with people. In addition, this allowed me to keep long term contact with many Rasta and to pursue the questions more deeply, which is part of a good fieldwork practice. Furthermore, in my methodology I embrace although in a distinct way Harvey’s (2003) decolonial method based on ‘guest-hood’, for which the research can be carried out only with the consent of the community being studied and in which the researcher becomes a temporary ‘guest’. My approach was distinct as my methodology has a longer term (not temporary) and 102 emic approach by speaking ‘within a culture’, for as much as I could. In fact, my personal interest of Reasoning with Rastafari was not a ‘temporal’ interest as I am continuing to participate in Reasonings and support Rastafari activities. Although I did not consider myself an insider, I did not consider myself a stranger to the culture either, but as someone who has knowledge, love, appreciation and respect toward Rastafari culture, views and practices. Therefore, although my method is a version of Harvey’s ‘guest-hood’, it is distinct from it as my method was crafted for working among Rastafari, while Harvey’s is one which was crafted for work among Indigenous Māori. This highlights the fact that research protocols need to be adapted and indeed be, where appropriate, derived from different contexts and cultures. This approach to the research was in line with the ethical guidelines of the university, it embedded good anthropological/fieldwork practices and to me was a more culturally appropriate, decolonised and respectful form of methodology to have with Rasta (I will explain my positionality in the study of Rastafari in section 4.2). Although I had used Reasoning as a research method during the fieldwork, in 2021 while following the SOSACRU Summer Schools (University of West Indies), I learnt that one of the topics was Reasoning as a method of conducting research.18 This made me aware that I was not the only researcher of Rastafari who was employing Reasoning in this way. For example, D. Frühwirthon is working on the topic ‘Zion land we want to go! Rastafari Reasonings on Africa in Historical Perspective’ at the Department of African Studies, University of Vienna. However, our approach to the use of Reasoning differs in few ways. For instance, while my Reasonings were mainly with common diasporic and transnational Rastafari in their private spaces and between InI, Frühwirthon Reasoning involves mainly local Caribbean Rastafari often well-known publicly. Although the reasoning is always between him 18 Sosacru stands for School of the Sacrament Rastafari University. 103 and one Rasta representative, other Rastafari and academics are invited to the talk as in a public online conference. Furthermore, while I used Reasoning to understand diverse, creative, cultural, linguistic and material performances, he is employing it more as a tool to gather information about the idea of Africa and repatriation. Yet, we both are employing this Rastafari practice to decolonialise Western academic practices. I have described already the concepts of InI, Livity, overstanding and the importance of the usage of dread talk in the section on Rastafari ideas, concepts and practices. However, here it is important to set out the extent to which they have enabled a decolonial approach to my fieldwork with different Rastafari communities. As has been highlighted by Nettleford, Rastafari employs dread talk as, a means of communication that would faithfully reflect the specificities of their experiences and perception of the self, life and the world… [by involving] sophisticated concepts in simple expressions, which outsiders experience as linguistic crudities, but which convey a whole range of meanings to the initiated (1998: 32). The knowledge of dreadtalk was extremely helpful in terms of understanding people, culture and also to define my positionality. This was (in Rastafari terms) ‘appreci-loved’ (appreciated) by many especially by diasporic Rastafari, as it was a sign of my deep interest and love for their culture. During fieldwork, Reasoning involved the knowledge of certain Rastafari words and concepts such as InI, Livity, Babylon, Zion and overstanding amongst others, as well as patois. It was during the process of Reasoning that Rastafari made me realise that we both were involved in a constant activity of creative performances. According to Christensen, The Dreadtalk arises spontaneously through the process of Reasoning wherein a speaker ‘will step up with the words’ that define and express the experience of the 104 speaker more appropriately than the words imposed from the outside... The implementation of the epistemological vehicle of Reasoning resulted in a burst of world-constituting activity (2014: 2/8). According to Lambek, Understanding itself constitutes a kind of ethical know-how that is a part of one’s being rather than a detached or scientific knowledge of universals (episteme) or a technical skill (techne) (1991: 46). Knowing and overstanding dreadtalk helped me to be placed or perceived often as an insider. I would not say as a Rasta, but as someone who knows ‘de culture’. However, despite this, during the fieldwork I often positioned myself as a learner especially with Rastafari elders who often positioned me as a student. This probably happened because I shared with them my enthusiasm and willingness to learn more and more about Rastafari, their personal life journeys and lived experiences within the movement. Alongside the use of dread talk and Reasoning, InI is a further example of how I employed and embedded Rastafari cultural expression within my research. According to Edmonds, InI is a a very important concept within Rastafari, Since ‘I’ in Rastafari thought signifies the divine principle that is in all humanity, ‘I-an-I’ [or InI] is an expression of oneness between two (or more) persons and between the speaker and God. I-an-I also connotates a rejection of subservience in Babylon culture and an affirmation of self as an active agent in the creation of one’s own reality and identity (Edmonds 1998: 33). Therefore, InI and its usage abolishes any idea of separation between people and Jah (God), and people in general. Consequently, relying on this principle was extremely helpful to 105 underline my positionality and avoid hierarchical issues while Reasoning. This is because InI goes against the grain of any Western Cartesian dualities such as me and you, academic and participant, subject and object. This rejection of binary assumptions eradicates any separation and leads participants to achieve (in Rastafari wording) mutual overstanding. I have employed the term ‘overstanding’ used amongst Rastafari to replace the word understanding as a way to express in a Rastafari cultural way, the kind of deep and intuitive comprehension that can emerge while Reasoning with the participants and their lived reality. Overstanding implies a deep knowledge of the language, cultural and historical background concerning the participants and assumes a level of openness and empathy. As Bean explains, Rastafari employing dreadtalk during Reasoning and words such as overstanding, ‘signifies the shared experience of sound quality, the agency and spiritual potential of a speaker and the collective resistance against linguistic forms imposed by colonial rule’ (2014: 49). Whilst practicing these words/concepts during Reasonings with Rastafari, I reflected and experienced them as deeply anti-hierarchical and decolonising concepts. In fact, all those words/concepts subvert the idea of placing people, their ideas and knowledge ‘under’ something. On the contrary, these terms elevate and give dignity to the persons involved in the conversation, creating equality and unity among the speakers. Therefore, together these words worked as elements to achieve a decolonised ethnographic method. As stated by Fanon (1967), to speak a language is above all to embrace a culture. On reflection, the methodological choice to use Reasoning and Rastafari concepts allowed me to enter a Rastafari space, on their own terms, while embracing their culture. Before conducting the fieldwork, it was not apparent to me that I was practising Rastafari methods. This became clearer when I started asking myself questions such as, 106 ‘How did I gather data? How did I gain people’s trust and develop intimacy? How was I able to be invited to participate in Rastafari gatherings, events, conferences, debates and homes? How did I position myself within the research and deal with issues concerning power, gender and ethnicity?’ Smith’s Decolonising Methodologies (2021) was especially inspirational for reflecting on decoloniality and methodology. In her book, Smith asks how one might ‘Avoid being complicit with colonisation and colonisers? How to break from categories that slice and box up complex realities?’ (2021: xvi). In this chapter, I propose answers to these and other related questions. Furthermore, as will be shown in the next chapters, the choice to start every fieldwork chapter with an African concept was a further way to decolonise this research. I decided to apply respectively the philosophical concepts of Nommo, Ashe, and Sankofa to the study of Rastafari lived experiences and performances, to replace the usual Eurocentric academic conceptual tools which draw from Western philosophical and disciplinary traditions. Although there were other concepts which emerged during the research, I decide to apply these terms to my fieldwork chapters as they are used amongst some of the Rastafari whom I met, and this inspired my choice to apply them to the respective fieldwork chapters. These terms were very familiar amongst diasporic Rasta in Britain, albeit less amongst Italian Rastafari. I decided to apply these African concepts to my fieldwork both inspired by the comments of the participants and by the analysis of the fieldwork. For example, while I decided to use Nommo (a Dogon word), because as suggested by Brathwaite (1974) it reflect the Rastafari believe of word-sound-power; I decided to use Ashe (a Yoruba word) when I notice that amongst Rasta on WhatsApp some use a sticker which states ‘Ashe’ as a form of good luck or greetings; while I decided to use Sankofa (a Zulu word) when I saw during an interview the drawing of it hanging in a Rastafari house, and heard its use during more than one public Reasoning. I was already 107 familiar with these terms and their use amongst Rastafari inspired me to use them as tools to decolonise this research and frame the fieldwork chapters. There were other African words/concepts that emerged during the research such as Ubuntu which is a Zulu word meaning ‘I am because you are’, and Umoja which is a Swahili word meaning ‘unity’. I did not consider these terms useful for the topics covered in this research, however, I would like in the future be able to develop further fieldwork chapters based on these other concepts. These African terms are drawn from various African cultures and geographical locations. Therefore, the employment of these words by some Rasta in their Reasoning, shows how strategic creolisation and selective essentialism are both central aspects of the localised construction of distinct Rastafari identities. 4.1.1 Decolonising Ethnography Doing fieldwork is not an easy task, although it can be very enjoyable, it is also incredibly challenging. As reported by Lancione and Rosa (2017), anthropologists and sociologists often feel unprepared for the complex demands of field research. They highlight that, This is something foundational for any ethnographic encounter: we are talking about sharing, about giving and taking, about trusting and being trusted about going in, out and through different stages of a continuous positioning and (re)positioning related to an entanglement of expectations, trust, political and intellectual commitment to a group, a process or a cause (Lancione and Rosa 2017: 137). Looking back on my fieldwork processes of engagement with Rastafari, I realised that I was prepared to do research amongst Rastafari both academically in terms of the literature review I wrote for this thesis, and also by my master’s research on Rastafari in Israel, as well as my interest towards this religion and social movement. While writing this chapter I realised that 108 bringing this baggage of knowledge with me, in terms of culture and language assisted me and made a positive contribution to this project. Generally, social scientists are very critical of researchers who are starting fieldwork with assumptions about the people studied. They stress that assumptions can be negative for the research because the researcher will lack neutrality and detachment. In contrast to this view, this research was built up on who I am as a person, from my personal experience with Rastafari informed by my values and the values that I sometimes shared with Rastafari. Although this position could be considered not neutral in the eyes of some social scientists, I argue that my values and knowledge concerning Rastafari has helped me to negotiate my positionality in carrying out this research. Furthermore, it assisted me in engaging with Rastafari and to learn how to be a better researcher by learning from the people I met during my fieldwork. After all, social scientists are always informed about the people they will research before starting fieldwork, in order to negotiate their positionality and be able to collect data. The knowledge I brought with me and the constant learning from Rastafari about their language, beliefs and practices were the keys that opened up the path to my fieldwork and methodology. As Chimbutane (2012), Chavez (2008), Labaree (2002) and Gelir (2021) suggest, a deep knowledge and familiarity of the people studied allows the researcher ‘to understand the nuances of participants linguistic and cultural practices’ and to ‘more easily interpret cultural cues associated with the values and belief systems of the community under study’ (Gelir, 2021: 234). As stressed by Smith (2021), the researcher’s positioning is an important decolonisation tool, An ethical responsibility, an Indigenous method of intellectual engagement that is inextricably connected to land, place, stories, context rather than claiming a universal authority over experiences and people who can speak for themselves (2021: xiii). 109 Since the 1960s, within the social sciences, there have been deep and endless debates on issues concerning writing culture and how the West in the past has represented or imagined the people that they were studying. As underlined by Clifford amongst others, from the seventeenth century until the 1950s, travellers, missionaries and subsequently ethnographers and anthropologists seem to have invented cultures rather than represented them with observed facts. Western imperial and colonizing discourse created a radical image of Otherness within the West and ‘simultaneously extended intellectual control’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 172) over the Other.19 By representing or ‘imagining’ the ‘Other’ and their cultures as savages, inferiors or primitives, the West constructed its own cultural and political superiority. The Other was constructed ‘in specific historical relations of dominance and dialogue’ (Clifford, 1988: 24). According to Camaroff and Camaroff, the concept of the Other was a ‘construction of an imperializing imagination; s/he will always be in the shadow of its dominant discourse’ (1991: 38). For Rastafari, this imperial and ethnographic construction is an example of Western civil-lie-sation. However, from the 1950s onward, many anthropologists and sociologists including Clifford, Geertz, Turner, Lévi-Strauss, Leach, Césaire, Said and Fanon started to criticise Western colonial epistemic and hegemonic cultural practices. Clifford called for a complete redefinition of ‘culture’ as something not belonging only to the West to redefine ‘writing of culture’ too. Therefore, in light of this cultural revaluation, for anthropologists and sociologists, it becomes essential when writing about cultures to analyse and reflect on, ‘Who is speaking? Who is writing? From where? For whom? under which institutional and historical [and political] constraints?’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986: 13). As stated by Smith, 19 I am following Smith (2021) by writing Other with a capital O. 110 These questions [are pivotal because they] related to the relationship between knowledge and power, between research and emancipation, and between lived reality and imposed ideas about the Other (2021: 217). This ‘self-reflexive’ approach, according to Clifford and Marcus (1986: 15) is pivotal to creating a ‘polyvocal’ fieldwork account where the participants become co-authors and disrupt Western cultural hegemonic power and its dichotomies. Hence, social scientists started focusing their methods and fieldwork on what Smith (2021) would call the lived reality of people, trying to deconstruct any form of essentialism by emphasising that cultures and identities are produced historically and are in constant change. As Césaire explained, Culture and identity are inventive and mobile. They need not take root in ancestral plots; they live by pollination, by (historical) transplanting (Clifford, 1988: 15). Consequently, social scientific criticism of the Western hierarchical and political arrangement of representative discourses started to implicate a revision of gender and racial discourses. For instance, the advent of feminism in Smith’s words challenged ‘the epistemological foundation of Western philosophy, academic practice and research’ (2021: 218) which was tendentially based on patriarchal practices. This innovative approach has involved ‘critiques, the development of new methodologies and the possibility of alternative ways of knowing or epistemologies’ (Smith, 2021: 218). The feminist critique led also to a critique of race and ethnicity discourse, for example, by criticising Western ethnocentrism in ethnographic accounts. For instance, women from the global South and women of colour started to condemn and deconstruct racial essentialism, beginning a process of cultural recovery by stressing that, 111 [Western ethnographic accounts] denied the impact of imperialism, racism, and local histories on women, who were different from white women who lived in First World nations (Smith, 2021: 83). Therefore, social scientists, by dismantling the Western hegemonic cultural approaches toward the Other, began to deconstruct ethnographic practices and the old idea of culture, race and gender as something fixed and homogeneous. In doing so they paved the way for the ongoing cultural, ontological and epistemic decolonisation. In this research I ally myself with this decolonising trajectory, proposing here Rastafari or African concepts to be used to decolonise ‘Western-centric’ ethnographic research and methodologies as alternative epistemic tools. 4.1.2 Decolonising Through the De-Essentialisation of Language, Materiality and Bodily Practices I am writing this research at an important time of new knowledge -making or better re-making as social scientists are calling for decolonisation and find themselves amid a culture war. Since Black Lives Matter got the attention of the media globally, the call for cultural decolonisation moved from the margins to the mainstream in Britain and around the world. The precursors of decoloniality and of the ongoing cultural war are Said, Fanon and Césaire, although the term and concept of coloniality and de-coloniality were first coined by Quijano in his work Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America (2000). However, those scholars started to criticise the fact that although political colonisation has ended, its power and legacy still survived within the domains of knowledge globally. These authors amongst many others, sought to revise and revaluate Western cultural representation, hegemony and epistemology about the Other. Decolonisation involves a complete revision of colonial epistemic, ethical and political knowledge concerning cultures, power, ethnicity and gender studies. To apply the 112 concept of decolonisation to the coloniality of knowledge, academics should empty their vessel of acquired Western-centric knowledge not only through a theoretical critique but practically, by dismounting and de-linking from it, by re-learning, reclaiming, re-making and re-evaluating the knowledge about themselves and the Others. This is what I have tried to achieve during this research. Smith cited Fanon and N’gugi Wa Thiong’o while assessing that, decolonising power relationship ‘is necessarily violent; physically, epistemologically and ontologically’ and that ‘decolonising has to occur [first] in our minds, literature and language’ (Smith, 2021:191). Smith stresses that in practice to ‘decolonise our methodologies necessarily involves the decolonisation of ourselves’ (2021: xxv). This means that ‘decolonizing our research methodologies also involves moving beyond deficit paradigms by seeking out new language and reimaginaries from the Indigenous sensorium’ (Smith, 2021: xxi). This form of decolonial knowledge is a way of reclaiming and revaluating Indigenous cultures, knowledge and voices. Furthermore, the new tendency within academia to decolonise and give value to people and their material culture shows how Western hegemony has often used objects, monuments and architecture to construct their cultural ‘superiority,’ over the Other. A way to apply decolonisation to the study of Rastafari material culture is by de-essentialising Rastafari language, materiality and bodily practices by seeking to answer to questions such as what does language, materiality and bodily practices do? Why are they so essential in people's life? Who do they represent? What ‘power’ do they contain or manifest? What do people do with them? and How are they used in everyday life to express or experience religious, political views or interpersonal relationships? 113 4.2. InI Positionality and Reflexivity on intersectionality In this section I will explain how I introduced myself to Rastafari, their and my intersectional positionalities, and how Rastafari reacted to different aspects of my identity in Britian and in Italy. As I stated previously, to develop an ethical responsibility toward Rastafari and a decolonial approach to the research, while Reasoning and engaging intellectually with Rastafari I have employed the concept of Reasoning, ‘overstanding’ and InI. 4.2.1 The intersectional dance The use of InI was pivotal for positioning myself towards Rastafari culture and also to be positioned by them throughout the fieldwork. The concept of InI was particularly useful not only because it allowed me to interact in an emic and cultural ‘worldly known’ way with Rastafari, which allowed Rastafari to speak from within their culture, but also because it allowed me to reflect on my identity, positionality and reflexivity. InI positionality was not something stable and it resulted in a constant intersectional dance between me and the Rastafari people. Recent academic theories on research methods stress the need within academia to investigate the subjectivity of race and culture in the lived experience of the participants and of the researcher. The term intersectionality, coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, underscores the ‘multidimensionality’ of marginalized subjects’ lived experiences (Crenshaw, 1989: 139). Romero stresses that, ‘intersectional research requires analysing multiple dimensions of individual identity and social structures simultaneously’ (2023: 4) in order to grip identities’ multidimensionality and avoid essentialism. As underlined by Collins, ‘understanding that race and culture influence individual senses of being and belonging within 114 families and communities scratches the surface of the many meanings behind identities’ (2023: 203). According to Collins (2023) focusing the methodology on the intersectional lived experiences of the participants shows how individuals make sense of their multidimensional identities. Therefore, reflecting and focusing the research method on the lived experienced of the participants, their ethnicity, nationality and cultural background, as well as age, class, gender has revealed the complexity of religious identities which overcome the idea of a single identity, both as a group and as a single individual. Religious identities, or identities in general, are not something fixed but are involved in a constant intersectional dance expressed through people lived experiences. When we talk to people, different aspects of our identities come out, and this depends on the context and on the interlocutors’ positions. Furthermore, during the research process it was important to reflect also on my own intersectionality, and therefore, my ethnicity, nationality cultural background, age, class, gender and other aspects of my identity, which influenced both the research and the attitudes that Rastafari had toward me. The intersectional dance in which our identities were involved, reflected the fact that there is not a single Rastafari culture or identity, but there were multiple positions adopted during the dance by both me and the Rastafari who I Reasoned with. This intersectional dance allowed me to gain sometimes more, sometimes less access and familiarity with the participants. My ethnicity, nationality cultural background, age, class, gender and other aspects of my identity influenced both the research and the attitudes that Rastafari had toward me. As Naples stresses, Insiderness or outsiderness are not fixed or static positions, rather they are ever shifting and permeable social locations that are differentially experienced and expressed by community members [and by social scientists] (1996: 140). 115 Before commencing the fieldwork, I was aware that other academics experienced some problems prior to researching Rastafari. In particular Bedasse, explains the difficulty that some social scientists could encounter in accessing Rastafari. She wrote, ‘Rastafarians typically engage in secrecy and are unapologetically selective when deciding which researcher they will trust’ (Bedasse, 2017: 7). She also underlines that because some Rastafari experience the academy and ‘the colonial/written archives as imperial,’ they often subject sociologists ‘to a rigorous and demanding series of test to determine motive’ (2017: 7). This shows that among some Rastafari there is a deep consciousness that social scientific research is itself implicated in Babylon. This awareness helped me to think and approach Rastafari on their own terms and in a decolonial way using their language and concepts to gain their trust, also by showing my decolonial approach to their culture, toward the academy and Western culture in general. For instance, I presented myself to my interlocutors as an OU student wishing to explore Rastafari in Britain and in Italy because this subject has been understudied for many years. I also explained to my interlocutors that during the exhibition ‘Rastafari in Motion’ I noticed a gap in the history of Rastafari in both locations. In fact, the exhibition recorded the history and activities of Rastafari in the UK from the 1960s to the 1990s. During our first meetings, I explained my passion toward the movement, but also that as a scholar of Religious Studies, I would love to see Rastafari taught in schools and be integrated into the national curriculum. I remember some Rastafari, especially from the diaspora, did not always agree with my view, as they consider Rastafari more than a religion, a way of life. Many view the word ‘religion’ as something corrupted and an agent of Babylon to control the masses. However, they all appreciated my vision, as they saw in it as my personal way to care and support the movement. Furthermore, I presented myself as an anti-fascist Italian and lover of Rastafari culture, as someone who does not embrace Rastafari religiously, but supports the movement and its 116 concern with decolonisation and reparation. I presented myself as a spiritual woman, respecting all religions and faiths. I was clear that I do not worship King Haile Selassie as God or the Messiah, but I praise him as a rightful king, who symbolises to me African unity, decolonisation and anti-fascism. Through the use and personal knowledge of patois and Dreadtalk, I was able to show to my interlocutors my commitment, interest, and overstanding of Rastafari culture, especially concerning its Caribbean manifestation and its globalisation and glocalisation. While contacting diasporic Rastafari, some Rasta met me just because they were curious to know what my research was about, and how an Italian woman from Rome had ended up wanting to study their culture. It was not always easy to be understood and accepted. Sometimes I needed to de-essentialise my identity during the Reasoning in order to achieve InI positionality. For example, I felt the need to share with them the fact that although I am Italian, I do not praise people such as Colombus or Mussolini, or institutions such as the Roman Empire, or the Vatican. My positionality was always in motion and often depended on how my interlocutors were positioning me. For example, I remember once while participating in a Rastafari Reasoning on Facebook, one diasporic Rasta woman started accusing me of being ‘a bloody Italian, paid by the Italian government to damage and spy on the movement’. I was upset by her comments, but I also understood how some Rastafari might position me as a white Italian, fascist and Vatican supporter without knowing me. However, my passion and knowledge allowed me to overstand where this woman’s concerns were coming from and overcome the uncomfortable feelings her comments generated in me. In Italy, although even in this context I needed to explain the reasons of my research, the initial contact was easy, I was approached with less suspicious attitudes and as an anti-fascist and anti-clerical fellow citizen. Many local Rasta called me ‘sister’ (in English) from our first meeting. Perhaps this happened as we shared the same history and language, which helped communication and cultural understanding. However, the fact that they were experiencing Rastafari and the 117 Towahedo Orthodox Church as one, made me feel quite as an outsider, comparing to diasporic Rastafari who focus more on the ancestors worshipping and reparation from colonialism. This experience made me realise deeply the diverse ways in which Rastafari is lived in these two contexts. Although during fieldwork I typically positioned and presented myself as a learner, while Reasoning and spending time with Rastafari, my positionality could change very easily from student to something else. In fact, to situate me and Rastafari as InI and be positioned by them as such, I remember that my knowledge was often tested especially by the diasporic elders who questioned me and the reasons for my research. The testing was performed in diverse ways and based on diverse parameters in both diasporic and transnational settings. In the diasporic setting, I was tested on my knowledge about the Caribbean, Jamaica and their colonial historical struggle. On reflection, I felt quite prepared and many diasporic Rastafari appreciated my knowledge, involvement and enthusiasm toward the study of Caribbean cultures and religions. Furthermore, I made them aware that culturally I am a Pan-Africanist, and therefore, politically, I embrace the Rastafari fighting for equal rights and justice, decolonisation, and cultural and economic reparation from colonialism. In the light of this, some diasporic elders suddenly during Reasoning start to call me ‘daughta’ (daughter), ‘Empress’ or ‘sistren’ (sister). I was glad of this, as it indicated that despite my background and gender, I was trusted by these Rasta and welcomed into the community. In the transnational setting my fieldwork experience changed drastically. Strange but true, during the first encounters with some Rastafari I felt like an outsider even though they were calling me ‘sister’ and we shared the same Italian cultural background. The fact that I had knowledge of Rastafari or Caribbean culture was not really helpful in this context. Many Italian Rastafari tend to be more Ethiopianist and only a few of them look to Jamaica as the source of Rastafari knowledge and authenticity. Many told me to be Rastafari by learning directly from 118 Haile Selassie’s life and speeches which informed them on how to be Rastafari. It was this different approach to Rastafari that often made me feel like an outsider. For example, the practice of praising the ancestors is completely absent amongst Italian Rasta. However, in this context during the first meetings, Rastafari questioned my knowledge of Ethiopia’s history and culture, Selassie’s speeches, and life activities. I must admit that I was quite ignorant concerning Ethiopian culture and the life of Haile Selassie. However, the fact that I positioned myself as a learner helped me to gain their trust and willingness not only to participate in the research, but also to teach me about Ethiopia and the Emperor. During this time, I was able to develop reciprocal friendly relationships and to be included and invited in many of their activities such as celebrations and gatherings. I must underline that Italian Rastafari were much more open and interested in participating in the research than diasporic Rastafari, probably because many of them were themselves academics or independent researchers. They did not have the same distrustful attitude toward academia as some diasporic Rastafari. Often, but not always, Reasoning with Italian Rastafari was based more on intellectual academic conversation than on Reasoning. They had strong academic and orthodox attitudes which led some of them to express their Rastafari identities in a more Churchical way. Their emphasis and attitude toward the Orthodox Tewahedo Church sometimes made me uncomfortable because it reminded me of institutional Catholic attitudes more than Rastafari as a movement for black liberation. With some Rasta I was able to share my discomfort, as I was very surprised to discover that many Rasta in Italy are Christians devoted joining the Ethiopian Towahedo Orthodox Church. I understood this tendency amongst diasporic Rastafari only when I was back from Italy, and I started to question Rasta about it. At that stage, I discovered that even in Britain some Rasta were baptised by the Ethiopian Towahedo Orthodox Church, as it is considered Haile Selassie’s Church. However, only a few follow the Church in its practices and worshipping activities. 119 One of the main debates in religious studies is related to insider/outsider positionality, which has a big impact on data collection and methodology in terms of influencing the direction of the research. As argued by Miled (2019) and Gelir (2021), it is often ‘the researcher’s professional and personal backgrounds which provided the researcher different degree of power that position her/him as an insider and outsider’ (Gelir, 2021: 234). During fieldwork, the constant ‘dance’ (Ryan 2015) or shifting between feeling or being perceived as an outsider or insider was strongly influenced by my Italian, academic and Catholic background, as well as the knowledge and passion I had towards Rastafari. As Ryan emphasises, Through an awareness of the dynamic rhythms of our multi-positionalities, we can appreciate the complexities and contingencies of the stories that are shared and understood through particular inter-personal interactions in the research encounter (2015: 57). From my own experience, outsider/insider positionality depended very much on the way Rastafari were positioning me, on how they were perceiving me and also on the in a diasporic or transnational setting in which InI were Reasoning. This constant motion or dance was happening because as Chavez (2008: 474) highlights, A researcher is co-participant as she/he positions her-/himself in relation to participants, and participants position themselves in relation to how a researcher is perceived or behaves (2008: 474; see also Ellis, 2004; Gergen, 2000). As Razon and Ross (2012) state there is a constant ‘dance’ going on at the crossroads which metaphorically highlights the constant shift of positionality of both the researcher and the participants. The meeting and the dancing at the crossroads were always exciting although sometimes it was uncomfortable, because I needed to be flexible and stand where I was 120 positioned sometimes as a daughter, a sister, a friend, a student, an academic, an Italian woman, a Rasta, a stranger, and more. Therefore, although I was flexible, I placed some limits on letting Rastafari position me. 4.2.2 InI and Gender Gender is a further important intersectional theme to consider while doing fieldwork and performing self-reflexivity and decolonisation. As many social scientists such as Gelir (2021), Berry (2017), Chavez (2017) and Vanner (2015) have shown in their works, gender can have a big impact on research fieldwork outcomes. When I entered the field, I was conscious that I could face patriarchal views and attitudes from some Rastafari. I was aware that some men might not treat me respectfully. This is because as highlighted by Imani Tafari-Ama, ‘traditionally, the male leadership in Rastafari has portrayed the role of women as supportive and subordinated to the male’ (2012: 193). Rastafari claim they are opposed to Babylon, but Tafari-Ama assesses that, RastafarI borrow heavily from Western liberalism, Christianity and Judaism all of which influence the popular belief in the livity that women have less authority than their male counterparts (2012: 193). I remember during one reasoning with sista Fyah, she told me, After so many years of activity within Rastafari, I am still not considered an Elder. Now I am quite old, I wonder when will I be considered as such? This shows Sista Fyah’s frustration at not having been recognised within the diasporic community as an activist and as an Elder. Also, Sista Crolei who belongs to a different Rastafari house than Sista Fyah, in a WhatsApp message she told me, 121 I have not been around the Rastafari house much since the show. As a woman, I can say from my heart there is not much regard for women doing the ‘work’ when the show is over. These statements show and highlight that within Rastafari there are still significant issues concerning gender equality that must be addressed and resolved. This led me during the fieldwork to decide to try to interview more women than men although, this was not always possible as the outcome was very different from my expectations. In fact, I had the opportunity of Reasoning more with men than with women, especially amongst diasporic Rastafari. This happened as many of the diasporic women that I met were quite cynical toward my research and viewed my work as Babylon’s work and did not want to get involved. Other times, I had the impression that some Rasta men wanted exclusive access to my research even when I knew their partner was also Rastafari. Approaching and getting female Rastafari participants to get involved in my research was more encouraging in Italy. Women were happy to approach me and talk to me about their lived experiences as Italian Rastafari. I must admit that some Italian women were not only happy to talk about their experiences but also to underline their frustration. They find themselves sometimes in situations of patriarchy which reminded them of the Catholic patriarchal approach toward women. I remember while Reasoning with Sista Amina, she told me that when she joined APRI (Permanent Assembly of Rastafari in Italy) about ten years ago during a Rastafari gathering, while men were playing reggae, women were cooking, washing and cleaning. However, she told me that after some women complained about this situation, things changed to the point that now women get respected, helped and they are also allowed to play the drums if they wanted to. She told me, 122 Many women [today] have left Rastafari for gender issues. However, now men understand that InI as a concept must involve and include respect, and mutual understanding between genders. From my fieldwork experience, I remember that when I started to gather with diasporic male Rastafari, the practice of Reasoning was quite neutral between InI. Although, Bedasse underlines in her experience the word ‘daughta to refer to Rastafari women…demonstrate the belief that women are not spiritual or moral equals to men’ (2017: 38). I argue that I lived and experienced this word in a paternal way to address me more than as a patriarchal utterance. This term at least in my experience was used toward me mainly by some Elders. I never had the sensation of feeling inferior or subordinate. On some occasions, male Rastafari were pleased and made me feel like an insider by calling me sister, Queen or Empress. Although there is a lot of work to do within Rastafari in terms of patriarchy, I found these terms empowering comparing it with Western terms such as ‘Miss’. I didn’t experience any uncomfortable circumstances or patriarchal attitudes towards me, I was always treated with respect especially in the light of the research I was conducting. However, during fieldwork with the diaspora, I realised that as a woman I had missed or been excluded from some Rastafari practices and social gatherings. I was never invited to a Sabbath Biblical reading in Rastafari houses or to general meetings and several female Rastafari indicated that they were and are often excluded from these events. Nevertheless, while attending the SOSACRU Summer School (University of West Indies) online in July 2021, I realised that there is a strong will to recover the role of women within the movement. This is visible today through a new emphasis on Haile Selassie’s wife Empress Menen representing respectively the alpha and the omega, the masculine and feminine side of the divine. This is reflected in the production of books concerning Empress Menen, in 123 the development of projects dedicated to her and also in the Rastafari salutation which now incorporates Selassie’s wife’s name. When I met Sista Fyah after our Reasoning, she told me that she is strongly devoted to Empress Menen and gave me a book about her life telling me that I should read about her because she was a very inspiring woman, the feminine side of Rastafari the King. While on the one hand, this idea of masculine and feminine as equal and complementary elements is positive, on the other hand, it often depends on essential traits and qualities which are often not welcoming to those with different experiences of sex and sexuality, an issue that I have avoided during fieldwork as I felt that I would struggle to do it justice in my work. 4.2.3 InI as self-reflection on Ethnic Self-identity Construction As I have just introduced above, in recent years anthropologists and sociologists have emphasised the pivotal role of researcher reflexivity and how researchers’ identities which are constituted by gender, ethnicity, culture and personal background have an impact on the research process (Gelir, 2021; Davies, 2008). In light of this, I have applied and implemented the concept of InI during the conversations that I had with Rastafari and also towards my own reflexivity and introspection. As Pillow argues, The use of reflexivity, as self-reflexivity, in this sense not only raises questions about the politics of how we go about the doing of our research but also engages the researcher herself in self-reflective practices (2003: 179). Reflexivity, therefore, becomes ‘a continuing mode of self-analysis and political awareness’ (Callaway, 1992: 33). It has been well addressed by other Rastafari scholars such as Chevannes (1994), Cashmore (1979) and Macleod (2014) that often diasporic Rastafari do not consider themselves 124 Jamaican or Caribbean but Africans or Ethiopians. This was reflected in the data I collected while Reasoning with Rastafari. What I found very interesting was that this tendency was echoed within both the diaspora as much as among Italian Rastafari. However, within the diaspora, the feeling of being African was linked to their historical and cultural awareness of having been deported from Africa to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. While Reasoning with them, I noticed that they were addressing themselves as African as a way of not only reinforcing their roots but also of re-constructing their lost identity, and history as a means of proclaiming self-determination. Although I agree with Kelsky when she states that ‘there is a specific need for “white ethnographers” to account for their own “nativeness” in their practice of representation’ (2001: 429), I argue that sometimes this is not a straightforward task because it involves deep self-reflexivity and historical self-awareness which can lead scholars to deal with identity crises. As I have highlighted above, decolonial processes are involving at first the researcher's self-identity construction. This means that for instance, from my personal experience and perspective, although I could be considered by the participants or consider myself as a ‘white, European, Catholic, middle class, academic’, I do not perceive myself in these terms and this was reflected also in my research. This reflection on the self is linked to the practice and concept of methodology in motion. For instance, just as Rastafari cultures are in motion blending with numerous and diverse cultural elements, Italian culture was and is constantly blending with influences from both Europe and Africa, informing who I am and local Italian Rastafari identities. On the one hand, traditions are fashioned by the host society, on the other hand they are involved in a constant blending motion with the ‘outside’ as much as ethnic and religious identities. For instance, coming from a southern Italian family and having absorbed southern Italian culture made me realise that I am a Mediterranean Creole, made up of a mix 125 of diverse cultures, rather than merely a ‘white’ European. Italy is a land where Mediterranean, African and European cultures encountered, mixed and clashed for centuries. This tendency to feel my identity to be the outcome of many vernacular traditions and cultures which are always on the move was also shared by the southern Italian Rastafari that I interviewed during fieldwork. For instance, some of them told me they feel physically and culturally closer to Africa than to Europe. As the data collected shows, Italian Rasta are still experiencing strong cultural and historical differences that separate the south from the north. Many Northern Italians still address Southern Italians as ‘Terroni.’ Terrone means ‘people of the land’ or ‘people dark like the land.’ The experience of Ras Negasi confirms and explains this point, For us Italian Rastas, the natural line to get to Rastafari is not through the Atlantic, but through the Mediterranean. We are, especially in Southern Italy the African roots of the Western society which is why they call us ‘Terroni,’ from the word ground, the earth and the earth is black. As ‘Terroni’ we have suffered the same discrimination created by colonialism but locally in Italy. For Southern Italian Rastas, Rastafari ideas about Babylon have tremendous resonance and power, given the racially inflected economic and political discrimination Southerners have experienced from the North. Furthermore, the racial slur ‘Terroni’ illustrates racism, rejection or denial of cultural creativity, motion and an insistence that cultures are pure and static. Reclaiming African cultural influences by both diasporic and transnational Rastafari is a way to engage in a new form of knowledge-making, which decolonises the knowledge that was responsible for the coloniality of our being and cultural background (Fanon, 1967). Similar to Southern Rastafari, reflecting, realising and going through the process of self-decolonisation 126 made me feel very much betrayed by ‘my own’ Italian and Western culture of lies and cultural hegemony. As Bhambra stresses, there is the need within the academy to develop a ‘“Connected histories” approach to counter to the otherwise dominant forms of [Eurocentric] historical sociology’ (2011: 667). Furthermore, she adds, The new paradigm of multiple modernities allows [postcolonial social scientists] to theorise differences between peoples and acknowledges the existence of a plurality of civilisations that, in its own terms, goes beyond earlier binaries of ‘civilised’ and ‘non-civilised’, modernity and tradition (Bhambra 2011: 671). Therefore, as Shilliam underlines that it is important to address the pivotal role of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy, 1993), the ‘Black Pacific’ (Shilliam, 2015) and slavery in the production of Western cultural modernity, in the same way I argue it is pivotal to address the role of the Black Mediterranean and centuries of cultural exchange between Africa and Europe which took place across the Mediterranean. According to Brambra, ‘the intermingling between the various groups [in this case southern Italians, Europeans and Africans] contributed to the “creolisation” [of identities]’ (2011: 677-678). This is what I have experienced while decolonising and reflecting on my Mediterranean identity and while Reasoning with southern Italian Rastafari, namely the connected history between Africa and Europe. This shows that it is extremely important for social scientists to have a methodological decolonial and historical-connected cultural approach or a focus on the historical determination of their social research to challenge the hegemonic narrative, create a new language and demonstrate the motion and cultural interconnection which characterises any religion, culture, tradition or identity. Challenging hegemonic narratives is essential if social scientists are to take a critical view of cultures, and identities. This kind of approach uncovers new identities, as old or new cultural or historical interconnections, omitted by official narratives or records, which tends to set cultures and 127 people into predefined boxes. For example, reflecting and understanding on the cultural interconnection of Italians or Caribbeans with Africa was essential to overstand why and how people embrace Rastafari. 4.3 On-life Fieldwork and Covid Challenges During the first two years of my PhD research, although I concentrated on the literature review and learning about other Caribbean religions, at the same time I started contacting and networking with Rastafari through Facebook. I decided to rely on Facebook because during my MA research on Rastafari in Israel, I found it an extremely useful tool in terms of networking and data collection. It was a convenient instrument also because I was able to follow Rastafari activities and their degree of personal involvement with the movement through their publicly posted or shared material. However, when I started my doctoral research, I relied also on WhatsApp as a further space to investigate and analyse Rastafari life activities on a daily basis and to keep in touch with them. While I was doing fieldwork in Italy in March 2020, an uncomfortable situation developed. The Covid 19 pandemic began, and a lockdown was announced. At that point I, understood that my research methods would need to be changed, and my supervisors supported me with this. Therefore, I decided to move my fieldwork and Reasoning into the virtual arena. Rastafari activities such as Reasonings, meetings, gatherings and celebrations also moved online during this time. Amongst social scientists conducting ethnography online, this is referred to as ‘hybrid ethnography’ (Przybylski, 2020). This term represents a new ethnographic space where the online and the offline lives of people combine. 128 During lockdown, I noticed that on-line activities increased incredibly as people started sharing more posts on how they were living during the pandemic. Some for example dedicated this time to gardening, others to cooking by experimenting new Ital recipes, others were sharing prayers, while others were dedicating this time to art. The main theme I noticed through Rastafari postings was a sort of resilience toward the pandemic expressed by a sort of joy to finally have time to spend doing what they really loved. It was a time when many felt that they were free from Babylon and that they had a chance to live a bit differently and get creative. It was a sort of positive resilient reaction to this frightening time. However, other Rastafari experienced the pandemic as a time of hardship. For many Rastafari elders, it was not easy being alone or far from family and friends and many faced economic difficulties. An initiative around a foodbank in south London and conspiracy theories surrounding the origins and treatment of Covid and the lockdown swirled around Rastafari online spaces during this period. The pandemic pushed me to start using Facebook differently than just for networking. I was quite lucky because a few years ago I joined a course on the ‘Anthropology of social networks’ (on Lilyfuturelearn) an experience which helped me at this time. To collect data, I started following and analysing participants’ everyday posts and their reactions and issues to COVID-19 among other things. To collect and organise the data I made screenshots and saved them in thematically organised folders using NVivo software. This data was used in the research, always adhering to privacy laws and ethical guidelines. Following the participants’ postings on Facebook gave me the opportunity to participate virtually in their everyday online experience, not only during the pandemic but also during the protests for George Floyd, BLM, and Rastafari celebrations both in Britain and Italy. Rastafari were aware that I was following them online and I had oral consent from them to cite their posts. However, as underlined by Georgakopoulou and Spilioti (2015), there are issues and debates among social scientists concerning what is in the public domain and what is not. 129 To avoid ethical and privacy problems, I anonymised all the data collected on Facebook and WhatsApp and saved data that only related to the study of language, materiality and embodied practices. Therefore, the original research design changed, and participant observation ended up being mainly virtual and this gave me insight into alternative methods of obtaining research data. I have decided to dedicate part of the (in Rastafari term) on-life (on-line) fieldwork to healing, gardening and the foodbank which were the main activities during Covid 19 and afterwards. During this time, I was also invited to participate every Saturday in the London Rastafari Sabbath school which was run remotely due to the pandemic. In this setting, I had the opportunity to get closer to this mansion (House) and to learn how some Rastafari were living during the pandemic. In addition, during and after the pandemic, a wonderful initiative was promoted online by Dr. Naphtali Sober about Rastafari, the Emperor and the movement called ‘Freedom in the city festival.’ This festival hosted various events at least once a month between April 2021 and November 2022 and it helped me to learn more about Rastafari. One interesting point was that before the pandemic started, I thought that a significant number of participants would not be willing to engage in Reasoning via digital platforms and on camera. I also had concerns and reservations about this because I have always thought that meeting people virtually would not create enough empathy and trust between me and the participants. I did not like the idea of being separated by a computer screen, therefore this was not part of my original research design, as I thought of it as a dehumanised, unnatural and unspiritual approach. However, during the pandemic I was forced to adjust, and I started Reasoning with Rastafari via Facebook messenger and WhatsApp. I did not need any further ethical permission to proceed in this way because interviewing or having contact with the informants by phone or computer was not excluded from my initial methodology and ethical 130 approval. I must admit that sometimes it was extremely hard to have a proper Reasoning due to bad network reception. However, despite the challenges, speaking virtually with the participants was not as bad as I expected. Everybody was very friendly, and it was quite easy to create empathy, trust and feel a spiritual connection although this didn’t happen with everyone. Partially, I believe it all went quite smoothly because we were all in lockdown and we all tended to be and feel closer as we were all sharing the same distressing experience. However, Reasoning changed quite a bit while having conversations online and by phone. While Reasoning in person in Rastafari homes could last hours, Reasoning on the phone or online was often shorter and felt more superficial, allowing only partially to access Rastafari intimate spaces and to ask questions about objects around the house and Rastafari material culture. However, social networks and virtual spaces despite being characterised by intimacy limitations are an amazing space for ethnographic fieldwork and an important source for networking and researching. Social networks are a great resource for field research and the pandemic pushed me to adopt and think of new ways to carry out my research by studying and experiencing in Rastafari terms people ‘on-life’. Conclusion In conclusion, this chapter has shown how I have applied decolonial methods in motion to carry out this research. As a starting point, I have used what I called a Rastafari methodology by employing oral and practical Rastafari words/concepts and social practices such as Overstanding, Reasoning and InI to register the experience of Rastafari as lived and to work to decolonise my methodology and research. Reasoning is a decolonial method which could be 131 applied also to a different community, if the researcher is able to overstand the nuances and cultural expressions. Furthermore, it allows the researcher to create more intimacy with the people studied and their worldviews. A further decolonial element of my methodology was to study Rastafari from the bottom-up as a lived religion. The lived religion approach is a decolonisation tool able to demonstrate and display the mobility of Rastafari identities, their localisation and particularisation. Consequently, the study of Rastafari as a lived reality deconstructs any form of essentialism or stigma and proves the constant creativity and mobility which involves cultures and religious identities. Furthermore, adopting a bottom-up approach was essential to create ‘polyvocal’ accounts from ordinary people avoiding the tendency to study religious institutions from the top-down. Smith’s work was pivotal for reflecting on the necessity of using decolonising methodologies and to reflecting on insider/outsider positionalities within the research. Using the term InI during the Reasonings with Rastafari helped me to present myself and the participants as equal not as an academic and an interviewee. In the light that the term InI is a term that counters Western Cartesian dualities, it was very useful to describe the constant motion which involved me and the participant’s positionalities. While writing this chapter InI term helped me also develop critical self-reflexivity regarding to my identity. Recognising the intertwining of cultures is a form of decolonisation because it acknowledges the constant creolisation and motion of religious identities and traditions. 132 5.0 Word-Sound-Power in Motion: from Creative ‘Trans-languaging’ to Textual Authority and Back again It is important to understand that redemption is not only physical or spiritual but also linguistic (Ras Negasi). 5.1 Nommo as a Tool to Reframe Languaging In West Africa, the Dogon people of Mali share the African concept of Nommo, which refers to the generative power of the spoken word. According to Alkebulan (2009), Nommo is the force that gives life to everything, because spoken words bring into existence all that is seen and unseen. Dogon believes that every word is an addition to the universe, and by adding it to the totality of the universe, words can change the nature and experience of human existence (Alkebulan, 2009). Through the power of the spoken word, human beings can invoke and/or gain spiritual power (Alkebulan, 2009). Whilst researching Rastafari, as has been already highlighted by Brathwaite (1971: 237-239) and Chevannes (1994: 225), I found the concept of Nommo reflected in Rastafari social practices around words and sound. Rastafari, like the Dogon, strongly believe in the power of words and sound. This concept or belief, in fact, was constantly practised by Rasta by engaging in the use of dreadtalk during our Reasoning. This is the reason why I decided to use this word/concept for this chapter. Hence, in this chapter Nommo will be adopted as a conceptual tool to grab and understand how, and to what extent Rastafari envision, experience and live language in their everyday lives, as a kind of power. Ideas and practices concerning words and sounds are not limited to Africa. For instance, the well-known word abracadabra means ‘I will create as I speak’ (Lawrence, 1998) and 133 mirrors the concept of Nommo. In addition, Ursula Le Guinn’s Earthsea (1952) novels refer to the same idea and concept around the power of speech and words, and importantly, the creative and performative power of the spoken word. In contrast to Le Guinn, the French philosopher Derrida (1976) described this Western attitude towards speech as ‘phonocentrism’. In his work, Derrida contests the Western tendency to focus on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, which is the inclination to see speech and sound as superior to writing. Derrida’s work criticises the privileging of spoken words, which, he says, is rooted in the Western philosophical tradition as a guarantee of meaning and truth, in contrast to writing which is corrupt because it introduces distance and the possibility of distortion into meaning. However, Derrida’s view is not in line with the work of the British philosopher Austin. Austin suggests that all speech and sound are a reflection of the act of engaging with words and signs or what he calls ‘speech acts’ (1976). In his work How to do Things with Words, Austin argues that ‘to say something is to do something’ or in which ‘by saying or in saying something we are doing something’ (Austin 1976: 12). Austin recognised the emotive and performative dimensions of language, dimensions neglected by Derrida among others. One way to frame how Western and African ontologies privilege speech is through the idea of ‘languaging’. The turning of nouns into verbs has appropriate academic precedent: the anthropologist Lambek (1995) has argued for ‘culturing’ and ‘re-culturing’, since culture is neither discrete nor stable but is always in motion and brought to life through lived practices. Similarly, according to Nye (2000), religion studied in its multiple expressions in people’s everyday lives should be considered as ‘religioning’, as a means of discovering the various and elaborate ways in which people are performing and experiencing religion. Religioning is ‘a form of practice…that is done and performed by actors with their own agency…who have their own particular ways and experiences of making their religiosities manifest’ (Nye 2000: 23). 134 In addition, this chapter adds knowledge to the emergence of oral culture and sound studies in the academic field. Since the 1980s anthropologists such as Bauman, Richard and Joel Sherzer (ed.) 1989 [1974] have highlighted in their work around oral culture, and the centrality and power of the spoken word within indigenous traditions. Furthermore, authors such as Kapchan (2004), or Gerety (2021) have focused on religious soundscapes, suggesting that ‘listening to sound creates sacred affect and identity’ (Kapchan, 2004: 70). Gerety’s (2021) work on sound and Yoga, for example, shows how sound and power are also central to the Indian traditions and yogis’ identities, as the sound of chanting mantras are essential to performative yogi sessions. Thus, in this chapter languaging will be used as a conceptual tool to frame and understand how Rastafari are living speeches and texts, through a creative variety of subjective linguistic, and sonic performances. Therefore, the questions that launches this chapter asks, how languaging manifests as a social practice among different Rastafari communities, and is sound an essential element in the development of new Rastafari identities? 5.2 ‘Trans-languaging’ the Field According to the study conducted by Albuquerque (1977), from the 1970s onward Rastafari and Rastafari modes of sound-making went global. As will be highlighted in this chapter, the recent developments of new forms of media, the commercialisation of Rastafari through reggae and dub music and also Nyabinghi chants and poetry have propelled Rastafari linguistic phenomenon onto a global stage. Today, Jamaican patois and dreadtalk are spoken in Jamaica, Britain and non-Anglophone countries such as Italy. Migration and new media are allowing people worldwide to access, combine, learn, absorb and perform dreadtalk in many ways, guided by different subjective and contextual necessities. The data collected during fieldwork will highlight how and to what extent the Rastafarianisation of languages is in motion and 135 boundaryless (Niaah, 2008) and will explore the performativity of their language and sonic practices. The data gathered among diasporic Rastafari in Britain shows that many of the participants employed dreadtalk as a marker of their Caribbean heritage. Ordinary language in everyday settings is characterised by frequent switching between English, patois and dreadtalk. Among diasporic Rastafari, dreadtalk is reinforced during community gatherings in written or spoken communication especially with the Elders. For instance, during my visit to Ras Bongo a Jamaican elder living in London, he explained that amongst Nyabinghi elders the word appreciate is replaced by ‘appreci-love’. While I was Reasoning about modernity outside a local venue with Ras Irie, he replaced the work technology with ‘take-knowledge’, to underline his view of the negative impact that technology has on youth culture by sapping away their knowledge. Words are switched depending on the audience, the meaning that wants to be conveyed, the subject of the conversation and the creativity of the speaker. It is argued in this chapter that dreadtalk and its usage is not fixed in time or space but is always in motion. New words can be created and often they reflect contemporary issues. For instance, during Covid 19 some diasporic Rastafari were replacing the word ‘pandemic’ with ‘plan-demic’, to signify something already planned by Babylon. I have also noticed that, although everyone is free in principle to contribute to the development or performance of word-switching, the majority of transnational Rastafari generally adopt dreadtalk words already created or in use by Rastafari elsewhere. While researching in Italy, although the Rastafari movement is very young, I was lucky enough to encounter a few dreadtalk or patois words adapted to Italian. For example, Ras Julio modified his city’s name Perugia with PeruJah, replacing ‘gia’ (which sounds the same in Italian as Jah) 136 with Jah (the name of God). A further example of Italian creation is the word made up by Ras Cool, I-micizia from the Italian word amicizia (friendship), replacing the ‘a’ with ‘I’. If we can call this ability to move easily between different linguistic registers, the Italian Rastafari with whom I conducted my research were practising ‘trans-languaging’ (Tomei and Hollington, 2020) as they move in and out of Italian as well. When I started fieldwork in Italy, I was very lucky to meet and interview Ras Tewelde who besides being a Rastafari reggae performer, is also a linguist who studies the use and consumption of patois and dreadtalk in Shashamane Ethiopia. During the interview, he made me realise that we were both adopting mixed words in our phrases picking them up from Italian, patois, English and dreadtalk. For example, when he came to pick me up at the train station, he greeted me with, Blessings Rastafari! gwa gwan? Come stai sista, hai fatto buon viaggio? (Blessings Rastafari! How are you? How are you sister, did you have a good journey?’). I replied, Blessings brother! Tutto bene grazie (Blessings brother! All went fine, thanks). While I was interviewing Ras Tewelde in his home, he made me aware that while we were talking, we were both engaged in what he called trans-languaging or ‘language switching’. As he explained to me during our conversation, The idea of trans-languaging is that I subconsciously consider [it] appropriate to use a certain language than another, because it represents more the idea of the message I wanted to communicate, so, I draw on another linguistic repertoire. Furthermore, Ras Tewelde added, that he is not always performing trans-languaging. He speaks Italian with his parents and English when he is teaching at the university. However, because he is married to a Jamaican (Ethiopian born) Rastafari woman, Ras Tewelde performs trans-137 languaging in his everyday life mostly at home with his wife, children and of course in the presence of other Italian Rastafari. A further local aspect of trans-languaging in Italy involves learning how to speak dread talk. Learning and appropriating the language is a way for Italian Rasta to join the community and understand their beliefs through words such as InI, Livity, Ital, Reasoning, Overstanding, Just-ice and Irie. In Italy, dreadtalk and patois are being absorbed, contextualised and refashioned in a local way. For example, it is possible to learn Rastafari dreadtalk and experience trans-languaging during the Iyahbingi radio show run by Ras Julio. This popular show has been running for five years, every Sunday. During the programme Ras Julio explains to the audience the Rastafari Livity often using Biblical references and testimonies from Jamaican elders. Despite the programme being predominantly in Italian, Ras Julio employs trans-languaging throughout the broadcast, mixing Italian, dreadtalk, English and patois explaining their meaning for those who are new to Rastafari. The programme also teaches you to be a translanguager as defined by Ras Tewelde. The following account supports this point. All the episodes of the radio programme begin with a recorded speech of Haile Selassie, followed by Ras Julio’s personal Rastafari greetings, Here is His Imperial Majesty Selassie I, the Kings of Kings, Lord of Lord, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Juda, Elect of God, Rightful light, His Imperial majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I, the creator of life, everlasting light, supreme force of Ireation [creation], supreme force of dispensItion [dispensation], His Imperial majesty, papa and King, Yes! The Negus Negasta, ruler of Israel, black Christ in flesh, in His skinny character, Yes! RastafarI greetings Iyahbingi family, welcome forward! Questa è la ventesima puntata di questa quinta stagione, bentornati nella nostra yard di cultura e Livity Rastafari [This is the 20th episode of this 5th season, welcome back in our yard 138 of culture and Livity Rastafari]. Quindi [So] Bless and Love, More Life, more blessings, more Rastafari vibrations (from Iyahbingi Radio Show 24/11/2019 St 11 pt. 20 https://www.reggaeradio.it/iyahbingi-radio-show/). This account shows how Ras Julio during his programme is performing trans-languaging and word-switching. He is not just someone speaking in Italian with knowledge of Rastafari; Ras Julio’s trans-languaging performances are synonymous with lifelong learning and lived experience of improvising and switching between languages. 5.3 Chanting Down Babylon The Nyabinghi drumming is the most powerful, spiritual sound. It works as a cleansing or healing music. The chanting when we are chanting together is like one sound, one vibration and you feel part of the spiritual vibration (Sista Fyah, interview 2019, London). For Sista Fyah a Nyabinghi Rasta woman from London, chanting is one of the most important sonic, creative and sacred worshipping performances within Rastafari. Many Rastafari share this sentiment. This is due to their belief that through the power of spoken words (Nommo) during chanting, they can contribute to the fall and destruction of Babylon. In this sense Rastafari chanting and drumming are religio-political weapons or tools ‘with eschatological consequences’ (Partridge 2010: 31). However, the chanting’s sound is lived and performed in a variety of subjective ways among the participants. Sista Fyah for example, experienced chanting not only as calling for Babylon’s destruction but also as an ontological sound for healing and cleansing from Babylon’s pollution. 139 Chanting is always accompanied by drumming. If I compare it with the drumming of Vodou or Santeria, the drumming of the Nyabinghi is much softer and slower. The musical accompaniment consists of a heartbeat rhythm played in a 4/4 time on a trinity of drums. To Rastafari, the Nyabinghi heartbeat rhythm has the power to reconnect humanity with the divinity, through its unique, sonic ‘spiritual vibration.’ More than that, it is also able to reconnect Rastafari in an imaginative way to Africa and to their ancestors who were enslaved due to its associations with slavery and anti-colonial revolt. Drumming and chanting in this context work as the sound of reparation, I would take it [the Nyabinghi sound and chants] out from [commercial] music, because when I hear the drums for me it is like listening to the heartbeat of all the ancestors, all in one place at one time. When I hear it, it moves me and takes me to a deep meditation, sometimes it hurts me because I can feel the pain and struggle of my ancestors, but at the same time is like this sound liberating their soul and mind. So for me, the drum is the most powerful, liberating, touching vibration (Sista Fyah interview London 2019). In January 2019 I attended the Genna (Ethiopian Christmas) Rastafari celebration, in London at the West Indian cultural centre. 140 Figure 12 Flyer about Genna celebration London 2019 (front) (My own picture). 141 Figure 13 Flyer about Genna celebration London 2019 (back) (My own picture). The celebration at the West Indian cultural centre began with Nyabinghi chanting and drumming. A large group of Rastafari gathered on the stage and accompanied by drumming started chanting down Babylon, singing ‘Inna di Armageddonnnn, fire burnnnnnn, fire burnnnnnn, fire burnnnnnn’, for several minutes. While the drums were playing, the audience engaged physically by dancing but also sonically chanting with them ‘fire burnnnnnn, fire burnnnnnn, fire burnnnnnn’. The ritual repetition of ‘fire burn’ and the continual sound of the drums created an intense sound which seemed to sacralise the place and make it Rasta. Furthermore, it gave the listeners a sort of sensation that a fire (even if invisible) was really burning. It was like the more they were singing the refrain ‘fire burnnnnnn’ and beating the 142 drums, the more the fire was increasing. This is a beautiful example of how the concept of Nommo works within Rastafari word-sound making. The belief amongst Rasta that Babylon will burn on judgement day is a Biblical reference taken from the book of Revelation. Rastafari by chanting the passages from the holy book of Revelation believes that they can contribute to Babylon’s destruction and to the realisation of Zion on this earth. Although chanting i.e., ‘fire burnnnnnn’ might sound negative or violent to ordinary people, for Rastafari it represents the sound which accompanies the victory of Jah (God) over evil. Rastafari reverse the Western Christian idea of fire linked to hell; fire to them has a positive meaning and it is an agent of divine purification. Furthermore, the utterance ‘fire burn’ or ‘keep the fire burning’ has not only a sacred and Biblical significance. This expression is actually a hymn of resistance related to the time of slavery and colonisation when the first act of any slave revolt was to burn the plantations down. Fire then is associated with black resistance to and rebellion against Babylon and the colonial system it represents. Rastafari by chanting ‘fire burn’ not only emphasising its power but they are also re-enacting by the transcendent burning, a form of resistance to colonialism in the present. In this case, the chanting is a kind of praxis for personal and communal spiritual but also political empowerment. During fieldwork in Britain, I learned that Rastafari religious celebrations along with rites of passage are always accompanied by Nyabinghi chanting and drumming. I also had the opportunity to participate in Nyabinghi chants during fieldwork in Italy. The seniors explained that they mainly learnt the Nyabinghi chants through travelling, personal direct links with Jamaican Rastafari or through their peers. The experience of Ras Dan is an example, As I was telling you my Jamaican friend who lived here in Sicily introduced me to Nyabinghi [chants and drumming] and we use them during Rasta celebrations. For me, 143 Nyabinghi and Jamaican chants are much easier to learn than the drums or chants of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church. However, for me, it is a sacred sound that must accompany Rasta celebrations. Ras Dan’s statement highlights how Rastafari sonic choices are based on pragmatic forms of reasoning. To Ras Dan both Nyabinghi and the Orthodox chants and sounds are the agency of the sacred, however, the former is chosen for practical reasons and its simplicity to learn. The first Nyabinghi chant that I participated in Italy was during the local Rastafari celebration of Timket. Timket is the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Epiphany and marks the baptism of Jesus Christ on the river Jordan. On the 19th of January 2020, I was invited to an Ethiopian lunch at a private home to celebrate the festivity with some Rastafari living in Rome. After having enjoyed a delicious Ethiopian meal cooked by Sista Amina, the festivities soon moved to the living room and a drumming performance began. What I found extremely fascinating was that they were in the middle of making an Italian chant in honour of the coming Rastafari Jubilee in November 2020. The celebration of this Jubilee is a local creation and commemoration. The chant was in honour and remembrance of Haile Selassie’s visit to Italy 50 years ago (1970) and emphasised his forgiveness regarding Italy’s fascist past. This chant, a mix of English and dreadtalk shows how local Italian Rasta have readapted and reproduced the Rastafari chanting tradition on Italian soil to suit Italian needs. In this case the chant was performed not only as a tribute to the visit of the King but also to emphasise the Italian Rastafari opposition to fascism. This chant is called ‘50 years ago’ and is available online.20 In this context, the Nyabinghi chanting is lived more as a sound for celebrating Rastafari events, the divinity of Haile Selassie and anti-fascism than as an ontological sound to reconnect to Africa or the ancestors. In the 20 The song ‘50 years ago’ https://youtu.be/w_Qmt345k_I?si=qeN6GtOsaZyktLqh. 144 Italian context, the Nyabinghi sound often functions as a tool to make a song, a space or a celebration, Rastafari. It is a sound which marks Rastafari identities and authenticity. 5.3.1 Toasting and ‘Poetizing’ I have already noted above Sista Fyah’s concern about the dangers that attend to the commercialisation of sound. When most people think of Rastafari, they think of one or more globally acclaimed and highly commercialised artistic and sonic forms, notably toasting, dub and reggae. Toasting can be considered the popular and commercial way of chanting, and it can be performed in any context. It can be argued to be Rastafari’s secular sound. Through the power of the sound system and the sound of dub and reggae, the toaster’s voice is essential to any dub or reggae performance. Toasting is to dub and reggae what chanting is to Nyabinghi, an essential element of sonic Nommo performances. On the 17th of February 2021, the passing of one of the pioneers of toasting U-Roy was announced. He was the first to open a reggae song toasting in Amharic as his song Rightful Ruler (1969) testifies: Kibir Amlak (Glory to Jah) Qedamawi Ras Fetari (First creator) Qedamawi Iyesus Kristos (Holy Jesus Christ) Lebdama mabrak isad tenayistilgn (Greetings). However, while chanting is predominantly inspired by Biblical references, toasting is more secular, social and political, and focuses more on everyday life issues. In February 2020, I participated in the Earthday (or Earthstrong/birthday) celebration of Ras Santo in Rome. For the occasion, a dub Jamaican DJ from London Ras Digby was invited. This was very interesting because I could listen to an Italian and English dub toasting session between transnational and diasporic Rastafari. Ras Digby started to play dub music and started to toast on it, 145 Revolution fi di young and di old, revolution! make the good time roll it, silver than silver, good time must a fi rola …. Babylon wants take control but Rasta run tings, Babylon want a fi beg pon tings, but we are rise and give Jah the glory! Toasting is impromptu or improvised and a good toaster is believed to be inspired directly by God. Ras Digby’s performance was admired by the public, people were dancing in appreciation of his style of languaging. It is important not to forget that dub and reggae are the most accessible ways to learn, listen and practice dreadtalk. Music is the most important global resource for learning, expressing and performing Rastafari knowledge and belonging, within both the diasporic and transnational communities. As Ras Julio highlighted during one of his Radio shows, Rastafari brought God's message into music, into modern life outside the churches, outside the temples but into everyday life (Ras Julio Iyahbingi Radio show). However, in contrast to chanting which is almost already in a box ready to be consumed, toasting is created, it is spontaneous, extemporaneous, and an improvised performance applied to dub and reggae tracks. During fieldwork, I noticed that dub and reggae are also used for further languaging performances amongst Rasta, such as poetry. The most well-known Rastafari poet in Britain is Benjamin Zephaniah, yet he is not the only one. During fieldwork, I had the opportunity to meet Ras Harry, a Rasta poet and musician. While we were Reasoning at his home, he told me that since he embraced Rastafari, Jah (God) gave him the gift of making poetic musical verses. He was very happy to show me his work especially his poem called ‘Civil-lie-Zation’: It has been a civil-lie from time to memorial 146 It has been a civil-lie from generation to generation It has been a civil-lie with nothing but brutality and injustice at it’s helm So tell me? How civil was it to have made slaves out of women, children, and men… (Harry, 2018) In his poem, Ras Harry plays with the word ‘civilization’ in order to de-colonise history and to address the barbaric violence of Western ‘civilisation’ during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In this sense chanting and poetry are working as a tool for social and cultural justice. 5.4 The power of Naming During fieldwork I noticed that most of the participants in Britain and Italy adopt double identities and/or double names, for example, their birth name and their Rasta name. But why do they feel the necessity to change their names? This section will explore how name changing is a further dimension of languaging performance, practiced for different and subjective personal needs. As will be shown, these performances are often entangled within processes of creolisation and decolonisation. While researching in Britain, when I asked the participants about their names, some replied that they decided to change it as they started to embrace Rastafari, to de-colonise their own identities from Western influences. As a result of centuries of slavery, most Caribbean people still carry the surnames assigned to them as a result of their enslavement. In light of this, many Rastafari change their names because it conveys all the pain of slavery. Whilst Reasoning with Sista Makeda I asked if this was her real name and she replied, I changed my name through Deed Poll because I had a Western name and I am not Western and I did not choose it, so I changed it to an African one. 147 Her statement shows the link between naming, culture and historical experience amongst diasporic Rastafari. Sista Makeda lived her Western name as the carrier of Western culture, slavery and colonialism which is why she felt the necessity to change it. Finally, her new name carries a different sound and the African heritage she believes is necessary for performing and living her Rastafari identity. She was not the only one to have this view. For example, when I asked Ras Baku why he chose his name, he told me, I chose it because it carries both Caribbean and African cultures within… I wanted to change my name with a non-Western name. The above statements highlight the importance and power that Rastafari give to naming for the process of decolonising their identities. The power of naming also works as a tool for the development and performance of self-authority and identification with Africa among Rasta. Rastafari men refer to themselves as Ras, which is a title of honour and nobility in Ethiopia. Furthermore, they also address themselves or are addressed as King, Lion, Binghi and Congo, while women as Princess, Queen or Empress. According to Hutton and Murrell the use of African names or appellatives inspires in the diaspora ‘psychological identity and black consciousness’ as they identify with African nobility, endurance, and resistance (1998: 50). Through the concept of Nommo and the power that they give to words these characteristics become embodied by Rasta through their new names. While Reasoning with Ras Bongo in London, I asked him what nationality he was and he firmly replied, ‘I am African!’, although he was born in Jamaica and grew up in Britain. The bond with Africa and the use of the title Ras is not only lived by the Rastafari diasporic community, actually this is a globally diffused practice amongst male Rastafari. During fieldwork, many times I wondered how Rastafari were reconciling their decolonial 148 performances and views with their identification with the Ethiopian monarchy. Most of the participants explained to me that according to the Kebra Nagast (the most precious holy book for Ethiopian Christians) the lineage of the Ethiopian monarchy could be traced back three thousand years to the Solomonic dynasty. Therefore, while the Western monarchies and another form of imperialism or politics (communism, fascism) are lived amongst Rastafari as agents of Babylon, the Ethiopian monarchy is perceived and lived as a sacred and righteous one because it is descended from the Davidic dynasty and as such represents a more authentic and holy form of power. Naming practices as an agency of decolonisation and African identity also surfaced during fieldwork in Italy, although with some different emphases. Some Italian Rastafari, in fact, used naming as a way to reconcile with the horror of Italian fascism in Ethiopia. In contrast to diasporic Rastafari, Italian Rastafari felt the need for decolonisation not only in relation to the slave trade (i.e., Christopher Columbus) but also in relation to fascism. Some of the participants stated that some of their older relatives were fascists, and, as Ras Negasi put it, as Rasta they feel the need for a form of ‘karmic reparation’. Furthermore, Africa is Italy’s next-door neighbour and many participants from Southern Italy perceive themselves closer to African culture than European. This is reflected in the experiences of many of the participants, for example when I asked Ras Tewelde why he changed his name he said, For me, changing the name is like for the Caribbean broke free from Babylon. At the level of localization of identity, I have never denied that I am, and I feel like truly Ethiopian!!! I have felt that I am Ethiopian since I realized that Haile Selassie is my father, so if he is my father, I am Ethiopian. 149 Ras Tewelde is not the only Rastafari in Italy to identify as Ethiopian. While Reasoning with Sista Amina she told me how she had felt the need to be blessed by the Tewahedo Orthodox Church in Ethiopia and to be given a new name. She told me, I was reborn in Ethiopia, in the spirit, and for me the spirit is everything, it is all my essence, it is DNA, it is the skin, I feel Ethiopian! Sista Amina and Ras Tewelde’s statements show that the factors that influenced their name changing was their contact with both Rastafari and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. They do not use Rastafari resources but Biblical references and Christian Orthodox practices to explain and perform their name-switching. Their statements show that in the making of their Rasta identities they are clearly, wittingly or unwittingly using a decolonising strategy coined by Spivak (1988) as ‘strategic essentialism’. In this case, in order to recover from the trauma of fascism and build her Rastafarian identity, Sista Amina uses her body in a strategic way focusing on her skin, her DNA and her nationality. She is choosing an essentialist strategy to deconstruct and reconstruct her identity. By linking her DNA, skin and nationality to Ethiopia she embraces ‘negritude’ affirming a black identity in a ‘Fanonian’ way. According to Nielsen (2013), ‘Fanonian strategic essentialism recognizes Negritude's positive re-invention of “blackness” as a social reality, constructed by the oppressed for specific socio-political, emancipatory, and therapeutic aims’ (2013: 350). For Sista Amina this was important in part because of comments made to her by other Rastafari, such as, Huuuuuuuuuu (long exclamation sound) [while talking with non-Italian Rasta] I have been called Mussolini more than once! Therefore, although name-switching practices are embraced by most Rastafari there are different, subjective and contextual reasons behind them. Whilst conversing with Ras Shango 150 Baku in a coffee shop in Kings Cross station (London) when I asked him the meaning of his name, he said, Shango in Nigeria is an Orisha and also a religion in Trinidad, while Baku is described as a spirit in Trinidad tradition. In Trinidad Baku is believed to be a spirit that sits on one's shoulder advising one of the ways forward. Baku is said to beat the individual with many strokes if the advice is not heeded! They say this spirit is fed with bananas! When I asked why he chose a Caribbean name rather than an African or Biblical name which are generally chosen by Rastafari, he answered, People don’t understand that to be Rasta you have to carry with you your Caribbean culture because Rasta has been influenced by all the Caribbean culture and religions. Although Ras Baku like Sista Amina and Ras Twelde is decolonising his identity through his new name, like them he is going beyond Rastafari resources. What is significant about Ras Baku’s statement is that through his name-switching and the creative and Creole narrative surrounding his new name which also characterises Caribbean cultures, he is reversing the strategic essentialism adopted by Sista Amina while decolonising her identity. By perceiving himself as Caribbean, African and Rastafari and by relying on various Caribbean divinities, he is performing what I will call strategic creolisation. Strategic creolisation is performed by Ras Baku as a way to decolonise his identity from any Western influences and through his name restore pride and dignity to the creative and Creole cultures and histories which characterise the Caribbean and from which Rastafari developed. By switching their names, Rastafari try to reclaim a heritage and an ancestry by renaming themselves, by getting rid of the name they associate with Babylon and replacing it with an Ethiopian, African or Caribbean name. By reclaiming through name-switching their 151 ancestry, they are decolonising their identities, expressing self-empowerment and self-determination to create themselves anew. Naming can be considered a Sankofa practice amongst Rastafari (see chapter seven). Some Rastafari are also adopting names from the Bible, particularly within the Twelve Tribes where each member adopts as a second name the name of the tribe of his month of birth (see chant figure 35). As Ras Naphtali explained to me, When I seriously embraced Rasta, I changed my middle name because my middle name was supposed to be Anthony. Back in 1990-89, I gave myself a Rasta name, one was Naphtali that’s in my passport, and it’s from the Twelve Tribe but the other name is Esdrai. In the Bible Esdras was a big prophet, but Esdrai is a humble farmer. I did not want to call myself Esdras, I don’t see myself as this big prophet, I am more identifying with the humble farmer (and laughed). I wanted to change my name for identity reasons and embrace the Rasta identity. I have been serious about it! Frequently, Rastafari choose their new name referring to characters not directly linked to the Bible, Rastafari, Caribbean or African cultures. For example, during fieldwork in Italy I discovered that some participants use naming to embrace a more subjective identity as Rasta. For example, during our Reasoning in his house, while drinking a delicious Neapolitan coffee with Ras Hobo, he told me, I have adopted this name since I started doing reggae seriously. In [19]82, [19]83 I was struck by the figure of this Hobo who is nothing more than a wanderer ... and in some ways, I feel like a wanderer. 152 Although Ras Hobo told me that Hobo’s do not necessarily have anything to do with Rastafari, he adopted this name as a metaphor for Rastafari and the black experience of deportation, which erased people’s identities making them homeless, as the name Hobo suggests. 5.4.1 Rastafari Words from the West to the East Rastafari loves to play with words and sounds, conscious of the creative power behind them. As discussed earlier, Rastafari languaging is shaped by historical experience, personal creativity and emotional involvement. This is supported by the recent adoption of new words borrowed, picked, chosen and fashioned from other languages, religions or cultures. The data gathered among diasporic and transnational Rastafari highlights increasing interest in the adoption of Asian words or concepts. For instance, in both Britain and Italy words such as mantra, yoga, chakra, karma, bardo and karmic reparation often cropped up during my conversations with the participants. While Reasoning with Ras Prime, we ended up talking about the Hare Krishna. He told me that he often participates in their worship and celebrations, You don’t need to change and become a Krishna worshiper [when you go to their meetings] you just want to chant the Mantra, and live good, they don’t care if you are Buddhist or a Rasta, it does not matter to them. Ras Prime suggests that being Rasta can be lived in many ways for example, experiencing the Hare Krishna celebrations, practicing mantras or Yoga classes, as he does in his everyday life. Furthermore, he also talked about new ways of chanting which for him can include chanting a Hare Krishna or a Buddhist mantra not only Rastafari chants. For Ras Prime the effect is the same, both sounds connect him to the divine. When I asked Ras Prime ‘what is power for you?’, he answered, 153 Power is connecting with the divine and overstand the energy that exist that’s power. Through mantra you can go close to the source, that’s depend how you focus the energy. Even yoga helps to connect to the energy, and you can see things. That’s what I do when I want to clean my mind, I do Hatha yoga and I focus…Tai Chi move your energy and rise power too, it’s all about focus. What is important for Ras Prime, in fashioning his Rastafari identity is the relationship with the divine that can be achieved through various Rastafari practices and also through Yoga, Tai Chi or chanting mantras. All these practices creolise his identity as a diasporic Rastafari. According to the testimonies collected in both locations for some Rasta, yoga and meditation are starting to become more common everyday practices. Moreover, while reading the biography of Ras Caleb, I found a very interesting passage where he states, The majority of Rastas are regular people, simple and straightforward; only a few of them are aware or informed of the existence of the Chakras. Although many Rastas still continue to privilege the objective of a physical return to Africa from 1977 onwards the real new trend, capable of creating a following is based on inner repatriation, the one that also passes through the doors of our Chakras. In choosing, mixing and juxtaposing the Hindu concept of Chakra with the political Rastafari concept of repatriation, Ras Caleb transforms repatriation from a physical, political and economic process to an internal, subjective and mystical one. In fact, the journey to Africa according to Ras Caleb can be accomplished through the adoption of bodily meditative and spiritual Eastern practices, re-shaped for a Rastafari personal inner repatriation. However, since Rastafari was developed as a movement for African repatriation, this view inverts the political ideology which is at the roots of Rastafari, pointing to a more spiritual, pragmatic and holistic choice. Ras Caleb’s experiences show how a big concept such as repatriation once localised 154 can be lived and experienced with new local meanings and viewpoints. Similarly, while Reasoning with Ras Jonas in Italy, he drew upon Eastern religious language and the Buddhist term Bardo to describe the four hundred years of transatlantic slavery, That's why there are Bardos, those holes of suffering so you can be reborn. And that's why the Africans who went to Jamaica have been 400 years without an identity. But despite this, the love for Africa has never died, you are in front of it, you are black. But these 400 years, unfortunately of atrocities served to give birth to this beautiful phenomenon that is today, Rastafari. Which has given back identity to those who had lost it. With this statement, Ras Jonas shows how he is using complex philosophical Eastern concepts such as Bardo to address the Caribbean transatlantic experience. Bardo within Buddhism is a transitional time (49 days) in which the soul travels from death to rebirth (Matt, 2015). However, Ras Jonas uses this concept in the way he needed as a Rastafari, to address 400 years of slavery. If Ras Jonas juxtaposed concepts from Eastern traditions with Rastafari as part of his own personal journey of religious discovery, Ras Wiz fuses the different traditions together, InI can also be the energy they say, the Chakra that the Buddhists say. InI is the Jamaican version of the concept of Chakras, like karma, which in Jamaica it is [expressed with] ‘whats go around comes around’ so you are always responsible for everything you do. 155 5.5 Reversing ‘Trans-languaging’: the Authenticity of Texts A thread throughout this chapter has been the link between languaging practices such as chanting, name-switching, wordplay and decolonisation. These languaging performances are, therefore, something that you can switch around and play with. In this section, this link is transformed, and the site of decolonisation shifts away from the (sonic) play of words to the frozen text, and it begins with a certain view of language. During fieldwork in Italy, a further perspective on word-switching was supplied by Ras Gebre the president of F.A.R.I. (Federazione Autonoma Rastafari Italiani). While we were Reasoning he told me that he would like to see the translation of dreadtalk and the practice of word-switching in Italian, because in his view English is the language of the colonisers. I noticed that this view was supported also by other Italian Rastafari as the following account of my Reasoning with Ras Negasi testifies, I would like dreadtalk to be applied to Italian. But the first step is recognizing the corruption of the language, negative words in our language such as ‘mente’ (mind) also means ‘mentire’ (lying). It is important to understand that redemption is not only physical or spiritual but also linguistic, this is why I think it is necessary to adapt dreadtalk to Italian. However, I tend to use Amharic or Ge’ez. The testimonies of Ras Gebre and Ras Negasi shows how Jamaican dreadtalk can be lived and perceived as a language contaminated by colonialism. They both would like dreadtalk to be applied to Italian. However, as Ras Negasi underlines, Italian has also been corrupted by centuries of Vatican cultural and religious hegemony as well as by nationalism. For Ras Negasi both Italian and dreadtalk are corrupted languages, in fact he specifies that he uses Amharic or 156 Ge’ez, as purer and more authentic vehicles for the achievement of spiritual redemption. This shows how Hall’s (1995) selective essentialism work in the pursuit of self-determination. Although many Rastafari in Italy are learning these Ethiopian languages, they are neither easy to access nor easy to learn. The extreme position taken by Ras Negasi concerning Ethiopian languages and redemption is a sort of strategic essentialism which posits them as sources of authenticity as against Italian, English and dreadtalk. In this way, Ras Negasi is effectively positioning the dreadtalk as inauthentic and by implication the Italian Rastafari who identify with Ethiopia as the true Rasta. However, Ras Negasi does not speak Amharic or Ge’ez in his everyday life but uses these languages mainly while praying and worshipping at the Orthodox Tewahedo Church of Bari or while composing lyrics for his music. Nevertheless, using and studying Ge’ez and Amharic by some Italian Rastafari is significant because it turns languaging from being something playful to something that promises pure access to an uncontaminated sacred language. It is important to underline here that for many Rastafari the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox church retains and preserves the most ancient forms of Christian knowledge. The first time that I heard Ge’ez was when I was invited by Sista Amina and Ras Din to celebrate the Ethiopian Christmas Genna celebration at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church of Rome. The Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on the 7th of January at midnight, which many Rastafari celebrate. 157 Figure 14 Genna celebration at the Ethiopic Church of Rome (2020) (My own picture). At the church in Rome, most of the participants had an Ethiopian Amharic background, therefore, while the homilies were read traditionally in Ge’ez, all the other prayers were read in Amharic. During the mass, the only word I could understand was Selassie. As Ras Din explained to me later, the word referred not to the King but to the Trinity as Selassie means Trinity in Amharic. This event was a million miles away from the Genna celebrations I had attended the year before in London with the sound of the Nyabinghi drumming and chanting ‘fire burnnnnnn’. There was a handful of Rastafari in the audience who considered the 158 Ethiopian Church as their church. According to the participant’s testimonies, many Ethiopians in the church of Rome including the Abas (priests) see Rastafari as blasphemous in considering Haile Selassie the returned messiah or God, this is why their presence is not always welcome. Despite this, Italian Rastafari continues to participate in the church events. When I asked Sista Amina why she decided to go to a church that rejects the divinity of Selassie and where the services are held in a language she did not understand, she said, They have such powerful language that it is not made up of words, it didn't bother me that I didn't understand it rationally because when I listen to it, I am in ecstasy. Then slowly I decided to attend a course... at the Oriental Institute ... Now I can read it but I don't know what I read. Although I must say that since there is a projector recently in the church, I can read the prayers (see image 13 above). The focus of Italian Rastafari on textual and linguistic resources is reversing the creativity of languaging, and ‘trans-languaging’ as a search for a purer, fixed and more authentic holy language, a sound that lies closer to the divine source. Sista Amina lives Ge’ez as a divine language, one not made by ‘mortal’ human beings. She experiences it as a series of divine, sacred and pure textual signs, uncorrupted and unaltered in their form, sound and meaning, enabling her to connect and experience a universal divine sound. While reading the prayer she is imagining and living its sound as the original divine sound of the creation and of the first Christians. To Sista Amina, Ge’ez texts are agents of authenticity and religious authority, the textual sound stands outside time and space, arriving to her intact as something sacred, authentic and true. This attitude toward the sacrality of the sound of textual sources which often are not even understood is also detectable in other religions. This is analogous to how Arabic and Sanskrit are considered authentic untouched sacred languages by Muslims and Hindus. Sound 159 does not come from creative utterances but through a written source conceived and experienced by practitioners as a higher expression of the sacred. This idea of Ge’ez as a sacred, pure and untouched language, surfaced while I was Reasoning with Ras Negasi. During one of our Reasonings, he told me, It is important to understand that redemption is not only physical or spiritual but also linguistic. Western thought, you must know, is corrupt… the only less corrupt Biblical version of the New Testament is the Greek version. Anyway, I am very lucky because I started my studies very young, and I have the opportunity to be able to read the Bible in Ge’ez. Ras Negasi also imagines Ge’ez as a sacred and pure language, that has never been altered but preserved in its original form throughout time. Here decolonisation occurs through an imaginary passage back into myth, occasioned by Ge’ez. As he stressed, Ge’ez language is a language of decolonization. Ge’ez means in fact first and original. It is the absolute language that restores divinity because it is a sacred language in words. According to the participants’ experiences and imagination, only the sound of reading Ge’ez texts has the power to take them back to a time where language was pure, sacred and preserved as divine. The performance of engaging in ‘authenticating rituals’ (McGuire, 2008) is an agency for Rastafari of commitment and authority. In fact, these authenticating performances are pivotal for Italian Rastafari identities, which are involved in the production of new knowledge, different from the ones provided by the Jamaican or diasporic Elders. For Italian Rastafari, claiming Ge’ez as the genuine authentic sound of spiritual, physical, linguistic, divine knowledge and redemption, totally reverses the negative meta-narrative developed around 160 Ethiopia and its culture by Mussolini during fascism. In choosing and combining various aspects of Ethiopian culture, Rastafari in Italy are trying to reverse and repair the history of their grandfathers, by glorifying and deifying this land. Ras Negasi explains this point, Living with my grandparents and hearing their war stories in Ethiopia, created a link in me with this country from an early age. One of my grandparents also has an Ethiopian family. Sista Amina expressed the same feeling when she was telling me about her blessing in Ethiopia, Since I could not decide where to get baptized, I made the Aba decide, he chose Debre Libanos. Debre Libanos is the place where the Italian fascist army massacred thousands of Ethiopians. Of course, as an Italian it was strange to think of being baptized there, I experienced it as a reversal of the historical perspective, I was very moved by this choice. ‘Karmic reparation’ is achieved by Italian Rastafari, not only by embracing piety and commitment to the Ethiopian King but also toward his culture, religion and most of all the sound of his sacred language. During fieldwork in Italy, it was difficult to draw a line among the participants in their involvement with Rastafari and the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church because they were overlapping and intertwining with each other, as one. In the diaspora, although many are close to or blessed by the Ethiopic Tewahedo Church, they are much less involved in its worshipping practices, in church attendance, or in the study of the Ge’ez language. Conclusion This chapter has analysed Rastafari’s lived experiences and social practices related to sound, speech, and text. It has highlighted the decolonising role of their use of language through which 161 Rastafari manifest their identities through creative performances and their local adaptations to both Britain and Italy. By focusing on the micro-scale of lived life, it has been possible to identify how the dreadtalk has been globalised and glocalised, but also how word-play performances are subjective and imaginative, adopted and adapted to various cultures and languages. The creativity behind languaging performances shows how Rastafari uses these linguistic social practices to maintain, develop and create their identities as Rastafari and make them manifest in their everyday lives. It has been shown also how chanting is used by the diasporic movement as a political and religious weapon to contribute to the fall of Babylon, through the power of Nommo. However, chanting is also a creative and imaginative performance and as demonstrated by subjective Rastafari experiences, it can be lived as an ontological sound which cleans and heals people from Babylon’s spiritual pollution. On the one hand, this sound is experienced in the diaspora as an ontological sound able to reconnect the Rastafari to Africa and to their ancestor’s enslavement experience. In this sense, it’s lived as a spiritual and political reparative sound, the sound of black liberation. On the other hand, in Italy chanting is lived and performed more as a sound through which Rastafari people emphasise their opposition to fascism and affirms their Rastafari identity. It has been highlighted how name-switching, which is always a creative and subjective performance, involves more of a secular dimension to achieve personal, social and political justice. The analysis of personal experiences has emphasised how diasporic Rastafari are using the power of naming to decolonise their identities, which has shown the link between naming and the historical experience of slavery. Naming is lived amongst the diaspora as a tool for self-empowerment and black consciousness. In Italy, this practice is experienced more to build a Rastafari identity, but also to reconcile with the occupation of Ethiopia during fascism. 162 Furthermore, the adoption of Ethiopian names, often experienced through christening by the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church, is also lived as a form of civic and religious disobedience toward Catholicism which was complicit with fascism and Mussolini in the occupation of Ethiopia. In fact, some Italian Rastafari are using name-switching as a form of cultural switch from Italian and Catholic culture, and as an imaginative way to enact Karmic reparation which marks their anti-fascist position toward the occupation of Ethiopia. Therefore, naming practices are often used as an agent of self-empowerment and identity construction vis-à-vis local history, politics and religious hegemonies. This happens through subjective choices of strategic essentialism and/or strategic creolisation. Furthermore, naming can be considered not only as a Nommo performance but also as a Sankofa activity (see chapter 7). In relation to the interest of Italian Rastafari toward Ge’ez, they orient themselves to what they consider to be an authentic divine language that through study, will bring them closer to the sacred. They do so by learning about Ge’ez or by experiencing its sound. The Rastafari experiences recorded above demonstrate that the dichotomy between Derrida and Austin, and the western binary opposition between the oral and the written resources is irrelevant. Rastafari subjective experiences demonstrate that both the sound of words and texts have an emotive and performative impact on Rastafari everyday life. This chapter also demonstrates how people engage in active identity construction according to their distinctive location (national, diasporic and transnational), histories and needs. 163 6.0 Living Material Culture 6.1 Ashe and Material Culture Amongst the Yoruba of West Africa, community members share a belief in the concept of Ashe. This concept is part of a wider African ontology, and it is the divine energy and power of creation which exists within all things, living and inanimate. While Nommo is the power intrinsic within words, Ashe is the power within bodies (humans, animals, plants) and things (Bankole, 2009). However, Ashe (like Nommo) is not a stable power or randomly present but is created. It can be erased, produced or nourished by people’s activities (or inactivity) through people’s relationships and feelings toward one another or certain objects. I will show how some Rastafari treat and relate to things as containers of special powers, qualities or essences. In this sense objects and things become animate mediators carrying with them a power, something akin to that which is described by the concept of Ashe. This term has been used sometimes during my conversations and extended contact with Rastafari in Britain, outside recorded Reasonings, as a form of greeting (replacing the word ‘bye’ or ‘bless’). It was a term which I learned while studying Vodou and Santeria, however, the fact that it was used by some Rasta as a greeting inspired my choice to employing it for this chapter, as I see a sort of historical relationality and link between the two ways of use the term. In The Social Life of Things (1986), Appadurai enacts what he calls ‘methodological fetishism’ (1986:5) to privilege objects and things and their centrality to social life. Fetishism is a term that emerged in the encounter between Portuguese and West Africans (Pietz, 1988). 164 The African worldview toward things, their relationality and values have historically been stigmatised and conceived as ‘fetishism’ by Europeans. William Pietz in his series of essays called ‘The problem of the Fetish’ (1985, 1987, 1988) highlighted that this term was developed and deployed by the Catholic Holy Inquisition in the sixteenth century, during the colonial encounters, between Africans and Europeans. As argued by Matory, African objects ‘come to be called fetishes precisely because Africans, Europeans, and their descendent have looked at them and intensely disagreed about the value and agency that can legitimately be attributed to them and their makers’ (2018: xix). According to Pietz (1988), any given value related to an object has the power to create relationships and power structures among social groups. However, recently we are seeing a new turn within the social sciences towards a new materialism, in which the fetish and fetishism have been resurrected as useful tools of research rather than moribund terms of nineteenth century anthropology, because they highlight the role of things and objects in social processes. Matory in his last work The Fetish Revisited (2018), argues that ‘the spirited things of Europeans, Africans, and their descendants have not been produced in isolation from each other. They result from an exchange of gazes, ideas, and commodities among three continents’ (2018: xix). Bruno Latour has argued that social scientists needed to accept ‘a certain dose of fetishism’ (1996: 230). Furthermore, his actor-network-theory (Latour 2005) laid out an approach to sociology that re-positioned humans alongside things and objects, in a moving flux of interactions in a manner comparable to the re-configuration of Tylor’s animism (Tremlett, Sutherland and Harvey 2017) as to the new animism by Whitehead (2018) and Harvey (2005). These approaches deconstruct the separation and the Cartesian binary opposition between spirit/matter and object/subject, contributing to the wider objective of this thesis to try to decolonise the conceptual landscape of religious studies. 165 6.2 The Intimacy of Things 6.2.1 Materialising Rastafari During fieldwork, I have always tried to create empathy, trust and understanding with the people that I interviewed in part by showing them my passion for my research and Rastafari. It is probably for this reason that more than once I was invited by the participants into their homes for interviews. This gave me the opportunity to cross the line between public and private to access a more intimate space. This space-crossing allowed me to investigate Rastafari lived religiosity in domestic spaces and gave me the chance to discover the lives of Rastafari things. While I visited many homes during fieldwork, I encountered diverse objects and creative and imaginative ways of displaying and interacting with them. I will start this conversation and journey into Rastafari material lived religion, with the objects that I encountered in Rastafari homes. In December 2019, when I began fieldwork in Italy, I had the opportunity to visit Ras Jonas, an Italian Rastafari veteran in his home. When I entered his home, I was fascinated by the many objects, books and plants he displays in his home. I felt like I was in a Rastafari Museum in miniature. He told me he had collected many of these objects through the years, during his journeys to Jamaica and Ethiopia, while others were presents from local Rasta, or those he had met during his journeys. All around the house, there were images of Haile Selassie and Ethiopian angels displayed on the walls. There was a map of Africa surrounded by many reggae CDs. There were shelves full of Rastafari books and objects such as Rastafari coffee cups, vinyl, journals and pictures of some Jamaican Rastafari elders. At one side of his living room, there was what he called ‘the Ethiopian corner’. 166 Figure 15 The Ethiopian corner at Ras Jonas home (My own picture, verbally authorised). This special corner consisted of a shelf with a Rastafari tabernacle in miniature, with a small statue of an Ethiopian priest reading the Bible close to it. Thereabout there were stones, a big standing Meskel (Ethiopian cross), a church incense burner, a wooden plate from Ethiopia and a small Ethiopian portrait of the nativity hung on the wall. During our Reasoning I asked Ras Jonas ‘which among all these objects would you take away with you if you had to leave?’ He replied, ‘only one? the Bible!’. He told me that it does not matter which Bible you read and referring to the words of Haile Selassie, he told me that despite the different Bible translations and versions, the message never changes. While he was showing me where he keeps his Bibles, I noticed that the space was organised as a sort of altar. 167 Figure 16 Bibles on Ras Jonas’s altar (My own picture, verbally authorised). Ras Jonas told me that he always keeps one of his Bibles there, perpetually open with an Ethiopian Cross lying on top of it. There were two Bibles on the altar, he told me that the smallest was the CEI version translated directly from the Greek ‘Septuagint’, while the other bigger book which was open was the Jerusalem Bible.21 On the left side there was an incense burner and behind there was an image of a Rasta elder, an image of an Ethiopian angel, an image of Haile Selassie, a small piece of card printed with the Ethiopian alphabet and a further Ethiopian cross. This shows that although Ras Jonas emphasises his love and commitment toward Ethiopia, his worshiping is still impacted by local influences and resources linked to the Roman Catholic Church. However, besides the Bibles, what made these items distinctive was that they were creating a Christian African space. The Ethiopian angel for instance was very dissimilar to the angels depicted in Catholic churches by Michelangelo among others. There was a black African angel portrayed as a warrior not as a white, blond cherub. The 21 The CEI (Conferenza Episcopale Italiana) and the Jerusalem Bible have been adopted as the official versions by the Italian Catholic Church. 168 display of the Amharic alphabet emphasised Ras Jonas’s conviction that Amharic was the real language of Christianity, although he was still consulting Catholic Bibles that had been translated from Hebrew and Greek sources. These objects are Ras Jonas’s containers of power, but also the mediums through which his own experience, beliefs and ideas about Ethiopia can manifest in his house. By displaying these things, Ras Jonas created a Rastafari spiritual assemblage to perform, express, live and create his Rastafari identity and space on Italian soil. These objects were part of his journey of embracing Rastafari, and they were pivotal to the development and maintenance of his identity as such. When I went to visit Ras Mikael in his home in London in June 2020, the first thing that he showed me was his Bible, a bowl of water and the quartz that he uses to protect the Bible as his Jamaican grandmother taught him to do. Ras Mikael was born in Jamaica, and he came to England during the 1970s. He explained to me that quartz and water are used not only to protect the Bible from bad forces but as he said, Their energies work together, both the Bible, the water and the crystal work together to enhance the forces, they have their own powers but together they enhance each other power. Those objects for Ras Mikael contain energy and power which are amplified once they work together. While I was in his home, after we had a chat about the Bible, Ras Mikael showed me where he generally keeps the Bible. He guided me through a corridor and opened a closet and said, ‘this is my spiritual quarter, where me go and me praise’. In contrast to Ras Jonas’s house where his sacred objects were displayed openly, Ras Mikael kept his sacred objects in a private room. I remember that I was feeling honoured that he had let me access this intimate sacred space, and I also remember his wife’s surprise when he let me enter it. As I recorded in my field notes, 169 When I entered the closet, the room was quite small but full of objects with boxes and unused personal stuff on the left, and just toward the door a desk with an altar [where he keeps his Bible]. On the middle of the altar, there was a big bowl full of water surrounded by candles, an orange, a lime – used to send away bad energies – an Eau de Cologne bottle – which he uses when he goes out for a special event – and a bottle of vinegar and white rum. Oh wow! (I exclaimed). Figure 17 Ras Mikael spiritual space (my own picture). When we left the room, I asked him about the meaning of the fruit (reported above) and if colourful candles had a meaning or particular use. Ras Mikael was very friendly and happy to talk about his special objects. It was like he wanted to teach me about them and share his knowledge. He said, Some days I light a green candle for luck, the yellow one they say [in Jamaica] is for money. If I light the green, I don’t light the yellow one, sometimes I just light the white 170 that is for blessings. I learnt from back home, my grandma’s altar had a Bible, blessed water and a few candles around. Ras Mikael’s house was full of objects from crystals to a huge bowl of fruit (that according to him bought prosperity) to Chinese and English bone-china items. Every object he possessed had a spiritual meaning, and a story often linked to his earlier life in the Caribbean, or people that he met during his time in Britain. When I asked Ras Mikael why he kept the rum on his altar, he said, The rum is for spiritual entities, most spirits love rum, then some spirits drink water and other do not drink water, so when you put the rum, you have to make sure to put water as an Elder [from Jamaica] teach me. He [the Elder] told me, ‘If you have rum and you don’t have water, you drunk out the angels [he exclaimed]!!! They [the angels] drink and when they drink the rum alone, they get drunk’ him se’ [he said] they create a void, they make trouble because they are not thinking clear, so when you put rum make sure that you put water. Here, food and drink are a medium between practitioners and the divine and for communication between humans and non-humans. When I visited Ras Mars’s home in Northampton in August 2019, it was as if I had entered a shrine to ancient Egypt. The following passages are from my fieldwork notes about his home: When I entered Ras Marsh’s living room, I felt like I was inside an Egyptian temple. On the wall opposite the main window was standing a huge picture of Luxor temple (Egypt), on the side there was a big drum from Ghana, and a wooden board carved with the face of Garvey which was made in Jamaica. The other two walls were full of Egyptian books, 171 objects and statues. While I was looking at his items, he told me that the real culture belongs to Kemit [Egypt] and successively it has been stolen by the Greeks and the Romans. I saw a beautiful scarab beetle standing on one shelf and I asked him why he was displaying it, and he said, The scarab beetle is very spiritual for me, it is the emblem of the creation and the creator who needs no other. He is single, he needs no other to reproduce and the circle he brings with, it is the pineal gland. It represents also the female energy, all things are female, all things born female. Everybody in this world comes from a mother. This view will extinguish this Adam and Eve thing, that the woman comes from the man, this is a thing that has been regurgitated. Figure 18 Ras Marsh’s Egyptian shrine (My own picture, verbally authorised). 172 Figure 19 Ras Marsh’s collection of Egyptian figures (My own picture, verbally authorised). By using the symbolism of the scarab beetle, Ras Marsh is re-creating Kemet/Egypt – or a certain Egyptian imaginary – in his home adding new meanings to this ancient culture. In doing so, he is trying to recover what he feels is his spirituality and personal history, re-creating a link with the ancient Kemet culture, religion and philosophy, in order to re-discover the real sacred, the one not corrupted by any church or by colonialism. He is also trying to decolonise his history and his past by using this Egyptian (or Kemet) material to reverse Christian gender hierarchies. Here Ras Mash is performing Sankofa (see chapter 7) through the Ashe (power) he gives to these objects. He chooses a creative creolised way to unite these distant cultures in the present, with a narrative that crosses time and space through objects and the power that he sees in them. Egyptian and Kemet objects have long been used by Rastafari, but the development and the spread of new information about the Kemet empire is raising more interest among Rastafari toward Kemet spiritual objects and books. 173 While I was doing fieldwork in Rastafari homes, I had the opportunity to discover many new objects, powerful meanings and the feelings bound up in them. For example, when I visited Sista Amina’s home, I noticed that in her room she had a small altar where she kept a picture of Christ and a rose. The altar was extremely simple, the picture was in the middle and was surrounded by two Meskel (Ethiopian crosses), one above the other. Figure 20 Sista Amina's home (My own picture, verbally authorised). What I found interesting was that when I asked about the picture which resembled Haile Selassie, she confirmed that the man in the picture was him, but she added, 174 This is actually one of the portrayals of Jesus [Christ Pantocrator] found in St. Catherine monastery [Mount Sinai, Egypt], Jesus has returned and here he is himself both Jesus and Haile Selassie. Death does not exist for Him; He has simply returned! I was quite impressed by the resemblance in this picture between Christ and Haile Selassie. Sista Amina told me that she does not believe in reincarnation as many Rastafari do, but she believes that God, as Christ and Christ as Haile Selassie lived and lives. Here he is not the reincarnation of Christ but Christ himself. Moreover, through this image, she implicitly wants to reverse the Eurocentric religious view and the Western dominant image in which Christ resembles a white European. In this way this image carries a countercultural imaginative power able to subvert the Western view of Christ making him black and alive. Although Rastafari has since its inception embraced the idea of Haile Selassie as the black Messiah, she goes further attributing blackness also to Christ as the same person in flesh and blood, not only spiritually as reincarnation suggests. Through this image Jesus and Haile Selassie are embodying one another becoming one. During my visit to Rastafari homes and as we saw in Ras Marsh’s home, some Rasta display objects that refer to other cultures and philosophies, not only to Rastafari. For example, while visiting Ras Hobo’s home, I noticed a portrait of various Hindu sacred figures attached to the walls. Pushed by curiosity, I asked him why he displayed them together with the sacred Rastafari images of Haile Selassie and Empress Menen. He told me, I placed Haile Selassie and Menen on one wall, the holy family Shiva, Parvati and Ganesh on the other and Buddha on the third one, like this they form a triangle of positive energies. 175 Ras Hobo, in common with all the Rastafari mentioned above has developed his own methods for collecting and displaying objects and for materialising his identity as Rastafari. 6.2.2 Touching Ethiopia Repatriation and reparation are two of the most important aims for Rastafari. For this reason, many Rastafari still consider Africa as their physical and spiritual home. Since the time of the transatlantic slave trade, the enslaved used to believe that after death they would go back (at least spiritually) to Africa. Although we know that the diasporic community were taken from West Africa, many Rastafari trace their origins to Ethiopia. This belief has been amplified by the fact that the first man on earth was found in Ethiopia and consequently, to many Rastafari ‘we all come from Ethiopia’. Furthermore, to Rastafari, Ethiopia is a very significant place, firstly, because it is the first nation mentioned in the Bible, secondly, because it is the land of Haile Selassie where he granted land (Shashamane) to diasporic Africans. I noticed during fieldwork that Rastafari possess particular objects through which they materialise their relationship with Ethiopia and their sentimental love toward this land in their everyday life. In fact, while Reasoning with Ras Tewelde he very enthusiastically showed me his Ethiopian identity card that he was able to gain after many years travelling to and living in the country. While showing me the card he told me, This is the thing that makes me a happy man [showing me the identity card]. I just need to look at this! This is the proof that now, even the Ethiopian government has certified that we Rasta are Rasta, and we have Ethiopian origins. Ras Tewelde does not need anything other than his Ethiopian identity card to manifest his faith, belonging and identity as Rastafari. This card makes him Ethiopian and Rastafari at the same time, it creolises his identity. The power contained within the card, which is both immanent 176 (legal) and transcendent (sacred) has the ability to make Ras Tewelde, although he is Italian by birth Ethiopian. The power intrinsic in the identity card contains Ras Tewelde’s identity. Through the card, he is materialising his identity, but also performing a metaphorical repatriation and historical reparation. His identity card is an example of fetishism in a positive sense, because it materialises his identity and his connection to Ethiopia, becoming a synecdoche of his identity. Ras Tewelde does not live in Ethiopia, rather, as he says, Ethiopia resides in him, transcendentally and immanently through his identity card. However, Ras Tewelde told me that when he goes to Ethiopia, he lives in Shashamane with other Rastafari, speaks patois not Amharic, eats Jamaican food and lives with Caribbean Rastafari not with Ethiopian people, despite Rastafari in Ethiopia feeling and perceiving themselves as Ethiopians. While I was doing fieldwork in Bologna in March 2020, I had the opportunity to meet with Ras Ruben. During our Reasoning, when I asked if he had any special objects, he said, Beyond the flag [Rastafari-or Ethiopian], I have this [showing me some stones and dried flowers]. This is called Cassite, a stone that always makes you feel at home. They [some Rastafari in Shashamane] gave me the Cassite, not having had a mother and having been around for many years, I missed home. These pieces (small Opals) come from Zion, from Wondo Genet the earthly paradise where I was baptised. [In this place] you walk, and you see the opal coming out of the ground! And these are two dried flowers from Wondo Genet. Ras Ruben told me that wherever he goes he takes these stones and flowers with him so he will always feel at home. These items materialise a ‘sense of home’, they are agencies and containers of a creative and direct relationship between the garden of Eden and Ethiopia, making them accessible to Ras Ruben every day. These objects contain a sacred power which 177 is so important to Ras Ruben that he must always take them with him to be able to feel at home. Home to him is Ethiopia as land but especially as a spiritual place, the land of the garden of Eden, home to the whole of humanity. Many Rastafari hold the belief that the garden of Eden described in the Bible is in Ethiopia by associating the White and Blue Nile with the two rivers described in the Bible. Nevertheless, many Rasta that I have met and Reasoned with during fieldwork are preparing for a physical repatriation to Africa, or Ethiopia. Some seek to live there, while others just want to touch its holy soil or stay there for a little while, driven by an unstoppable internal need to experience or at least ‘touch’ Ethiopia once in their lives. Materialising the ‘touching’ of Ethiopia has different meanings and inspires diverse feelings amongst Rastafari. For example, Ras Tewelde told me, Probably my trip to Ethiopia, the physical touch with Ethiopia that was decisive. As Bob Marley said in an interview, 'it is the place where I want to stay, where I want to live.’ I am one of the few in the Italian community who has sought a form of repatriation. I have never felt part of anything or at home anywhere else [other than Ethiopia]. Ethiopia, I studied it, I listened to it, I dreamed of it, I read it, I did this all before to touch it. When I touched it and arrived in Ethiopia for the first time, I felt a familiarity that I had not felt anywhere else until now. The act of touching Ethiopia was decisive for Ras Tewelde in the interiorization and creation of his Rastafari identity. Although by gaining an Ethiopian identity card he has in some way sought a form of repatriation as he said, he is still living and working in Italy. What he has done by studying, reading and touching Ethiopia is repairing its history by giving value to a culture and a land that was despised during the fascist period. In some ways he is interiorising Ethiopia and its culture, materialising it metaphorically as part of his identity. In fact, Ras Tewelde 178 despite being Italian and even though he knows that the land of Shashamane was given by His Majesty to the black diaspora, argues that in his view, the land of Shashamane was for everyone who opposed the fascist occupation of Ethiopia, even those like him who were born after the occupation. As he explained, As [Italian] Rastafari we did it, we supported the Ethiopian liberation war, we did it spiritually because we were not physically born. This is an explicit way to decolonise his identity and underline his positionality toward the Italian fascist past. This is common among Italian Rastafari who link being Rasta with anti-fascism. Among them, Ethiopia is a powerful symbol of anti-fascism. Furthermore, by celebrating as Rastafari the victory of the Ethiopian King over fascism they are also decolonising their identities as Italians. Ethiopia, lived as the land to touch or to return to, comes out while Reasoning with Ras Isdra, a Twelve Tribes member who lives in London. During our Reasoning he shows me a further subjective perspective and a different path to materialising Ethiopia. He lives it as the land of Melenick, the legendary son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, which made Ethiopia the second Israel and therefore a sacred place, Ethiopia is the first country mentioned in the Bible and so that land, Jah promised that land to Abraham, you know what I mean? It is actually our right to go there, our right because as we say, we are Israelites, and all Rasta really are Israelites. Ras Isdra statement demonstrates how some Rastafari are developing a mythology around their identity as “Israelites”. The physical and spiritual importance of this land for Rastafari mirrors the story of Exodus: Ethiopia is the second Israel or Jerusalem, the land given by God to Abraham. Many Rastafari that I have interviewed told me that to them Ethiopia is the ‘second 179 hand’ of Israel, which they call Beta Israel. This view was also confirmed and supported in my previous research in Israel by local Rastafari (Capparella, 2018). Therefore, while Ras Tewelde in his narrative positions Ethiopia as the land that Haile Selassie given to the diaspora or anti-fascists, Ras Isdra goes further in claiming it as the land given by God to the Israelites. This shows how the materialisation of Ethiopia amongst Rastafari shifts according to subjective feelings and experiences. Furthermore, it demonstrates how diasporic and transnational Rastafari imagine and perceive differently the same land, developing their creative mythologies around it, given their diverse historical contexts and experiences. On the one hand, they both see Ethiopia as the land of Haile Selassie, on the other hand, for Ras Tewelde it is shaped by the Italian fascist experience, while for Ras Isdra by his sense of lost identity caused by the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade, which parallels the story of Exodus. They both use Ethiopia as a means to imagine historical reparation and decolonisation. Furthermore, the experience of Ras Caleb shows how the connection with Africa or Ethiopia as home can be lived as an interior transcendent experience. As we saw in the previous chapter, in his biography Ras Caleb assesses, Although many Rastas still continue to privilege the objective of a physical return to Africa, from 1977 onwards the real new trend capable of creating a following is based on inner repatriation, the one that also passes through the doors of our Chakras. Africa for Ras Caleb does not need to be physically touched through a stone or an identity card but can be de-materialised, achieved and lived through spiritual work, through the creative imagination. In his statement Ethiopia and Africa in general are dissolved and reconfigured as interior states and spaces. This shows how the idea and experience of Africa which is part of Rastafari material-symbolic culture is lived and adapted to subjective views, and contingent 180 experiences, and also can materialise an intersubjective relationality with other cultures or religions, such as Hinduism in this case. By contrast, when I asked Ras Gad if he believed that Ethiopia was Zion, he replied, No Man! Them a (are) wholla (all) corrupted already. Zion is here, right now is Zion. For Ras Gad, Zion is not an interior state nor an exterior distant place. Rather, it is immanent, here and now, in everything around, which again shows the diverse ways in which Rastafari materialise their connections with Ethiopia, Africa and Zion. 6.3 Materialising Decolonisation 6.3.1 Haile Selassie and Ethiopian Objects During fieldwork, I learned about the domestic and personal material culture of Rastafari, but I also learned how Rastafari venerate the places where Haile Selassie lived or visited, and the objects belonging or related to the King of Ethiopia. During fieldwork in Italy, I found myself involved in long conversations with local Rastafari about places or objects concerning the Emperor. First was his house in Ethiopia, which has been visited by some of the participants. According to Ras Tewelde, When Selassie was told, ‘we will make a statue of you’, He said ‘I will give my statue to you… it's a university’. It was an incredible thing because he gave as university his own palace. If you go to the university, the rector of the University of Addis Ababa has Haile Selassie's bed [he told me with a super enthusiastic voice]. The first and second floors of the university host the Ethnographic Museum. There is the bed and the rooms of the Emperor and Empress Mennen, it is the royal palace, it was a wonderful experience…it is an incredible place, the first university in Africa. 181 Ras Tewelde’s statement shows that for him as a Rastafari and as an academic there could not be a greater thing than making a royal palace into a university, the ‘first university in Africa!’. For him, this is a building (or object) of great value because it delivers knowledge and is the materialisation of the glory and generosity of Haile Selassie. Furthermore, Ras Tewelde implicitly underlines how the King reverses the European view of a good leader, which does not erect statues to himself, but one who builds a university for his people. Things move with time and, as I highlighted previously, thanks to new technology and the global spread of Rastafari, today many Rasta are involved in the research of new knowledge involving Ethiopian documents, objects and places concerning the Emperor. For Italian Rastafari this is not only a reflection of their need to confirm and prove their beliefs and activity to other Rastafari, but also a way to construct an Italian Rastafari identity. In Italy, Rastafari also have discovered and created their own sacred places of pilgrimage linked to Haile Selassie and Ethiopia. For example, many participants in Rome told me they have visited, more than once, Vatican City to take a photo of the main central obelisk. The obelisk is beautiful and comes from Heliopolis in Egypt, but what fascinated and attracted local Rastafari is what is stated in Latin below the obelisk, Ecce Crux Domini, Fugite Parte Adversae, Vicit Leo De Tribu Juda (Here is the cross of God, flee adverse parties, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah has won). 182 Figure 21 The statement under the Egyptian obelisk in Vatican City. Rastafari making the globally known Rastafari symbol with their hands, a gesture often done by Haile Selassie (Public Fb picture, verbally authorised). 183 Sista Amina told me to venerate this statement because it proves that the Vatican is also aware of Haile Selassie’s (the Lion of Judah) victory over evil and therefore, over Babylon which the Vatican represents. However, her view is completely opposite to the experience that Ras Wise, a diasporic Rastafari, has toward the Vatican obelisk. While Reasoning with him he told me, Many Rasta believe that the statement below the Vatican obelisk is related to Haile Selassie, but it is not, it’s related to Jesus! That’s a Vatican statement toward paganism or Egyptian religion, why do you think there is a cross on top of the obelisk? It’s a statement to all the other religions that the Lion of Judah, Jesus! has won [he said in sarcastic way]. It’s a way to show their supremacy over all other faiths. This shows again the diverse approaches, views, and feelings that transnational and diasporic Rastafari may display even toward the same object, but also their diverse ways to decolonise history and historical monuments. Going back to Sista Amina, during our Reasoning she told me that, In Naples there is the stolen throne of his Majesty, I went to see it with a brother, and to see it there, in the midst of fascist symbols, it really moved me, I cried for the happiness of seeing it, but also for the place where it was, I felt like a rebellion inside me because it was surrounded by fascist symbols. We really didn't like it, that throne shouldn't be there anyway, it was stolen, it should be in Ethiopia. 184 Figure 22 The throne of Haile Selassie in Naples. Sista Amina and a friend visit the throne making the globally known Rastafari symbol with their hands, a gesture often done by Haile Selassie (Public Fb -picture, authorised verbally). In recent times, there has been a growing debate about the repatriation of objects, or the way sacred objects are displayed within museums, often without appropriate contextualisation or consent. Many Rastafari went on pilgrimage in Naples to see and touch the throne, whilst highlighting to me that the throne must be returned or at least displayed in a different setting, and certainly not surrounded by fascist objects. Sista Fatuma, a Rastafari woman from Naples, underlined this point during our Reasoning, 185 Yes, the throne is beautiful, I saw it in June [2019]. It is in Piazza del Plebiscito, in the Royal Palace, in the centre of Naples. The throne has this incredibly sad title written on it ‘The Negus' Throne’. Someone has also stolen the two armrests, which were two Lions…and it is not known what happened to them. Something is being done, [for the throne] I know a brother who is doing something, I know that he is in contact with the Ethiopian embassy for possible repatriation. In addition, I learned from Sista Fatuma that, in Turin there is the grave of Princess Romaneworq, one of Haile Selassie’s daughters. Figure 23 Sista Fatuma in Turin at the grave of Romane Worq Haile Selassie’s daughter (Public Fb picture, verbally authorised). An article published in the journal ‘Cose nostre’ in October 2020 by L. Bairo, explains that the Emperor’s daughter refused to accept exile under the fascist occupation and stayed in Ethiopia to fight on the front line. She was injured and deported by the fascists, first to the Asinara prison, and after to Turin when she died of tuberculosis in 1940, at the age of 40. The Asinara 186 prison was located in Sardinia, and many Ethiopians were deported there. After the fall of fascism, the prison was closed and now is a tourist site. Sista Fatuma told me that, Romaneworq died in the midst of the fall of fascism, at first, they buried her in an anonymous tomb, there was only written ‘to a mother’. It was only in 1988 when her nephew visited Turin, that her and her son’s name was revealed and written down. Imagine that when Haile Selassie came to Italy in 1960, he was not aware that she was buried there. All these objects and places are now pilgrimage sites among local Italian Rastafari, and maybe they will become also places of pilgrimage among the global community. Furthermore, Ras Gebre told me that they are actively looking for Ethiopian objects and documents, helping the Ethiopian embassy and other Ethiopian organisations to recover and repatriate them. He told me during one of our WhatsApp conversations that F.A.R.I. reported to the Ethiopian embassy the presence in Italy of various objects stolen during the fascist period, I point you out the things ascertained by F.A.R.I.: a further throne of the King preserved in a church in Monserrato (Como), one Ethiopian aircraft named after Princess Tsehay hidden in the aeronautical museum in Vigna di Valle, a large painting of the Imperial Family held here in Rome at the Carabinieri Historical Museum, hundreds of precious manuscripts stolen by the fascists and kept in the Vatican library. Consider that in addition to Italian museums, most of these stolen goods are found in private homes and collections and are therefore impossible to find. Recently there have been several reports of private objects belonging to His Majesty being stolen and sold to museums such as that of the Getty family in the United States. Furthermore, as Sista Amina described during our Reasoning, 187 Here in Rome, there was the Axum obelisk which has been returned [to Ethiopia]. Then of His Majesty, we have videos, interviews, photographs, objects, coins, the itinerary of the places he visited in Italy, the gifts he gave or received state speeches he gave with heads of state, and with the Pope. For the jubilee 2020, F.A.R.I. would like to bind them together and make a publication. A lot of these documents were stolen from Ethiopia during the fascist period, and many still lie more or less forgotten on the shelves of many Italian civic and religious libraries and archives. Sista Amina understood and lives one aspect of this as a privilege, We Italian Rastas, I don't want to sound arrogant, but we are in a privileged position compared to [Rasta living in] other nations. Italy is to Ethiopia as Britain is to Jamaica. In Italy we have access to many unique Ethiopian documents, quotations from the life of His Majesty, the history of Ethiopia, objects, etc, not existing elsewhere. The involvement of Italian Rastafari in researching, discovering, and translating new textual sources and the study and knowledge of Ge’ez or Amharic, is generating new knowledge concerning Ethiopia and Ras Tafari (The King). The biggest contribution of Italian Rastafari to the development of new Rastafari textual knowledge has been the discovery and translation from French and Amharic to Italian (and after into English), of the booklet containing a detailed description of Haile Selassie’s coronation. It contains a description of all the religious procedures and practices (incense, objects, prayers) used before, during, and after the ceremony for the coronation of the Lion of Judah. Sista Amina was extremely enthusiastic and proud when she was telling me about this, This document is crucial for Italy. Basically, this text that they [Rasta] are now consulting worldwide, was first discovered, and translated into Italian by Ras Gebre 188 and his brother and was called Il Cerimoniale del Sacro [The Sacred Ceremony], then to English by Ras Yared and another brother and was called the Order of Coronation…Thanks to [the discovery of] this document, we were able to participate in His Majesty's coronation!! You cannot imagine what a joy!!! The Coronation is the peak event of His Majesty and for InI. So, now we can follow the whole celebration, word by word and for a Rasta, there cannot be greater joy! At a document level, it is the most crucial possible document that could be found. There cannot be a higher document as far as we are concerned. When I joined the [Italian Rastafari] community it was already translated, it was already used and consulted in a standard way by the Italian community during the celebration of Coronation Day on the 2nd of November. This particular document is lived among Rasta as a source of direct religious knowledge, and direct imaginative experience, through its reading, of the most important day for Rastafari, Coronation Day. It has been translated also into English to reach a wider audience. According to Ras Tewelde, Here in Italy, there has been a lot of attention on developing a consciousness based on Haile Selassie’s life and his teachings, which incorporate the church, and other things. In Jamaica everything started against a system, as a movement for black liberation and it is totally different. Ras Tewelde’s statement highlights that in Italy the movement is oriented to Ethiopia rather than to any pan-African imaginary. Furthermore, Ras Tewelde emphasises that in Italy to create and develop locally, Rastafari relied on things (documents, objects) related to the King, while in Jamaica the creation of Rastafari was a mystical revelation for African liberation. This tendency to embrace Ethiopianism rather than Pan-Africanism also emerged while Reasoning with Ras Isaac, a Venetian Rastafari. He told me that when he met Sista P., a Jamaican Rastafari 189 woman for the first time, he did not like it when she started to talk about the ancestors and perform some Jamaican local traditional practices such as placing a bowl of water close to the Bible. He regarded these practices as foreign to Rastafari, at least in Italy. He also explained to me the shift in Rastafari experience in Italy after the 1980s, concerning Rasta material culture: In those days having photos [of Bob Marley, of Garvey, of Selassie, of Ethiopia, of Fairfield house, of Jamaica] was a miracle, we made collages, brooches, not to mention [the work done collecting and translating] Haile Selassie's speeches. If anyone could find a book in the library, we used to make photocopies, some went to Ethiopia to get books, these were things that you suffered to have. Now you open Google and type Haile Selassie, and it opens up a world full of books, or photographs of His Majesty. Ras Isaac stresses the strong commitment that the first Italian Rastafari generation had during the 1980s in looking for books and journals to find information about the King or Rastas in Jamaica, while now it is very easy to find everything online just with a click. Today there is a flourishing economy producing and circulating Rastafari books, images, necklaces, dresses, music, incense, and spices. This economy is central to the production and promotion of knowledge about Rastafari, and their Ital lifestyle and includes closed and private networks of exchange, as well as more global networks that can reach and create new publics. 6.3.2 Materialising Rastafari Presence My visit to the Rastafari in Motion exhibition which was held at the Black cultural archives in Brixton, London, inspired my PhD research. The exhibition was about the history and experience of the Rastafari movement in Britain. While I was enjoying the exhibition, I noticed an area that was dedicated to the ‘book liberator’ Ras Seymour. 190 Figure 24 Ras Seymour (public picture). During the 1980s Ras Seymour risked jail more than once trying to reappropriate ancient Ethiopian books and artefacts, such as the Kebra Nagast, taken by British soldiers during an expedition to Ethiopia in 1868, which was kept at the British Museum.22 He was the pioneer for the repatriation of stolen objects and books belonging to Africa. As a Rastafari he felt a duty to recover and reappropriate these stolen items. In doing so, he was recovering not only books belonging to Africa, such as the ‘Magdala collection’ which was kept at the British Museum but also his own culture and identity as an African. Thus, the books stolen by Ras 22 The Kebra Nagast, or Glory of the King, is a 14th-century national epic of Ethiopia, written in Ge’ez, which contains the story of King Salomon and the Queen of Sheba and how the Ark of the Covenant came to Ethiopia. To Ethiopian Christians, it is considered a historical document. 191 Seymour were not only books or manuscripts stolen by British soldiers in Africa, but any books regarding Africa or African history. He collected all these books in St. Agnes place, making a library of about 2000 books available for Rastafari seeking to rebuild their history silenced by a white colonial hegemonic mindset, which until now has curated what we learn as history. He was an advocate of black culture and black justice, and he lived his actions as a duty. In an interview recorded by some London Rastafari, when they asked him how he was able to spirit away all these books he answered, ‘by magic’. Black history was not part of the Humanities UK national curriculum until recently, despite many British people coming from Africa or the African diaspora. Neglecting a culture is neglecting a people, and that’s why even nowadays talking with many diasporic Rastafari in Britain, they rarely told me that they feel British. According to Ras Seymour’s trial record, on the one hand he was considered guilty of theft by English law, but on the other hand among the Rastafari he was proclaimed the ‘book liberator’! During fieldwork in Italy, I learnt that every year on the 19th of February, F.A.R.I. organises a conference and an exhibition in Rome to commemorate the Ethiopian martyrs killed by the fascist regime during the war, and to advocate the teaching of Italy’s colonial history in schools. This annual conference is a local initiative. In February 2020, I was invited by the members of F.A.R.I. to assist to the conference. This was a secular event and did not involve any religious ceremony. The commemoration was held in a school which was built during the fascist regime of Mussolini. Ras Gebre, after giving me a warm welcome, pointed out the ceiling to me where the symbol of the ‘fascio’ was still visible. 192 Figure 25 The school ceiling where the ‘fascio’ symbol is still visible in the centre between the two big white frames (My own picture). On the right the ‘fascio’ symbol, the fasces (Latin: fasces littoriæ) was, in Ancient Rome, the weapon carried by lictors, which consisted of a bundle of wooden sticks tied with leather strips, normally around an axe, to represent the power of life and death on Roman convicts. The main function of the lictors was to protect the magistrate, who ordered them to carry out death sentences. He told me that for him, Holding this commemoration in a fascist building is a way to decolonise Italian history and to create historical consciousness. While we were talking, we were close to the speakers’ desk which was covered with a white flag with a black Davidic star, with the image of Haile Selassie.r Figure 26 The speakers’ desk (My own picture, verbally authorised). 193 Afterwards, he invited me to check the exhibition before the conference started. The exhibition was on the opposite side of the room. Before I entered the exhibition area, I noticed on the top of the entrance two Ethiopian flags, one with the image of the Lion of Judah (symbol of Haile Selassie dynasty), and another with ‘Exodus, Ethiopian cultural service’ (ECS). Figure 27 Ethiopian flag on which is written ‘Exodus: Ethiopian Cultural Service’ (my own picture). The ECS Association is the secular branch of F.A.R.I, and it is an Italian creation. It has a ‘non-confessional’ character as Ras Gebre reported, The ECS is a cultural service for all our brothers and sisters of Ethiopian descent, who live on our territory and for all those people of good will, scholars, volunteers, those who are about to go to Ethiopia and all those who are passionate about its greatness and beauty. 194 The exhibition space was full of posters displaying very sad pictures. There were posters with text and images concerning fascist repression and the occupation of Ethiopia, and the reconstruction of the massacre of Debre Libanos, Addis Ababa and others, carried out by the viceroy Rodolfo Graziani. Figure 28 The reconstruction of the massacre of Debre Libanos, Addis Ababa and others, carried out by the viceroy Rodolfo Graziani (My own picture, verbally authorised). Graziani was the one who decided to use poison gas on civilians in order to conquer Ethiopia. According to the posters, Graziani’s military actions were reported by the Italian newspaper Il Secolo Sera as part of a so-called ‘civilizing mission’. The posters displayed images of Graziani’s massacres including pictures of corpses, severed heads, and captured prisoners. These were followed by others concerning the military’s use of gas, followed by three wonderful posters about the patriots and defenders of the Ethiopian homeland and their sovereign. 195 Figure 29 Documenting Graziani’s massacres (My own picture, verbally authorised). Figure 30 Documenting Graziani’s use of gas in Ethiopia (My own picture, verbally authorised). 196 Figure 31 The patriots and defenders of the Ethiopian homeland and their King Haile Selassie I (My own picture, verbally authorised). The exhibition also highlighted the silence and complicity of the Catholic church and its support for Mussolini, as the picture below demonstrates. Figure 32 The Catholic Church’s complicity with Mussolini (My own picture, verbally authorised). 197 Figure 33 A Catholic priest, blessing the army before their departure to Ethiopia (My own picture, verbally authorised). 6.3.2.1 The Gift of the Emperor Fairfield House in Bath is where the Emperor lived for five years during the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia. The Emperor left this house to the people of Bath and today it is used by locals for social activities, and by the Rastafari community living in the area for celebrations and Nyabinghi gatherings. In April 2021 Dr Shawn Naphtali Sobers, a British Rastafari, in partnership with Fairfield House CIC and the University of the West of England, with the support of the Art and Humanities Research Council, directed for several months an online festival called ‘Freedom in the City’ to promote knowledge on Haile Selassie, Rastafari, and the city of Bath. The aim of the festival was to share and increase popular knowledge about Rastafari (the King and the movement), to develop a more positive narrative concerning Rastafari in Britain, and to give more visibility to the British diasporic movement and its activities. 198 I followed the festival from April 2021 until October 2021, and conversations, stories, and knowledge developed in many directions. For instance, one of the first of a series of events was the screening of a movie about Haile Selassie called ‘The Footsteps of the Emperor’, about the life of Haile Selassie in Bath during his exile. The movie shows how Fairfield House became, over time, a place of pilgrimage for Rastafari, where Rastafari can feel and perceive the Emperor’s presence. The movie was made by Dr Sobers and Benjamin Zephaniah in 1999, and it is about the Emperor’s connection with the city of Bath during his exile and his legacy. The movie includes very interesting accounts about the Emperor given by Bath citizens who had the pleasure to have met him during his exile. Throughout the movie, the directors show also how objects personal to Haile Selassie were starting to be recovered by local Rastafari from public auctions, such as his walking stick which was recovered by Ras Bandele. In the film, Ras Bandele testifies that just by touching Selassie’s walking stick he felt empowered, strong, and emotional. The peculiarity of this stick is an original African tribal wood stick with the top carved into an African ancestor’s face. This stick testifies that although Haile Selassie was a Christian, he was also supporting local tribal beliefs and traditions. The movie continues showing how local citizens and some local Rastafari were using the house as a day centre for senior citizens since 1999. Sista Pauline Swaby-Wallace, a Rastafari elder, looked after the house for many years. She testifies to the inclusiveness of the place which hosted Indian, Chinese, and Caribbean elderly and the services that they were providing such as interpreting and translation, information, and lessons in sewing. Furthermore, the movie testifies how the house that at one point was closed to be sold, was preserved thanks not only to Rastafari but also through the support of many citizens of Bath. Further events of the Freedom in the City Festival included talks about the Ethiopian scrolls of St. George preserved at the British Museum, and the mystic links between Bath and 199 Ethiopia, while others emphasised the role of women within Rastafari, which included a talk about the life and work of Empress Menen and one concerning Sylvia Pankhurst and her fight against fascism. There were also events focusing on art, from an exposition of Rastafari paintings to a play about the meeting between King Salomon and the Queen of Sheba. I remember one event that I found very emotional was a magnificent sacred ceremony held by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo church in commemoration of Haile Selassie’s close friend, the Ethiopian foreign minister Blattengeda Herouy, hosted by the Anglican church at Bath Abbey. I was assisting at the festival for many months as a researcher and as a passionate student. However, as a researcher, I was also asked to get involved and give a presentation about my research on a panel called ‘Rastafari and the academy’, to which I was very honoured to participate. Fairfield house, it’s the most important sacred place for diasporic Rastafari in Britain, as the words of Ras Irie testifies, InI can feel the King’s presence. He left this place to all of us, not only to InI [Rastafari] but to all people, all religions. However, on the 23rd of July we play the Nyabinghi in the house garden, we stand there opposite the balcony where he used to stand, it’s a sacred ground, Haile Selassie and Empress Mennen live here, you know?! All of the above creative and intellectual activities run by Rastafari, testify the importance to Rastafari of material things, through which they connect themselves and their shared histories. Furthermore, the fight for a more inclusive and historically conscious society and the repatriation of looted artefacts, books and histories about Ethiopia, are active issues amongst Rastafari in Britain as in Italy, where Rastafari are endorsing and continuing also if in a different way Ras Seymour’s legacy. These micro-practices of reparation and repatriation are involving not only Rastafari bodies but also objects and buildings of cultural value. These items 200 help Rastafari to represent, materialise and acknowledge African and Ethiopian histories and cultures, which have been systematically neglected as a result of four hundred years of enslavement, colonialism, and physical and cultural subjugation. Conclusion Visiting Rastafari homes shows how diasporic and transnational Rastafari assemble their Rasta identities through diverse collections and displays of objects. Things that associated Ethiopia, Jamaica, Egypt, and Britain were often blended to create Rastafari stories and identities that materialised diasporic connections with Africa and transnational ones with Ethiopia. Moreover, exhibitions, conferences and artefacts provided Rastafari with opportunities to explore the politics of things, particularly the politics involved in how things are represented or neglected. The concept of Ashe provided a useful tool for thinking about things and relationships with things, both as an African concept that could signal the liveliness of things and their centrality to Rastafari cultural worlds, but also as a means of decolonising the material turn which still relies in part on words and concepts derived from colonial and transatlantic encounters stained by slavery and colonialism. 201 7.0 Rastafari Embodied Practices 7.1 Sankofa: Recovering the Body According to Asante and Mazama (2009), Sankofa is an Akan (West African) word made up of three parts: san (to return), ko (to go back) and fa (to fetch/retrieve). One interpretation among several is ‘Go back to the past and recover it’, hence Sankofa is said to represent the repossession of something forgotten, misplaced, or lost (Asante and Mazama, 2009: 586-587). The word suggests that there is something in the past for people to draw into the present, to make a new future. Although I already knew this word/concept from my personal studies, I was inspired to use it for this chapter as I heard it from Rasta during public cultural Reasonings (see Dreadlocks and stigma 7.2.2.3). I also saw it depicted as a bird with its feet planted forward, while its head is turned backwards to reach an egg, in some Rastafari home. This chapter will explore how Rastafari implicitly employ this concept and express it through various embodied practices and performances. However, to draw on a preserved and intact past is quite impractical because traditions are never frozen in time, ready to be used again in their pure forms, they are always and everywhere an improvisation, an imaginative recreation, part of creative social and historical processes. As such, Sankofa’s performances of recovering the past must be understood as dynamic processes characterised by local, creative and subjectively contingent interpretations. Retrieving the past through embodied practices is a creative dimension of religioning. The concept of Sankofa points to the question of essentialism. Stuart Hall, in his work ‘What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?’ (1992), argued that on the one hand, in the context of historical inequality, a touch of strategic essentialism is pivotal to dignifying marginalised people’s struggle for recognition and the right to self-determination. On the other 202 hand, Hall stressed that Western notions of Black, African, and tradition must be de-essentialised to avoid an idea of homogeneity and unrealistic stereotyping concerning people, traditions and black cultures, including Rastafari. Hall argued that when it comes to culture, popular culture, strictly speaking, ethnographically speaking, there are no pure forms at all. Always these forms are the product of partial synchronization, of engagement across cultural boundaries, of the confluence of more than one cultural tradition of the negotiations of dominant and subordinate positions… these forms are impure, to some degree hybridized from a vernacular base. They are not the recovery of something pure that we can, at last, live by (Hall 1992: 28). Therefore, the concept of Sankofa, in the sense of recreating a tradition, is a useful conceptual tool to understand how people are trying to reconnect, recover, and recreate their pasts to imagine their futures. It’s a tool which takes into consideration both strategic essentialisms as much as the necessity to de-essentialise identities. As I will demonstrate in this chapter when Rastafari look to the past, some imagine it as something lost which must be recovered due to slavery and colonialism, while others imaginatively re-create and re-imagine it as a means of re-positioning the here and now. These imaginaries are performed and externalised through embodied practices. The first part of this chapter will focus on how Rastafari, through embodied practices relating to hair (dreadlocks) and clothes, engage creatively with their history in all its complexity. The second part of this chapter will focus on how Rastafari imagine their bodies as sites of cultivation about to the consumption of food and medicine and the practice of gardening. Finally, just as I suggested in relation to Nommo and Ashe, Sankofa is the first step of a decolonising strategy to push religious studies and the social sciences out of the theoretical 203 and methodological space of the colonial period, to adopt new ideas and approaches, informed by non-Western cultures. 7.2 Dreads: Death, Identities, and Stigma 7.2.1 The Nazirite Vow For Rastafari, the body is the container of the soul and the divinity and for this reason, they consider and experience it as the living temple of Jah, or the place where their divinity resides. Considering this, Rastafari must look after their bodies as if it was a temple. To achieve this sense of spiritual purity and cleansing, some Rastafari undertake the ancient Biblical Nazirite vow to follow the rules set out in the book of Numbers 6:1-21. The etymology of the word Nazirite derives from the Hebrew word nazir which means separated or consecrated to God. The Nazirite vow requires an oath toward God, which is characterised by the following certain procedures, contained in the Bible: If anyone, man or woman, explicitly utters a Nazirite’s vow, to set himself apart for the Lord, he shall abstain from wine and any other intoxicant; he shall not drink vinegar of wine or of any other intoxicant, neither shall he drink anything in which grapes have been steeped, nor eat grapes fresh or dried. Throughout the term of his vow as Nazirite, no razor shall touch his head; it shall remain consecrated until the completion of his term as Nazirite of the Lord, the hair of his head being left to grow untrimmed. Throughout the term that he has set apart for the Lord, he shall not go in where there is a dead person. Even if his father or mother, or his brother or sister should die, he must not defile himself for them, since hair set apart for his God is upon his head: throughout his term as Nazirite, he is consecrated to the Lord (Numbers 6: 3-8). 204 Although many Rastafari try to adopt the vow, they often improvise and negotiate it. In March 2016 during fieldwork in Israel for my MA thesis, I noticed that the Nazirite tradition was lived creatively and flexibly way amongst Israeli Rastafari. During the Sabbath celebration held at home on Friday night, they replaced the wine with grapefruit, telling me that ‘[We drink grapefruit juice, because] as Rastafari we are not allowed to drink wine’ (Capparella, 2016). In that circumstance, I noticed that the vow and the Sabbath tradition were lived as something constrictive and creative at the same time, where Rastafari were subjected to creative negotiation and compromise between the two traditions, for example by replacing wine with grapefruit juice as a solution. When I started fieldwork amongst Rastafari in Britain and Italy, I was extremely interested to learn how Rastafari were living the vow in the diasporic and transnational contexts. Since the beginning of fieldwork with diasporic Rastafari, while interviewing some Rasta from the Nyabinghi Order, I thought that the vow was something compulsory because they often referred to it during our Reasoning. However, with time, I learned that the vow is not mandatory, for example within the Twelve Tribes it is a personal choice and not something pivotal. While Reasoning with Ras Isdra, Ras Cush, and other Twelve Tribes’ members, they told me, that this point is clear in their Greeting statement written on the Twelve Tribes pamphlet which is used to open their celebrations as partially reproduced below, Greetings through the Orthodox faith, not a faith of writs and rites, vows, or laws but an inward function of the heart, acquired through a Mystical Incorporation, or Unity in One with Jesus Christ who revealed Himself to us through Haile Selassie the first. 205 Figure 34 Twelve Tribes Greetings used during celebrations (My own picture, verbally authorised). Therefore, what surfaced among the Twelve Tribes’ members was that it’s a good heart that makes a Rastafari, not a Biblical vow. However, despite this flexible way to live their faith the Twelve Tribes are quite inflexible concerning the reading of the Bible. As Rastafari they must read the Bible, one chapter a day. They strongly believe that daily Biblical reading develops self-discipline and knowledge. However, other Rastafari emphasised the importance of keeping the body as a temple, and therefore pure. To them, this can be accomplished only by taking the vow, as the experience of Sista Amina testifies, I was making the worst use of my temple [body]. Then when I embraced Rastafari, and made the vow, I started to cover my head, I stopped drinking [alcohol], I stopped eating meat, I started to change clothes, I was much more covered, more modest, and I abandoned any make-up. 206 During our reasoning I asked why she felt the necessity to do this vow to be Rasta, and she answered, I decided after Baptism to take the vow of Nazirite, but I didn't do it to be Rasta. I felt that it was a fundamental step to feel His Majesty’s daughter. So, I vowed myself, Nazirite means to separate, a vow of separation from what can be seen as Babylon. When I asked Sista Amina if she could break the vow, she told me, ‘In the Bible, [they say] you can end the vow, but Rasta usually never break it.’ Also, while Reasoning with Sista Maryam when I asked, ‘If a person dissolves the vow, is that person no longer Rasta for you?’, she told me, ‘sincerely, I am wondering why someone will stop the vow if they want to be Rasta’?! The experiences of Sista Amina and Sista Maryam show how for some Italian Rastafari on the one hand, making the vow is a way to keep the body pure, and on the other hand, it is also a way to embody a Rastafari identity. However, while for Sista Amina is a vow that is not essentially linked to Rastafari, to Sista Maryam is a vow that defines what it means to be Rasta. A further view and experience was given to me by Ras Berane, while we were Reasoning in Florence. He told me that he had kept the vow for six years but decided to cease it and cut his dreadlocks to get a job. He added that, ‘nothing changed since I ended the vow, I still feel Rastafari,’ so while some link observance of the vow with being Rastafari, others do not, as explained below by the testimonies of Ras Regi and Ras Wise. While on the bus Reasoning with Ras Regi a Jamaican Rastafari living in Milan, I asked him about ‘when did you made the vow’? he told me, ‘to be Rasta you don’t have to make any vow’. On another occasion, while in London Reasoning with Ras Wise a Jamaican Rastafari and I asked the same question, he said, 207 I am not a Christian and I do not grow my locks because of the Nazarite vow. The Nazirite vow is related to the Nazarene. For example, there are laws within the vow that would constrict me to cut my hair if I came close to a dead body, and as a Rasta I would never cut my hair because it represents my identity. So, I grow my hair as a natural concept, in the sense that in the past many people did not have comb and scissors to cut their hair, for example, the Mau Mau had dreads and it was not from the Nazarite vow, but as a revolutionary symbol. As Anthony B sings, ‘Fire pon Rome, pon dem scissor and comb.’ Recently, I have not seen any black liberation but confusion amongst Rasta who follow the Biblical narrative, instead of fighting for black liberation they are becoming more religious, instead of living Rastafari as a simple way of life. 7.2.2 Dreadlocks as Embodied Practice The most visible identifying mark of Rastafari identity is the dreadlocks, and for some people they are strictly linked to the Nazarite vow. It has already been explained, in chapter two, some of the traditions and practices that Rastafari draw from in relation to the wearing of dreadlocks. However, during fieldwork, I learned that Rastafari have diverse ways of experiencing and carrying dreadlocks, the meaning attributed to them is very subjective and they can convey and materialise diverse emotions and feelings. For example, Ras Julio during one episode of his radio programme ‘Iyahbingi’ referred to the dreadlocks as a crown but also as a ‘lived rosary’, Dreadlocks are also called in the Bible the crown, so in the Rastafari Livity we manifest this in our daily life…It is like the monks who always wear the rosary because for them the rosary is the constant reminder of their spiritual path, a reminder of fidelity. For us, the dreadlocks are a living rosary, which we always wear so long that sometimes it becomes even bigger and longer than us. In the book of Numbers chapter six, we speak 208 of this, of the Nazarite pact, of this fidelity which is not by chance called the crown. Dreadlocks are the manifestation of the covenant, the covenant between God and man. However, while Reasoning with Ras Ruben in Bologna, he told me, During my Rastafari journey, I began to understand that Rastafari have dreadlocks because Samson was the first to be like this [to have dreadlocks in the Bible]. The Angel said to his mother, make him grow his hair, he was famous for his seven braids. So, growing dreadlocks is different from being Rasta. For me, being a Nazarite is being Rasta and the dreadlocks is our cross. While Ras Julio sees dreadlocks as the embodiment of a covenant with God, Ras Ruben is implicitly reversing the typical image of Rastafari which is not about uncut or untamed hair, but intense bodily discipline and control, as required by Biblical law. Likewise, while Ras Julio used the rosary as a metaphor for dreadlocks, Ras Ruben instead pictured them as a cross. Both statements show how on the one hand, Catholic objects such as the rosary and the cross are influencing Italian Rastafari imaginary, experiences, identities, and metaphorical associations. On the other hand, this is also a straightforward cultural way to present and explain the wearing of dreadlocks in a Catholic culture. Hence, this is also an imaginative strategy for materialising Rastafari beliefs and practices through Catholic objects, symbols and idioms. During fieldwork, I learned that while for many Rastafari growing dreadlocks works as a performance to signify a spiritual relationship with God and a Rastafari identity, in the diaspora, they also represent an effort to connect with Africa. When, I asked Sista Lulana, a Rastafari woman from London, why and when she started growing her locks, she said, 209 I watched ‘Roots’ [the movie] and that changed everything inside me, I decided to go back to my Africa-ness, so to my natural way of life and style, that’s when I started to grow dreadlocks. 7.2.2.1 Dreadlocks and Death As many Rasta undertake the Nazarite vow, for some it can be a problem when they need to deal with death. According to Numbers 6:1-21, Nazarites must avoid becoming impure, for example by polluting their soul by entering into contact with corpses or graves. Furthermore, according to the Bible, if a Nazarite get close to a death body, he/she should shave his/her head. This section will highlight how Rastafari negotiate and deal with death practices. In June 2021, Ras Isdra who is a member of the Twelve Tribes, and who I consider a Rastafari brother, came to visit me in my house. While we were talking about life, he told me that very sadly his uncle had died, and he was the one to have found his body in his house. So, I asked if he needed to cut his dreads because he had had contact with his uncle’s body, as per the Nazirite vow. He told me, In the Twelve Tribes this is not compulsory, but it’s a personal choice to what extent to follow the Biblical law and how to practice it. During the Reasoning with Ras Isdra, I learned that the Twelve Tribes take a quite pragmatic position toward death, in order to be able to assist Rastafari members and their families during sickness or death and to be able sometimes to accompany the funeral with Nyabinghi drumming. However, I also learned that for Nyabinghi and Boboshanti members, death is often treated with more rigidity because it is strongly associated with soul pollution. This can be a 210 problem if Rastafari wants to stay near a sick friend, family, or community member. While Reasoning with Sista Stella, she highlighted this issue, Often the elders are not properly buried as Rastafari and do not receive a proper Rastafari funeral or grave. Their family members who often are not even close to the dead Rastafari, are organising their funeral according to their Church affiliation [generally Christian]. This is because we cannot deal with death, but I see some changes recently within the community, more awareness that a Rasta is supposed to have a Rasta funeral and service. However, we do not have developed them [rites of passage] yet. The absence of Rastafari rites of passage and funeral services means that most Rastafari are buried according to the wishes of family members which, in practice, often means a Christian funeral. One way in which the diaspora traditionally commemorates death is through what they call the Ninth Night. The Ninth Night is a Jamaican practice, which takes place on the ninth night after the death of someone. It is believed that when someone dies the soul lingers for nine days. Therefore, on the ninth night, family and friends gather with music and dancing to mark the soul’s departure. While researching Rastafari in London, I was invited by Sista Fyah to a Nyabinghi Rastafari Ninth Night in London, to commemorate a Rastafari youth, a victim of knife crime or what is known as the London postcode war. He was not involved with any gangs, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The youth was commemorated and remembered by many members of the community, not only by Rastafari. However, while usually a Ninth Night is accompanied by the sound of reggae and dancehall, the only music allowed to be performed that night was Nyabinghi drumming. Ninth-night celebrations are not performed by Italian transnational Rastafari. This death practice is largely unknown among them, except for a few Rastafari who have lived in or travelled to Jamaica. 211 During Reasoning with some Rastafari, I learned that they were often negotiating death practices according to their personal situation. For instance, while in Coventry Reasoning with Ras Dubbie, a Rastafari reggae artist from Zimbabwe who has lived in Britain for over twenty years, he told me, I cut my dreadlocks because I lost my mom and for respect to her, I cut them. That’s the only reason why I cut my dreadlocks, she did not like them, she was Christian, and she did not like the dreadlocks, she was only believing in her own views about Rasta people, which she did not like. But in respect to her, my mother, I cut the dreadlocks. It was an emotional day for me, a particular day, so I respected her in that way. Although Ras Dubbie was very attached to his dreadlocks, he decided to cut them as a form of respect for his dead mother. During the pandemic, while Reasoning online with Ras Esdras, a diasporic Rastafari, the link between dreadlocks and death emerged, As I said earlier, dreads are the weight of the cross on your shoulder. I used to have longer dreads, I had them for 23 years since 1990, and in 2013 I cut them when my brother passed away. I was thinking before about cutting the dreads, but when he passed away the time was right. I just needed a new beginning, I cut my hair the day before his funeral. Other Rastafari, recognise that making the Nazirite vow is problematic if one has elderly or infirm family or friends. For instance, while Reasoning with Sista Melesse an Italian Rastafari woman from Venice, she highlighted this point, So, if you go and read the vow, it is a special vow that can last a lifetime, or that can be done for a certain period. I have to cut them [dreadlocks] and I cannot hide from you 212 that I have lost a part of my identity because for a Rasta dreadlocks are part of their identity. If you see the interview with Burning Spear, he is talking about this, ‘the dreadlocks represent the identity of a Rasta’. But my parents are elderly, and I want to be close to them, no matter what happens. The Nazirite vow is too serious stuff, I highly respect it, but for example if someone dies you can't get close to death. I have an elderly mother, and I'm afraid that she will die soon [especially now with Covid 19] and I want to stay close to her. 7.2.2.2 Dreadlocks and Identity Death is not the only event in which Rastafari may be required to cut their dreadlocks. During my Reasoning with Sista Peace an Italian Rastafari, via WhatsApp, she told me, Being Rasta above all, does not mean just wearing dreadlocks. Now I don't have them anymore, I cut them about a month ago for health reasons, unfortunately for a nerve problem in the neck, they were very long. Then I also did it as an act of interior cleaning, at that moment I had to do so. I was sorry, I am very sorry because I wanted to keep them, but I hope they will come again, they had made themselves and so it will happen again. While Reasoning with Sista Fyah, in her house in London she recounted a similar experience, I grew my dreadlocks when I was twenty, twenty-one, I needed to cut them off at one point because I went sick in 2001 for some treatment. That was an interesting time because when people saw me without my hair [dreadlocks], they treated me differently, they said ‘she cut her dreadlocks, she is not Rasta anymore’. Was interesting because inside I was the same person, but people judged me from the outside. This made me look at Rastafari in a different way, I started to think that you can grow dreadlocks, you 213 can wear your colours, but internally you are not Rasta. So, I started to realise that Rastafari had to do with humanity, from my personal journey love came from inside not from the wearing of dreadlocks. Sista Peace and Sista Fyah had similar experiences whereby a sort of inside/outside experience came into play. There was a dissonance between their subjective, interior feeling and their exterior objective appearance which led them into a process of reflection on how appearances are judged and valued. While for Sista Peace and Sista Fyah trimming their dreads was a personal choice made for health reasons, during my conversation with sista Makeda, she told me that when she was in her twenties her partner decided to cut his dreads and wanted her and their children to do the same. While Reasoning, she told me that that was a very coercive and violent choice, but she needed to do it, to stop him from cutting their children’s dreads. I asked her how she felt, and she said, I made a deal with him, rather than cut my children’s dreadlocks I will cut mine. I felt naked, I felt like false, I felt like a fraud, I did not feel alright without my dreadlocks. If the absence of dreadlocks can raise identity issues amongst Rastafari, wearing them also impacts personal relationships with the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church, as the Reasoning with Ras Levi highlighted, In England, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church started to put up a resistance to not allowing baptism with your locks. Even though I Reason with them, they were insisting ‘you have to cut your locks,’ No [I said]!!! That did not make any sense to me, inna [into] my studies, I researched the movement of Christ, the Nazarite movement, I research the Essene as well, and this movement did not cut their hair, they did not drink 214 strong drinks, and they did not eat meat. So, I told them ‘This [cutting my dreadlocks] does not make any sense to me,’ so I refused the baptism. However, during fieldwork, while I was doing some research on Facebook, I also found some Rastafari who had decided to trim their dreads to be baptised into the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church. In January 2021, an Italian Rasta Ras Gabriel uploaded on his Facebook wall the picture of his christening at the EOC in Bari. He not only displayed pictures of himself after the ceremony surrounded by priests and church members, but he also showed a picture of his shorn dreads in his hand. Friends asked if the priests had forced him to cut the dreads in order to be blessed, and he answered, I wanted to pay homage to His Majesty Tafari Selassie I, by respecting an ancient tradition in the Tewahedo culture where children are completely shaved the day before Timquet. They [the Dreads] will grow back stronger than before, but I repeat, it was a very free choice that surprised even the priests. 23 23 Timquet is the Ethiopian orthodox Tewahedo church celebration in remembrance of Jesus’s baptism in the river Jordan. 215 Figure 35 Ras Gabriel’s trimmed dreadlocks (Private Fb picture, written authorisation). Everyday life necessities are what often lead Rastafari to mix, match, and negotiate amongst various traditions as to whether to grow or trim their dreadlocks. Ras Gabriel is not trimming his hair because of death or sickness, but as an homage and sacrifice to Haile Selassie I, and as a part of a transaction to be Christened by the EOC and state his identity not only as Rasta, but also as an orthodox Christian. He did not live the trimming as the loss of his Rastafari identity, instead lived the christening at the EOC as an addition to it. While Reasoning with Ras Wise he showed me a further prospective concerning Rastafari and dreadlocks. He told me, Recently, some Rasta are holding on to the view that to be Rasta you must follow what Haile Selassie says and do. They seem not to be conscious of the fact that as a Rasta if we follow everything that Haile Selassie says or do, the Livity of Rasta does not match with what Selassie says. For example, growing our dreadlocks, Selassie did not grow his dreadlocks, he did not have an Ital diet, he did not smoke marijuana as many Rasta 216 do, and been a Christian, the Livity of Rasta is much different than a Christian lifestyle. I praise Selassie but I do not follow everything he says, if he asked me to cut my hair, I would never do it. Mi a Rasta and I live the lifestyle of a Rasta man with dreads not as many other Rasta who believes Rasta is only in our heart, dreads are InI identity. I will never trim my locks, and I want to be buried as a Rasta not as a bold head. Therefore, while Ras Gabriel trimmed his dreads to praise Haile Selassie, Ras Wise would never cut them because they are the symbol of his devotion to the King and of his identity as Jamaican Rasta. However, some Italian Rastafari hold a complete opposite view than Ras Wise, by connecting dreads with the Nazirite vow, rather than see them as a symbol of Rastafari identity. When I met Ras Gebre for the first time in Rome in December 2019, he told me, I cut my dreadlock because the Nazirite’s vow is very hard to follow and the hermits in Ethiopia also sometimes struggle to follow it. To follow the Nazirite’s vow, you should lock yourself up as a hermit in a monastery. It is really difficult and once you take the vow it is a serious matter, you do not play with these things, it is a great responsibility. Many Rastafari are aware and conscious that the vow must be recreated and negotiated within Western, modern society. While Reasoning with Ras Esdras he made me realise that many Rastafari, like him, are aware of the difficulties that they face to achieve a real separation from society, or to fulfil the vow while living in a modern, urban environment, I think one of the challenges of Rastafari, is that actually we live in the world so much. So, we are not like the Hassidic Jewish… who are closed [among themselves], we are open, we live very much in the world really. What both Ras Gebre and Ras Esdras stressed is the difficulties Rastafari face in accomplishing a real separation from society, as required by the vow, while living their everyday life in the 217 West and the cities. They understood that the kind of separation required by the Nazirite vow could be mental and spiritual but hardly physical as prescribed by the holy scriptures. As the data collected shows, for many Rastafari dreadlocks are lived simultaneously as an outside/inside, creative/constrictive, immanent/transcendent and flexible/rigid subjective practice and performance. 7.2.2.3 Dreadlocks and Stigma Although for Rastafari dreadlocks have different meanings and are grown for various personal beliefs, this kind of hairstyle has been often stigmatised by mainstream Western society. Since the time of the Coral Garden massacre in Jamaica in 1963, during which the Jamaican government allowed police to arrest or kill anyone wearing dreadlocks, this hairstyle has been associated with criminality, laziness, dirtiness and is not recognised at all as a Biblical, spiritual, or cultural hairstyle. In 2018, in an article published by the Guardian newspaper, it was reported that a Rastafari kid from London was told on his first day at school ‘that his dreadlocked hair, which he wore tied up, did not comply with the school’s uniform and appearance policy and had to be cut off or he would face suspension’ (Guardian, 12th September 2018). The publicization of the case raised many concerns amongst the diasporic community, even though he was eventually allowed to keep them and return to school after legal action was taken by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). In light of this, in November 2021, the Freedom in the City Festival held a Reasoning event about this issue called ‘Dreadlocks in Education, Understanding Dreadlocks in School’. The Reasoning was held by some Rastafari who were invited to express their views and experiences about the stigma surrounding dreadlocks in schools, and to promote respect and dignity to protect children with this hairstyle, 218 We felt the necessity to promote this event also as a resource for teachers, schools, and families, to develop knowledge and attitude toward the acceptability of children wearing this form of cultural expression. The participants were invited to talk about their personal experiences about dreadlocks and how the wearing of this hairstyle influenced their lives. Ras Malcom Richards opened the conversation by explaining that, when he was young, in his school those wearing dreadlocks were disadvantaged because they were perceived badly, ‘in the school if you wanted to progress, you must be sure you don’t have dreadlocks.’ He underlined that the dreads were not perceived as having a spiritual or cultural value, on the contrary, they were seen very badly by schoolteachers. He continued by explaining his experience as a Rastafari school teacher, [when I started teaching in the school] To see a teacher with dreads was as rare as it was when I was a boy. Something unique is conferred to the teacher, a physical manifestation of somebody who is going to be critical, radical, rebellious, and who is going to think outside of the norms of the school system. After his intervention, Sista Simba Pili took the floor. She runs a haircare business specialising in dreadlocks called Superdreads. She underlined that she had had dreadlocks since she was a child in Barbados and while she was describing her experience, she recalled that her schoolteachers used to assume that she and her brother were people ‘not intelligent or not well educated.’ She explained that, although the negative perception surrounding dreadlocks was changing, when she arrived in Britain ten years ago, she felt stigmatised for her hair, people were enquiring if I washed my dreads, and I found it very offensive. People are not educated about it and that’s why the stigma is created. For many people dreads have to do with spirituality, for some is about connecting with their culture, and for others is 219 just wearing a hair natural style. Dreadlocks should not be a barrier to education and determine how intelligent you can or not be. After Sista Simba’s intervention, Sista Princess Black took the floor. She started explaining that in the late 1970s, she grew dreadlocks as a symbol of cultural identity, self-awareness, and Rastafari identity. However, her family told her, ‘why do you wear your hair like this? you won’t find a job!’ The conversation turned to a video about a project done by the Black Family Education support group, which was sent to British schools to address the stigma of dreadlocks faced by many kids at school. In the video children and mothers explain the main issues, and negative representations regarding dreads in school settings, such as: unwashed hair, dirty hair, children treated differently, bullying, unconscious bias, cultural misunderstanding and so on. At the end of the video, Dr. Sober took the floor explaining that this is an important conversation to have, although it is sad that such a conversation is still necessary in 2021, Schools and government bodies, they are presenting one kind of fixed laws and regulations at schools, they don’t look at the cultural significance that can actually oppress, and they are doing it with a lack of understanding, but also a lack of willingness to listen when there is a challenge on that … [children and mothers] they are not listened or taken seriously. Regardless of BLM, schools have policies about equal opportunity, equality, inclusion, diversity... and they are supposed to look at why their regulations are trying to deculture experiences and sets of beliefs. It is not only Rastafari that carry dreadlocks but also other cultural traditions in connection to natural hair and Africa, and many white people carry them by link it to paganism, and their connection with nature. These stories need to be heard. Sista Simba took the floor again, arguing that dreadlocks were a diversity and inclusion issue that encompassed many communities, not just Rastafari. Afterwards, the main speaker asked 220 Sista Princes Black ‘how do we address this matter nowadays? How can we possibly protect the children in the school’s system from 2021 onwards?’, and she said, Rising awareness, education, increasing the knowledge of the truth about dreadlocks in general. But I am a great believer in Sankofa, in looking back so we can go forward. I am going to give you a positive aspect [about dreads] experienced by one of my children around 2005. He said to me that at the time when he grew dreadlocks in school, it was not common in school, but it was common in popular and social culture, because a lot of artists were wearing the dreadlocks, so people perceived him as ‘cool’ because he was looking like an artist. He felt cool and unique, he felt proud, he felt different and proud to wear his locks because it identified him as somebody cool. When it comes to religious education, also there, he was feeling proud because the teacher was always referring to him as a point of reference, asking him if he could explain to the class why he got dreadlocks. So, we should capitalise on these positive aspects and carry them forward…addressing children with dreads at school in a positive way, instead of that through these stigmas and stereotypes. However, despite Sista Simba’s positive intervention, the event concluded with the guests underlining that the oppression faced by people wearing dreadlocks (especially Rastafari) is very real and whenever a person is excluded from school for this reason, this is an extension and expression of this oppression. 7.3 Fashioning Rastafari While doing fieldwork, I noticed that besides dreadlocks also fashion was of great importance amongst Rastafari, for different subjective reasons. Often Rastafari express resistance toward 221 Babylon by adopting and choosing certain specific forms of dress styles, which are often performed and lived as antagonistic to the Western notions of aesthetics and beauty. Sometimes, as with dreadlocks, the chosen style can be lived as a sign of Rastafari identity, as a mirror of their adherence to Livity, as an act of piety, or as related to an identification with Africa. For example, during one of our Reasonings Sista Stella told me, We like our African dress style because we are African. [This style] gives us dignity and it reminds us of who we are and come from. We were queens and kings [in Africa, before the transatlantic deportation], so we dress accordingly and wear our crowns [dreadlocks, or turban]. Sista Fyah here is performing Sankofa in her dressing style, by emphasising that dressing as an African queen is a way to recover an imaginative neglected past and bring back the dignity taken away during the deportation and enslavement of her ancestors. However, Rastafari have adopted numerous ways in which they are living, fashioning, creating, and playing with their styles. Furthermore, there are always subjective meanings and personal reasons behind their style choices. For example, when I asked Ras Asher why he was wearing a white turban, he told me, I am not a Boboshanti, but I am a Rasta. The turban I have comes from Ethiopia, the priests wear it. This is also why the Boboshanti wear it because is a priestly order, and I am a Levi [referring to the Twelve Tribes chart below] so I am a priest. 222 Figure 36 The Twelve Tribes chart (my own picture, verbal authorisation). By wearing an Ethiopian turban, Ras Asher is materialising his feeling and identity as Ethiopian, as a Rasta, and as a priest, in his everyday life in London. It is a statement of identity related also to a specific spiritual and cultural path. He is practising Sankofa, by retrieving and recreating knowledge from the Bible, Ethiopia, and the Twelve Tribes and applying it to his everyday life. During the many events that I attended during fieldwork, I also met Rastafari wearing ‘bling’ objects, others dressing as orthodox Ethiopian priests, others as soldiers with military uniforms, others wearing suits and others just adopting casual simple clothes. Those who dress as Ethiopian Orthodox priests, with a white turban and a tunic, are those Rasta who generally 223 belong or are close to the Bobo Shanti order. They dress in this way to indicate their identification with the Biblical Melchizedek’s priesthood and recognise themselves as priests. This is also reflected in the fact that in front of their names they do not use Ras, as the majority of Rasta do, but Priest. Furthermore, there is no gender distinction, both men and women adopt this dress style, and cover their head as a sign of purity. However, women are not considered priestesses within the order, as only men are authorised to conduct religious services and groundation (gatherings). While researching among the Twelve Tribes, I learned that for their celebrations they choose the colour of their outfit depending on the month (see figure 35 above). When I participated in November 2019 at the Twelve Tribe’s 50th anniversary in London, I noticed that many people were dressed in red, because according to their calendar, the colour of November is red, and it is associated with the tribe of Gad. However, as Ras Isdra told me, Actually, tonight everyone should wear his own tribals’ colour because is all Tribes’ celebration. Within the Twelve Tribes, each individual belongs to an Israeli tribe depending on the month in which they were born, and today they should dress accordingly. With time I learned that the Twelve Tribes use a calendar or a special chart where the names of the Twelve Tribes of Israel are listed (see figure 35 above). The chart then associates these names with the months, body parts, colours, positive and negative faculties, personal traits, metaphysical spiritual strengths, planets, divine attributes and places, and Christ’s disciples. The chart is a guide where each tribal name (or monthly name) has specific attributes and characteristics. For example, according to the chart, since I was born in December, I belong to the tribe of Asher, my body part is thighs, my colour is grey, my natural positive faculty is truth, my negative faculty in reverse is lying, my personal trait is ‘I expand therefore I am,’ my 224 metaphysical spiritual high office is ‘understanding,’ my planet is the Moon, and finally among Christ’s disciples I would have the characteristic of Thomas. As I stated previously, the ways in which Rastafari are materialising and embodying different styles are various and creative. For instance, when I met Ras Mikael for the first time at the Strawberry Fair (Cambridge) in 2018, he was dressed in a crooner style, wearing a bright red suit and shoes, with several necklaces, bracelets, and rings. His eccentric style reminded me of Lee Scratch Perry, the creator of Dub music. When I went to visit Ras Bongo a Jamaican Londoner and Nyabinghi elder in his home in July 2019, he showed me his Rastafari uniforms and opened his wardrobe for me. I noticed a military uniform with an Ethiopian flag and a white suit, and I asked him on which occasions he wore them, he replied, Well, I don’t need to [wear it every day] because it’s like, yeah, every day is alright, but it is on special days that I come out in it. Because is like if I go inna di Parliament Thursday I [will] wear it, because that’s the Parliament the seat of Babylon so, me have to go and represent myself as Rasta! [He shows me what he is wearing to go to Parliament and explains his outfit] So, me a wear my military uniform, my hat [a green, yellow, and red hat], and my necklace [a simple wood necklace with an image of Haile Selassie attached]. I wear the white suit in certain [special] time, like Christmas, or on His Majesty Earthstrong [birthday] on the 23rd of July. We put several things for that day, we dress for the occasion. The Boboshanti they dress that way [as priest] all the time because they are a ‘Priestical’ order, but we [the Nyabinghi], we dress now the 225 way we want to dress, really. Yes, we represent His Majesty in our dress because His Majesty was wearing suits and that thing de [these kind of military dress]. 24 25 Also, during my Reasoning with Ras Tewelde, he also stressed that Rastafari should embrace a style similar to Haile Selassie because they represent him, I wear a suit and tie almost every day, but not for Babylon's protocol, but for His Imperial Majesty’s protocol. His Majesty was not going to talk or appear in front of the masses in a T-shirt. Furthermore, during fieldwork in Italy, I was very surprised by the orthodox style adopted by some Rastafari women. Some were wearing long white dresses with Ethiopian colours and covering their Rasta turban with a white veil. When I met with Sista Fatuma, who was dressed in this way, I asked, ‘why do you feel the necessity to dress like this?’, and she told me, I have started wearing Ethiopian clothes since I approached orthodoxy. I was already Rasta, then I got baptized a couple of years ago, I received baptism, and I am more oriented towards orthodoxy now. 24 Earthstrong is a unique Jamaican way which refer to someone’s birthday. For example, ‘Wish you a blessed earthstrong.’ 25 Ras Bongo was going with other Rastafari to the parliament on the following Thursday to stress again, after the 2015 reparation march, the need for economic and cultural reparation. 226 Figure 37 Italian Rastafari women’s style, doing the Rastafari symbol (my own picture, verbally authorised). Through their dress code, Rastafari are materialising their subjective identities, and the message that they want to carry, conscious of the power their ways of fashioning the self can have on others. They enact Sankofa in highly creative ways through their dressing styles, recovering refashioning and blending Biblical and Rastafari resources with African cultures, Haile Selassie’s dressing styles, or Orthodox practices. Style as an embodied performance is, therefore, a pivotal element of Rastafari lived religiosity in motion. 227 7.4 A Journey through Ital Material: Food, Herbalism, and Earthical Bodily Practices Alongside the various, creative, and subjective ways in which Rastafari fashion their Rastafari identities through embodied practices, during fieldwork I noticed especially throughout the Covid -19 pandemic a reinforced tendency toward Ital and bodily practices. In this section, it will be shown that Rastafari Livity is not only related to music, or to Ethiopian, African, or Jamaica cultures, but to bodily performances related to the consumption of food, the use of herbs and to gardening. Sankofa in this context works as a means to retrieve and recreate a natural lifestyle, which in the Rastafari imaginary has been deformed by Babylon and global capitalism. In this framework, Rastafari which is considered by many an ‘Heartical’ movement, becomes ‘Earthical.’ This Earthical tendency, which is not new within the movement, is emphasised by a spiritual and bodily relationship with Mother Earth and nature. As Sista Fyah wrote on her Facebook page, Rastafari believes that they are ‘made by nature and healed by nature’, that’s why they consider the Earth as a mother who nourishes and provides for them. Earthical bodily practices involve any activity which engage the body with nature such as gardening, farming, or the use of (medical) herbs. This shows a further dimension of Rastafari Livity, and everyday bodily practices, which goes beyond the Nazarite vow and toward a gendered relationship with the earth through Ital diets, healing herbs and activities such as gardening. 7.4.1 An Immersive Journey into Ital Food Many diasporic Rastafari told me that they eat Caribbean food as a way to preserve and stay connected with their Caribbean heritage. Amongst the diaspora, knowing how to cook Caribbean food has great cultural value because it is something transmitted generationally. Preserving Caribbean heritage involves the usage of specific vegetables and spices, not only 228 for consumption, but according to some to boost their immune system to support the body and cure themselves of illnesses. To them, human bodies and nature are interconnected with each other, as one. This is one way in which Rastafari express oneness with the whole of creation, and a way also to retrieve an African way to manage food, the body, health and well-being. In fact, many Rastafari strongly believe that Jah (God) through the creation of nature, has given to humanity everything it needs, and it is what Bob Marley defined as a ‘natural mystic.’ Therefore, to Rastafari, food practices are pivotal to their cultural and religious way of life and to what they call Ital. Not Ital, which to Rastafari stands for not natural and man-made, consists of genetically modified, processed and tinned foods and also meat or fish consumption. Non-Ital food is often experienced by Rastafari as a form of physical colonisation and spiritual contamination linked to Western eating habits. Food is a further way in which Rastafari are experiencing Sankofa. Rastafari are performing strategic ways to detach, contrast, and challenge Babylon by emphasising the consumption of natural Ital food, and trying to eat accordingly, despite living in an urban environment which sometimes makes it difficult for them to do so. The most well-known British Rastafari with a passion for promoting Ital food, is the British singer and poet Macka B. He plays wonderful hilarious reggae songs about the natural properties contained in vegetables, herbs, and fruits. In his songs and poems such as Plantain, or Vegan Jamaican national dish, he refers to and sings about Jamaican vegetables and their nutritional properties and ‘traditional’ dishes. Macka B is one amongst many diasporic Rastafari to stress the Rastafari motto ‘Ital is Vital.’ For instance, while Reasoning with Ras Esdras, he stressed the importance of Rastafari food knowledge and its transmission, I think Rastafari is the world’s best-kept secret! [Repeated twice with emphasis] There are so many things that Rastafari champions and now become normal, such as the vegan 229 diet in terms of Ital, the use of herbs as medicines, no salt in food, natural food, natural hair these things were not normal before, now people are becoming conscious. Let’s see how the new generation takes them forward. When I met Ras Wise, he invited me to his allotment for our Reasoning. While we were there, he prepared a delicious Ital soup with many of his vegetables seasoned with Caribbean spices, dumplings and banana fritters. While enjoying the food he told me, If in Jamaica poor people understood that they could just grow their own food, there would not be the necessity for them to deal with criminality in order to survive. You see? I grow my own food, so I go to the supermarket mainly in wintertime, this keeps me independent economically. During Covid, I was here all the time, I was lucky to have this space and eat my own Caribbean Ital food. I stand for life, so I do not eat dead animals or any derivate such as eggs or dairy. While I was at the allotment, I noticed some wood pallets with Biblical references written on them. 230 Figure 38 Biblical quotes in Ras Wise’s allotment (verbally authorised). When I asked him about the meanings of the pallet above, he recited the Biblical verses to me, God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seeds, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruits of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. [He continued by telling me] People in the past did not eat meat, meat to 231 them were vegetables and fruits. This is why Rastafari do not eat meat, as is written here [indicating a further pallet with a Biblical account, this time from Ezekiel]. Figure 39 Ras Wise Biblical quotes around his allotment (verbally authorised). After he pointed to the Biblical quote, he continued by explaining what the quote referred to, Do not misunderstand me, I am not a religious person, for me the Bible is an historical book about the Hebrew, the Hebrew were the people of Kush, black people. This Biblical passage explains that the Hebrews were not eating any meat as Ezekiel states ‘No impure meat ever enters my mouth’. 232 However, for some Rastafari, Ital food does not necessarily mean a strict vegetarian or vegan diet. While talking to Ras Isdra he explained to me the Twelve Tribes’ position toward food consumption more clearly, As I told you, when it comes to food and drinks that’s a personal choice, we don’t force our doctrine on anyone. We know that God says ‘yes, is better not to eat certain things,’ but there is no food doctrine. Well, I do not eat pork, I don’t eat shellfish, I eat normal fish like cod and snapper not like lobster and shrimp, those kinds of things, I do not eat pork obviously, I do eat fish. I do eat chicken and there is no law against eating certain kinds of meat. Furthermore, during the pandemic, the Rastafari movement UK started to promote on Facebook and other social media, a fundraising activity called ‘Food and Well-being’ for a food bank with which they were collaborating in London, called Pepys Social Market. 233 Figure 40 RMUK fb post about Pepys social market (public picture, verbally authorised) 234 Figure 41 RMUK social market activities during Covid 19 (Fb public picture, verbally authorised). With the support of the RMUK, the food bank was able to provide food to help vulnerable and at-risk households, children, and elderly people living in isolation during the lockdown. This service was created and promoted principally by two Rastafari women, Sista Stella and Sista Sheba, to assist Rastafari and other local people living in Lambeth and Southwark by providing 235 access to healthy organic food and promoting a broadly Ital diet. Although the food bank tended to be Ital, many products such as beans, chickpeas, or soups were in tins, therefore not totally Ital. However, the food bank initiative went so well that RMUK received an award for their wonderful work, from the UK Faith and Belief Forum. Sista Stella told me that for her it was an honour to be able to deliver this service to people during the pandemic because she stressed, It’s a principle of Rastafari to let the hungry be fed, the naked be clothed, the sick nourished, the aged protected, and the infant cared for. Food in this context and for these Rastafari women was a way to perform and embody love toward humanity. In fact, Lambeth Council developed a website called ‘right2food’ where in a podcast, called ‘Ital: Rasta Food and Friendship for Lambeth’s Poorest Families’, children, elders, and local people thanked the RMUK for their vital support and help (https://shows.acast.com/right2food/episodes/ital-rasta-food-and-friendship-for-lambeths-poorest-families ). Many people in the podcast stressed that the RMUK not only provided healthy food for the community but also psychological and moral support during the pandemic. Ethical values concerning food were strongly emphasised and promoted among diasporic Rastafari during the pandemic, notably on social media where people were stressing the importance of having an Ital diet. For instance, in one of Ras Irie’s Facebook posts, he was playing with the word ‘Self Isolation’, which he fashioned in a Rastafari way, writing on his FB wall ‘Self-Italation’ as soon as a new lockdown was announced by the British government. His post was an invitation to his followers and friends to become Ital, to adopt a vegetarian (or vegan) diet to boost their immune systems and resist the virus. To him following a healthy Ital diet was more important than self-isolation. This posting shows a counter-cultural form of responding to the lockdown, and the pandemic. 236 In contrast to the diasporic community, for which an Ital diet and herbal healing practices are traditionally Caribbean, while I was doing fieldwork in Italy, I experienced that Rastafari bodily practices toward food consumption had a different flavour. In January 2020, I was invited together with Ras Din, and Ras Gad, to Sista Amina’s home for lunch. This was our first encounter, the first of many. When I arrived at Sista Amina’s house, I was very surprised to find her busy in the kitchen cooking, I could smell very peculiar flavours coming from different pots, so I asked what she was cooking. She told me that she was making the Ethiopian national dish injera and that the smell was coming from the spices that she was using such as berbere and shiro powder. It was the first time that I had had injera and it was delicious. Figure 42 Sista Amina’s Ethiopian food (My own picture). During fieldwork amongst Italian Rastafari, I learned that it is becoming a tradition to prepare, cook, and share injera as a special meal, to be consumed together, especially during Rastafari celebrations such as Haile Selassie's’ birthday, or Ethiopian festivities. It is through 237 the consumption of Ethiopian food that Italian Rastafari materialise their Rastafari identities. For instance, on the day of Timquet, after having attended part of the Tewahedo Orthodox church ceremony in Rome, I was invited to join local Rastafari for lunch at Ras Shaka’s house. For the occasion, Sista Amina prepared for all of us a wonderful injera with zighini, shiro, lentil stew, homemade hummus, peas and cabbages. She told me that preparing Ethiopian food is a joy for her, it’s her passion, and she finds real pleasure in cooking Ethiopian food for her brothers and sisters, especially on such a holy day. After we all sat down, Ras Sound took the floor and recited a prayer in which he thanked Jah, Haile Selassie, and Sista Amina for the food, and to allow us to stay together on this special day. When the prayer closed everybody exclaimed ‘Rastafari’!! I was sitting close to Ras Gad, a Jamaican Rastafari I met in Rome through Sista Amina, and I asked him, ‘do you generally eat Ethiopian food?’ He told me, Noooo, I generally eat Jamaican food, like achee, cassava, bread fruits. Also, when I was in Shashamane I never had an injera, this is my second time. I remember really enjoying the smell and the flavour of the Ethiopian cuisine. However, during fieldwork I noticed that some Rastafari in Italy like Sista Amina, or Ras Negasi were eating Ethiopian food almost every day. In Italy, Rastafari have created a new Ital cuisine and cultural tradition, inspired by Ethiopia the land of Rastafari (the King), and re-created it locally. On the 23rd of July 2021, Sista Amina asked me to join her for dinner in one of the best Roman Ethiopian restaurants close to Termini Station to celebrate Haile Selassie’s birthday. It was very interesting to go to this restaurant because more than a restaurant it was like being in a small Ethiopian museum. Sista Amina told me that there are two kinds of Ethiopians living in Rome, the ones who support the Ethiopian monarchy and the ones who do not. Although the owner of this restaurant does not recognise Haile Selassie as divine, she told me that she would never eat in a restaurant where they do not welcome Rasta, or Haile Selassie as their king. We 238 had a fantastic injera, and we took a lot of pictures around the restaurant. Meanwhile, she explained to me the meaning and usage of various objects. She told me the history of past Ethiopian kings, showed me musical instruments such as the sistrum, the horsetail fly whisk generally used by the orthodox clergy, and explained to me briefly the Amharic alphabet which was carved on a wooden tablet. Figure 43 Ethiopian restaurant in Rome (My own picture). 239 Figure 44 Vegetarian injera (My own picture). 240 Figure 45 Ethiopian restaurant in Rome (My own picture). 241 Figure 46 Haile Selassie portrait at the Ethiopian restaurant in Rome (My own picture). Sista Amina was very happy to share her knowledge with me and involve me in an immersive 242 journey through Ethiopian culture, food and objects. However, while in Italy when I was invited by Ras Hobo and Ras Tewelde to their home, the taste and smell of the food changed completely, they offered me delicious Italian Ital meals. For the occasion, Ras Hobo’s wife prepared a wonderful Ital Italian lunch which consisted of a pie with Taleggio cheese and radicchio, mozzarella, a salad with black olives and oranges, another with fennel and oranges, and traditional biscuits called 'brutti ma buoni' (ugly but good) accompanied by a traditional Neapolitan creamy coffee. Ras Hobo and his wife come from Naples and the lunch was a mirror of southern Italian cuisine. On this occasion, I learned how Rastafari have a personal, creative, and cultural approach to food and the Ital diet by adapting and recreating Ital food through diverse cuisines such as the Italian, or Ethiopian. Sometimes Italian Rastafari also merge and blends all these cuisines creating new Ital dishes. For instance, Sista Faith and Sista Tsai, two Italian Rastafari women that I had the pleasure to meet and Reason with online, have blogs and YouTube pages to promote vegan, healthy, new and globally inclusive Ital recipes. Sista Faith is collaborating with the monthly F.A.R.I. journal with a vegan column called the ‘Ital corner,’ while Sista Tsai has a YouTube page called ‘Ital cucina.’ When I asked Sista Tsai why she did this page, she told me, In my humble way, I am a chef, so I know how to cook, when I cook, I give all my knowledge, which also comes from Rastafari. When I entered the faith, I first became a vegetarian, then a vegan and then I started learning how to take care of my body through food. My goal in life is to make people understand how to take care of themselves [through food]. I also started to learn about Rastafari fasting practices while I was doing fieldwork in Rome. While Reasoning with Ras Gad he told me, 243 You see the Bible is written inner you, if you want to activate the Bible inner you, you start to do some fasting. The last time I fasted, I fasted for about fifteen days, it was a resting fasting, you eat good and a lot for few months and after you do it. You can also do it for three days. Fasting does the same thing to everybody, clean you spiritually, because much of the food we eat is not good, not good spiritually, so sometimes is poisoning your body, like if you eat pizza every day, that’s madness and makes your body slow and can’t think… Whilst fasting can be done anytime to purify the body, I noticed that some Rastafari follow the calendar of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo church. For instance, during a Zoom meeting with some Italian Rastafari which was held to celebrate Fasika (the Ethiopian Easter), Ras Din expressed his happiness to have finally finished his Easter fast saying, ‘fasting is a pleasure.’ He experiences fasting as an embodied act of piety and commitment toward Rastafari but especially toward Christian Orthodoxy. Although Ras Gad and Ras Din are close friends their ways of living Rastafari are very different, while the former has created his identity on an inherited Jamaican tradition, the latter is developing his Rastafari identity more around the Ethiopian Orthodox church, its theology, and its practices. They are strongly aware of their different views, but this does not stop them from being incredibly close friends. While in Rome I also met some Rastafari who were fasting every Saturday for the celebration of the Sabbath, as Ras Quedamawi who during our Reasoning told me, Generally, at home [in Kenya] we fast from Friday evening until Sunday evening. If you are busy or sick, maybe you do half day from 6 am to 12 pm and then you can start eating. You wash your hands, you wash your feet, we already prepared the food before, and if you can do it you supposed to do it. Because Rastafari it’s the cheaper way of life but it is really tough. Like on Sabbath you have to prepare the food for yourself, 244 you have to cook the right stuff like a lot of vegetables, and you can eat it at 12 noon. If you are not working, you have to wait until 6 a.m. Yes at 6 a.m. you can eat, but if you are very connected and in love with Rastafari you can prolong it until Sunday. It depends on your personal strength. Fasting, therefore is linked to strong subjective commitment and personal spiritual strength, which is why it is considered and used as a powerful practice of piety not only toward the King, or Orthodoxy but especially toward the temple, the body itself. 7.4.2 Healing Practices and Views during Covid 19 During the Covid pandemic, while interviewing diasporic Rastafari, I observed that they were all stressing and promoting the importance of a healthy lifestyle, to boost their immune systems and to take proper care of their temple (body). For instance, while I was Reasoning about Covid with Ras Prime, a Rastafari elder living in Liverpool he said, I think it depends on how your body is, if it is weak, it is a problem. Me too one day I went to the supermarket, and I did not feel good. I started to feel funny, my throat started to itch, I had not had a cold since 2008 when I came back from Brazil. Every time that I feel sick, I just boil garlic, ginger, and lemon, and I add honey, it is very good, it’s a Jamaican recipe. It cleans your body, reduces your cholesterol, makes you strong, it’s good for many things. You must stay healthy, eat turmeric, and take vitamin D because we [Caribbeans] don’t get usually enough sun [here in Britain]. Ras Prime is engaging in Sankofa by drawing on traditional Jamaican cultural knowledge for healing, and to look after his body, which he recommended to me and everyone. By choosing certain traditional ways to heal his body, he is performing a Rastafari method of self-medication. During our Reasoning Ras Prime, like other Rasta that I met, was explaining to me 245 the healing properties of different types of food and herbs and expressing the idea of oneness between food, body, and nature, lived by many Rastafari. During the pandemic, part of my fieldwork in England moved online, and for more than a year every Saturday, I joined the Rastafari Sabbath school virtually. During one of these meetings Ras Cush took the floor, focusing on the importance of melanin and vitamin D to keep the body, and the immune system healthy, during the pandemic. It was very interesting to hear how he interlinked the issue of the pandemic and the loss of melanin, to highlight the bleaching issue among Black communities. He said, Melanin helps with the absorption of vitamin D, vitamin D is important for the absorption of calcium, and phosphorous is important for the mind, and the body’s skeleton. Especially among us [diasporic Rastafari] there are people not using dairy products, so we are losing calcium, so it’s important to the sun! In Europe or the USA…many of us living there don’t spend time in the sun because they don’t want to tan. This mentality can be a form of mental and nutritional genocide. [Bleaching] is a psychological illness and mental genocide, that we are experiencing, because of the historical mistake of imagining us, constantly bombarding our consciousness, so when you see something light and bright you think ‘this is right.’ When we see dark, and we see black, we still feel bad because our subconscious has been influenced by this wrong European identification. Ras Cush linked race and health because during the pandemic a lack of melanin and vitamin D could have been extremely dangerous. Bleaching is a dangerous practice that is related to the view of Western beauty and is performed by black people who do not appreciate their natural skin colour. It’s a practice that 246 derives from racism, which privileges Western aesthetic ideas of beauty relating to skin colour, and it is widespread in the Caribbean and elsewhere because light skin colour is frequently associated with high social status. This idea is still visible in Jamaica where people use ‘cake soap’ or blue soap, generally used for bleaching dresses, on their skin, thinking that a lighter colour would improve their social standing.26 Figure 47 Jamaican cake soap sold in Britain (My own picture taken in Harlesden-London). This issue reflects the negative meta-narratives and stereotypes created by the Western colonial hegemony toward blackness, which has haunted black men and women for centuries. Today colonial brainwashing and mental cultural ‘whitening’ are visible within the black community through practices such as bleaching. While participating in the online Sabbath school, I noticed that quite often Ras Cush, the main speaker, was encouraging people to eat plants and vegetables to support their immune 26 There is a song by Vybz Kartel called ‘Cake Soap’ which promotes the use of bleaching soap in Jamaica. This well-known and controversial dancehall song, released in 2010, states ‘Cool like mi wash mi face with di cake soap.’ Kartel is not a Rasta but the most famous Jamaican dancehall artist whose songs greatly influenced Jamaican society. In fact, this song had a strong impact and success amongst the dancehall public, to the point that Kartel’s followers started to bleach their skin by using the promoted soap. Colourism was and is still a big issue within Caribbean societies, especially amongst the poor. Indeed, the song received many criticisms from Rastafari, but sometimes the Rastafari emphasis on blackness can create issues concerning interracial relationships, especially in the Caribbean. 247 systems. As a result of so-called austerity and the many events of institutional racism toward Caribbean people such as the Windrush scandal, many Rastafari in Britain today live in poverty and in overcrowded areas, where Covid 19 was transmitted far easier. Ras Cush was naming plants that help with health issues, such as ‘goldenseal roots, blood wis, bitter leaf, and moringa’. His account testifies how knowledge and practice inherited from the Caribbean is preserved among the diasporic community. During the Sabbath school, I noticed that some of the remedies Ras Cush suggested were taken directly from the Bible. For instance, during one class he told us to check Psalm 45 which suggests some natural remedies against the virus, such as ‘incense, myrrh, aloe, and cassia’. Although this Psalm is considered a love poem addressed to a king who was anointed with these herbs and resins to make him smell good for seductive purposes, Ras Cush recommended them for their healing properties. 7.4.2.1 Covid and vaccine efficacy The ways in which Rastafari view health, the body and nature have nourished peculiar mythological views around the origins of Covid and the efficacy of vaccines. Sometimes their worries and concerns about their body and health intersected with global conspiracy theories about Covid. While doing interviews online at the beginning of the pandemic, I often heard Rastafari using the word ‘Plandemic.’Although this term fits perfectly into some Rasta narratives, it is worth noting that the term ‘plan-demic’ originated outside of the Rastafari milieu (Nazar and Pieters, 2021). 248 Figure 48 Rastafari art about the ‘plandemic’ by Ras Ed Jones (Public Fb picture, written authorisation). When the Covid 19 pandemic started in March 2020, I was doing fieldwork in Italy. I decided to add a further question to my semi-structured interview questionnaire (see appendix) asking ‘what do you think of the pandemic?’ During my Reasonings with Rastafari, I had quite a number of different answers from Rastafari in Italy and in England. For instance, some believed that Covid 19 was part of the fulfilment of the prophecy for which Babylon shall fall (Sista Tefari), while others told me that Covid was not God’s will, but a human laboratory mistake (Ras Jonah), others told me that it was ‘Babylon’s strategic plan to transmit fear and take control over people life’ (Sista Fatuma). During the Reasoning with Ras Federico, when I asked about the pandemic and what he was thinking about Covid, he said, 249 I think [Covid and the vaccine] are always Babylon stuff. When these things happen here, I think that man has no respect for God and wants to imitate him and go further, but instead, he does damage. Society should have evolved people mentally not materially, they destroy your brain. Coronavirus is one of the many things they do, we have to defend ourselves. There are even Bible warnings of these things here! Babylon will fall sooner or later! It could also be a virus created in the laboratory, as they call it in Shashamane the ‘United States of America 666'. When I asked Sista Tefari in June 2020 the same question she explained her views and feelings about the virus, Yes, as I told you I feel the day of judgment close, Armageddon is right here and now! It is all part of the Babylon plan, it is not a thing, it is the whole of things. The powerful of the world who will then also make war with each other have hands everywhere, for me the problem is not the virus, 5G or vaccines, they are all these things put together. The plan is to destroy humanity not to preserve it, food today is plastic, the sea is plastic, the air is chemical, viruses kill us, vaccines kill us even more than viruses. Only we [Rastafari] are saved, and we must try to stay at an adequate distance to avoid falling into that trap, but we are in this world. When my son gets angry and says, 'mom what can we do to stop Babylon?', I always tell him, 'the only thing you have to do is lead by example'. While researching during the pandemic, I noticed some disagreements between Rastafari concerning the vaccine and the mythology surrounding it. During a WhatsApp Reasoning with Ras Julio, he told me that the wrong reading and interpretation of the Bible has led many Rastafari to judge one another over whether to have the vaccine. Ras Julio told me, 250 I was recently invited to some Rastafari international meetings to clarify the narrative that if you take the vaccine, you are taking the ‘mark of the beast,’ based on chapters 13 and 14 of the Apocalypse book. This is a new interpretation, not the one left by the Elders. During these meetings, I explained that the ‘mark of the beast’ refers to the Second World War, to Mussolini, and Hitler, and their alliance with the Catholic Church. Because the Bible says that, with the ‘mark of the beast’ you can neither buy nor sell, some brothers have associated it with the green pass [Italian Covid passport]. Instead, biblically, it refers to those who, by following Mussolini and Hitler, would have thought, and behaved diabolically. The problem is that it is claimed that the vaccine or the green pass are the ‘marks of the beast,’ so what happens if a brother gets vaccinated, he also acquires the mark? No! I tried to eradicate this bad weed that was growing within the movement, between Rastafari vax and no vax. Misery to it! If Rastafari becomes a philosophy closed in a room, a community, or in a tabernacle, NO! Rastafari is a spiritual dimension that lives in unison with the historical mundane dimension. The division between the vax, and no vax is something shabby, it is the divide and rule that Babylon uses, even among the Rastafari. Some Rastafari in Italy lived the Italian government's vaccine imposition as a form of sanitary dictatorship. For instance, before the green pass became mandatory in Italy, and while I was in Rome in July 2021, I met with Ras Din, Sista Amina and a few other Rasta. We had a Reasoning about the vaccine, some had already had it, while others were still thinking about it. Nevertheless, they were all concerned by the position taken by the Italian government about the green pass. They told me that the use of the green passes was a move against democracy and freedom of choice to be vaccinated, and wholly unconstitutional. Sista Amina told me, 251 Look I am a doctor, and I am not generally against vaccines. But this vaccine has not been tested properly, it has been discovered and placed immediately on the market and now they want even to oblige us to take it and give it to children, they are mad! So now if you won’t take it, you are not free anymore. In doing so, they are taking away our rights and our freedom. While I was participating online in the Rastafari Sabbath school, I also noticed a lot of scepticism towards the vaccine. People were concerned that the vaccine had not been tested and that it would not stop the virus. During this time, I received messages from a Rastafari living in England who did not want to be interviewed. He was sending me many videos with peculiar theories concerning the vaccine, such as that along with the vaccine, governments would inject a micro-chip, that the vaccine would cause many deaths in a few years, or that it was Bill Gates spreading the virus to make more money and reduce the global population by one third. I personally did not believe those theories, but I understood the difficulties that some Rastafari had in trusting the system. However, during the pandemic I also met many Rastafari who supported the vaccine campaign. When I asked Ras Prime his view on the vaccine, he told me, To me, the idea that Babylon is trying to kill us with the vaccine is ridiculous because they could kill us in many ways. I do not believe in all these conspiracy theories about the vaccine, it’s a personal choice and I am glad I decided to have it, this is what freedom is about, freedom of choice. I believe in science, and I love technology. Many Rasta do not love technology, but they have cars, they use Facebook, they go to the studio to record, they use electricity and after they say technology is Babylon or the anti-Christ. Also, the King [Haile Selassie] introduced and used vaccines to eliminate many pandemics in Ethiopia. 252 While Reasoning via WhatsApp with Ras Gebre concerning Covid and the vaccine, he told me to have had the jab and referring to Haile Selassie’s vaccination campaigns, he said, I believe in science as a gift from God to human intelligence, the Lord Quedamawi Haile Selassie always and everywhere has control over everything and would not allow the forces of evil to destroy his creation and his creatures. At the time of His Majesty, various vaccines were administered in Ethiopia, both to the people and to the livestock that people ate. The diffusion of various therapies and hospital treatments were introduced by His Majesty in the many hospitals he built and financed for the good health of his beloved subjects. Furthermore, during one phone call with Ras Din, when I asked what he was thinking about the Covid vaccine, he told me, I decided to have the vaccine after my uncle died last year, I don’t see anything evil about the vaccine. His Majesty would support the use of the vaccine, as he did when he was ruling Ethiopia, because it saved lives. Also, while Reasoning with Ras Quedamawi via WhatsApp about Covid and the vaccine he showed me a more pragmatic approach to the situation, as he said, If Rasta nuh jab, he can’t work, I know that there are many Rasta very strict on the vaccine, but if I don’t bring money home my children can’t eat. So, I did it for work and survival needs. 253 7.4.3 The Value of Earthical Practices, Gardening Roots, and Culture The emphasis toward Earthical bodily practices before and during the pandemic manifested also through subjective bodily performances of direct contact with the land such as gardening. During fieldwork in Britain, I noticed that RMUK was raising more awareness within the London Rastafari community about the value of gardening and well-being. Whilst I was writing this chapter during September 2021 the RMUK is moving and trying to get a space to develop an Ital food bank with a vegetable garden in the Lewisham or Southwark area, in south London. During a WhatsApp chat with Sista Stella she shared with me the vision concerning the garden and the new food bank saying, I hope we will be able to do some yoga there [in the garden], and stretching as the sun comes up, massages for the elderly, have herbal days where people are coming and experience the herbs, pure food for medicine and medicine for food, sensory plant growing around the edges. There young people will learn skills on how to maintain the herbs and groundwork, we want to do theatre, we want to dance, and cultural activities throughout the year. Probably we will go to share this space with other groups making an annual booklet of activities that will take place there. A lot of activities will take place there, such as outdoor crafting, Binghi [drumming] will take place there with a fire, a drumming session for all sorts of different people, ages, and backgrounds. If we can be able to adjust the kitchen, we will be able to do natural juices. In a further conversation with Sista Stella about the project in Southwark and Lewisham, she underlined to me the need to have such a space because many Rastafari in London are struggling economically to maintain an Ital organic diet due to unemployment, and the prohibitive costs of organic food, the impacts of government austerity, education barriers, and 254 institutional racism. Sista Stella told me that the development of a Rastafari place with a garden in London, where they could grow vegetables, would help to fulfil their Ital religious duties, create a micro-economy and encourage self-sustainability. Promoting wellbeing and communal cultural activities would be beneficial not only to Rastafari, but to the whole community of Southwark and Lewisham and the city of London. This space could also help the RMUK to preserve and promote Rastafari cultural heritage in London. In December 2021, the RMUK was able finally to open a further foodbank with a small garden. In honour of the hard work of Sista Stella, the community of Southwark and Lewisham, with the help of a local blind artist David Johnson, decided to erect in the foodbank’s communal garden a statue of Sista Stella, the first Rastafari to be memorialised in stone in London.27 Figure 49 Sista Stella’s statue in London (Public Fb picture, verbal authorisation). 27 The foodbank has since moved location, and the statue of Sista Stella can now be found at Lewisham commercial centre. 255 When I saw the statue on Facebook, I congratulated Sista Stella and she said, InI see it as a beautiful collaboration between his [David Johnson's] inner vision, and his technicalities [as a sculptor, being blind]. As for I, I just loved being and expressing the love, that is Rastafari. Besides the RMUK activities in Southwark and Lewisham, since the lockdown I noticed that many Rastafari participating to the research were getting involved in gardening practices. For instance, while Reasoning with Ras Esdras on Zoom in June 2020, he told me, I know since the time that I changed my name in 1990 that I wanted to get this closer relationship with nature and the land. About two years ago I started to meditate about it more, and I thought now I want to do this, so I put myself down for an allotment, I signed up with the council, I was on the list for a year, and in October last year, I got it. Since Corona Virus I got the time to work on it. So, since April I have been on the allotment nearly every day, and I am growing potatoes, rhubarb, corn and onions. It feels good, it feels very good, and I know that if anything grows that’s going to be a bonus, it’s actually about the process of digging, working the soil, it’s therapeutic. I hope through this Corona time to change and improve my lifestyle, because I am always rushing at the phone, or in the car. Also, while reasoning with Ras Wise during the pandemic, he told me by phone, The pandemic is not affecting me, I have my garden and vegetables to eat. You see, since God placed man out of the garden of Eden, man looked for food all over, people do not think to go back to the garden and grow their own food as I do. 256 One Rastafari branch, the Boboshanti, is required to plant the seeds found in the vegetables or fruits they consume. They call it ‘multiplication’ and it is a pivotal part of their religious, Ital practices. While Reasoning with Ras Quedamawi a Kenyan Rastafari who came to Italy many years ago as a refugee and who follows the Boboshanti Order, he explained this practice to me, You have to be careful of what you eat because we don’t eat seeds. So, we need to separate all the seeds from the fruits, we don’t eat seeds because we believe in multiplication, so you make them dry and plant them again. That’s why Ras Tafari King Selassie said, ‘all people, should have at least a piece of land, a vegetable garden out of your door. So, you can have your food,’ as Rasta you must grow your own food. During the summer of 2020, I noticed on Facebook, that many Italian Rastafari were posting pictures of their gardens and the vegetables that they were able to grow during the lockdown. For example, Ras Emanuel wrote on Facebook accompanied by a picture of his garden, The most difficult and revolutionary gesture of all, even though every time it seems that the world turns upside down, probably remains even more than ever to cultivate your own vegetable garden. I recommend keeping your brain sane out of this delirium. Others were displaying pictures on their Facebook walls of their vegetables, and plants as if they were trophies, to emphasise their arduous work but also the magnificence of mother nature. In spring 2020 Ras Jonah wrote on his wall, accompanied by a picture of him showing an aloe plant, 257 Spring is here...we open the greenhouse and take out the plants. Here with one of the best from the collection and one of my favourite plants #aloecosmos #Greenforlife #rastaman #gardening. Ras Jonah was often posting pictures of his garden, accompanied by hashtags related to Rastafari and gardening such #growyourown, #Italfood, #vegetablesgarden, #hortotuo, #Rastafarmer, #greenlife, #organicfood, #Rastalife. One day he posted that he ‘could not check the yard for a couple of days,’ which was complemented with a picture of him with a big smile, in which he was showing a box full of vegetables collected from his garden. He tagged the images using hashtags such as #organicfarming, #Italfood, #Rastagarden, #growyourown, #Rastafarimovement. During spring 2020, Ras Yosh posted an article on Facebook from the National Geographic called ‘For Rasta Eating Food from the Earth is a Sacred Duty’, which explained the Ital way of life. During the summer of 2020, Ras Yosh posted on Facebook many pictures of his garden, where he started to grow bananas, mango, and avocado, and sell them to the Italian market. In June 2020, Sista Tefari published on her Facebook wall a picture of vegetables growing in her garden, writing ‘small vegetable garden, great satisfaction’. While researching on Facebook, I noticed amongst some Rastafari the tendency of using public and private gardens as spaces to meditate, or to hold Rastafari celebrations. A notable example of this Earthical activity was at Fairfield House, Haile Selassie’s house in Bath, where in 2019 a local Rastafari committee created a sacred garden. 258 Figure 50 Rastafari garden in Haile Selassie house in Bath (Public Fb picture). This garden was created for praying and meditating, according to Ras Irie’s testimony, Haile Selassie was praying, contemplate, and meditate every day here. It is a little piece of sacred land where InI can plant some plants, also burn a little fire, and where there was the church now, we placed in the middle a star of David as the symbol of the King. It’s a natural mystic. Fairfield house garden is not only used to meditate or to grow herbs, but it is a special, sacred space used by diasporic Rastafari to gather during festivities and celebrations. In the summer of 2020, for Haile Selassie’s birthday, Ras Negasi published some pictures on Facebook of him and his Rastafari brothers and sister drumming around a fire, in a big garden surrounded by olive trees, in Italy. Among the pictures that he published, there was a remarkably interesting one in which they created in the garden a sacred space to play the drums, an altar dedicated to Haile Selassie, and an Ethiopian flag with Bob Marley at the back. They created a micro-Rastafari space on Italian soil. 259 Figure 51 Ras Negasi’s Garden (public Fb picture, verbal authorisation). Conclusion This chapter has shown that the concept of Sankofa is a useful conceptual tool to understand the creativity behind the development of new Rastafari identities manifested through embodied praxis. As it has been demonstrated, these performances involve Rastafari in processes of retrieving and reinventing, by employing and blending various cultural traditions and recreating them in their everyday life. Focusing on Sankofa performances, the first part of this chapter has shown the many ways in which Rastafari materialise their Rastafari identities by involving their hair, clothes, and food praxis, to recover and empower their identities culturally, physically, and psychologically. However, the process of retrieving is not straightforward, as it involves Rastafari in practices of negotiations and compromises. For instance, Rastafari are 260 constantly moving while retrieving and recreating their identities, between past and present, tradition and modernity, transcendence, and immanence. Therefore, Sankofa praxis cannot be understood through dualities. By exploring in a distinctive way diasporic and transnational Rastafari, this chapter has highlighted the different creative ways in which Rasta are experiencing and performing embodied practices. For example, while the diasporic community adopt certain practices as a form of cultural reparation from slavery by trying to recreate a lost past, Italian Rastafari embodiment practices are performed mainly as a sign or statement of identity belonging and devotion toward Ethiopia. Moreover, the testimonies collected show how the Nazarite vow itself is experienced in different ways and for different contingent subjective reasons and involves processes of interiorisation and externalisation of what it means to be Rasta. Dressing as a priest or as Haile Selassie, are identity statements toward the host society, but also within the movement itself, which strongly intersect with issues of power and race. Furthermore, in terms of food, this chapter demonstrated that the difference between diasporic and transnational Rastafari is quite significant, as their diet reflects their historical background. While diasporic Rastafari base their diet on Caribbean food and their grandmothers’ recipes to preserve somehow their Caribbean identities, on English soil, transnational Rastafari are creating a new Ital cuisine by consuming and mixing Ethiopian and Italian dishes, as a means of reversing their grandfather’s history during fascism, and as a meaning to embrace Ethiopian culture as a whole. Generally speaking, while diasporic Rastafari look to Jamaica or the Caribbean, in Italy, Rasta seems to look more toward Ethiopia as a source of authority and authenticity particularly in relation to food and diet and in their practice of Sankofa as a means of recovering a pristine and healthy body. This chapter has offered a view of how Rastafari experienced the pandemic and their views about healing 261 practices and freedom of choice concerning the body. The testimonies gathered shown that amongst Rasta there is an intersectionality between race and health that is expressed through suspicion of Babylon, which is held responsible for the destruction of nature and natural ways of life. 262 8.0 Conclusion 8. 1 My contribution to academic knowledge This thesis is my unique contribution to academic knowledge and debate concerning Rastafari as a lived religion, in its diasporic and transnational contexts, respectively in Britain and in Italy. With this thesis, I have contributed to academic knowledge and debate in various ways. First, I have proposed and tested a distinction between diasporic and transnational Rastafari to demonstrate the development of new Rastafari religious identities; secondly, I have fulfilled the aim to fill in the gap in contemporary ethnographic scholarship about Rastafari living in Britain and Italy; thirdly, I have advanced debate in religious studies concerning lived religion, mobility, and creolisation; fourthly, I have contributed to the decolonisation of religious studies and related methodologies by relying on African and Rastafari resources and epistemology, and by employing what I called a Rastafari methodology. The first achievement of this research has been to prove that social processes of globalisation, such as migration and mediation, have affected the glocalisation of Rastafari in Britain and Italy, creating two respective dimensions (the diasporic and the transnational) and consequently influencing the development of new creolised Rastafari identities and what it means to be Rastafari. In the study of lived religions, this research has proposed a distinction between diasporic and transnational Rastafari to catch and demonstrate the complexity and creativity behind the formation of distinctive new Rastafari identities and point to the possibility of using these differences to improve debate about other religions. This is not simple comparative ethnographic research, but a methodological test which demonstrates the importance of studying lived religions, in their diasporic and transnational dimensions. Distinguishing Rastafari in this way has allowed me to collect testimonies which are mirroring 263 and revealing different Rastafari identities, historical backgrounds and contexts, ways to use languages, objects, or embodiment practices. This is an intervention which is opening theoretical possibilities in religious studies by stressing the diasporic and transnational dimensions of religions. This approach is strategic and essential in order to capture lived realities and de-essentialise religious studies. The testimonies collected amongst diasporic Rastafari demonstrate that in Britain Rastafari are still embracing their Caribbean ancestry and cultural habits, although they acknowledge and look at Ethiopia or Africa. The testimonies collected in the transnational setting, reveal that in Italy Rastafari are mainly Ethiopianist in their praxis. In fact, generally speaking, in Italy people are experiencing Rastafari more than as a movement for black liberation, as an anti-fascist movement par excellence, and as a counter-cultural faith to Catholicism. The practical categorisation used to distinguish Rastafari, such as diasporic and transnational, has demonstrated that, although Rastafari symbols, music and objects seem to be globally homogeneous, when the movement localises, particularisation occurs, leading to different priorities which are most obvious in the orientation of British Rastafari to Jamaica and the Caribbean as a source of authority and authenticity, as opposed to the Italian Rastafari orientation to Ethiopia. This thesis strongly challenges the idea of homogenisation and dualities in the study of religious identities but highlights the plurality of lived realities and therefore the subjectivity of identities and their glocal conscientisation (Capparella, 2016). By glocal conscientisation, I mean that in both contexts – Britain and Italy – Rastafari are aware and conscious of their local micro manifestation, which is influenced and informed by their historical, social and political context and their everyday life experiences and issues. This study establishes that Rastafari (as for any other religion) can no longer be studied as a single entity but must be analysed in its plurality of lived manifestations within these two frameworks 264 (diasporic and transnational). As this thesis shows, the development of new Rastafari identities in Britain and Italy are creolised identities, the outcome of a blend of cultures, histories, and traditions. The second achievement of this research has been to fill in the ethnographic gap related to the study of Rastafari in Britain and Italy. In fact, over the past decades, there has been a lack of research and interest in academia toward the presence of Rastafari in these two countries. This empirical gap in contemporary scholarship is worrying, in light that England hosts one of the biggest Rastafari communities out of Jamaica. The most accurate and detailed ethnographic work about Rastafari in England was carried out by Cashmore in 1979, with his book Rastaman, the Rastafari Movement in England. This research has sought to add to the academic record new scholarship on Rastafari in Britain by recording testimonies and experiences of ordinary Rastafari and individuals such as Ras Seymour, Benjamin Zephaniah, Macka B, Ras Sober, Sista Stella and Sista Sheba, Professor Haile Mariam Sober, to show the various subjective and creative ways in which Rastafari have led decolonial and reparative activities in Britain, for the past decades.28 This is the first ethnographic research on Rastafari as lived religion in Britain over the past forty years, and it has adopted a comparative perspective. Similarly, concerning Italy, the first and only ethnographic account of Rastafari in Italy was carried out by Bonacci in 2000. Since then, Italian Rastafari have been neglected by scholarship, although the community has grown and has been at the forefront of demands to decolonise Italy’s history, museums and school’s curriculum, in light of its history of fascism and colonialism in Ethiopia in particular. With this thesis, I have tried to address this empirical 28 At the moment there is a further ongoing research project about Rastafari in Britain, carried by Aleema Grey a local Rastafari, called: Bun Babylon: Rastafari movement in Britain, unpublished PhD thesis, Warwick university. 265 gap although partially, as Rastafari is always on the move. Furthermore, I was able to demonstrate through the double lens of the comparative perspective not only the many ways in which people are articulating, materialising and embodying Rastafari, but also explored its voyage from the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean. In the light that ‘no man is an island’ (Donne, 1624), this thesis shows how social processes of globalisation had a strong impact on the movement, especially when the religious, cultural and material features of the movement glocalise, and germinate on a different soil. Consequently, this thesis has advanced the debate in religious studies concerning lived religions, religious mobility, hybridity, creolisation, bricolage and related critical terms. At the beginning of this research, the concepts of bricolage and hybridity were very useful to inform the development of new Rastafari identities and categorise Rastafari religious identities. However, I replaced these terms by arguing that the concept of creolisation is more positive, beneficial and suitable to decolonise and grasp the complexity of lived Rastafari identities, and religious identities in general. This thesis argues that there is no pure religion or tradition, and consequently no such thing as a hybrid religion. As such, I chose to use the term ‘creole’ to replace concepts such as syncretism, hybridity and bricolage which although useful, are limiting the understanding of complex glocalised identities. Creole is a concept that recognises the complexities of identities by rejecting the idea of them as singular or as hyphenated. Creole is a term that should be applied to the study of all religions and traditions, not only to Rastafari, to highlight the now decaying fantasy of ‘purity’ that, perhaps, is a mark of the World Religions Paradigm. However, this term takes into consideration both the global and glocal mobility which characterises and informs the development of new religious identities in general. Creole is also a concept that involves learning, embracing and appropriating cultures, while bricolage is tendentially limited by often superficial choosing and picking practices. Furthermore, this 266 thesis argues that as much as Gilroy’s Black Atlantic can be considered a creole space, the same can be said for the Black Mediterranean. Consequently, I am claiming that new Rastafari identities develop in culturally creolised social spaces and are the manifestations of the impact of social processes of globalisation and glocalisation on identity formation. In addition, analysing and conceiving new Rastafari identities as creolised leads this research to the de-essentialisation of the movement. De-essentialising the movement and focusing on its pluralities of expressions, as a lived religion in motion, was a key aim achieved during this research. This was done by analysing Rasta lived experience and creative religious performances in order to reverse stereotypes, cliches and stigmatisation. I have fulfilled this aim by exploring transnational and diasporic Rastafari experiences, feelings and performance toward languages, material cultures and embodiment practices. This approach advances the debate in religious studies concerning lived religions, as I emphasise the importance of approaching religious identities as flexible whilst simultaneously being rooted in historical experience. Fourthly, this thesis contributed to the decolonisation of the field of religious studies in various ways. Following Smith’s (2021) argument about the decolonisation of research methods, the Rastafari methodology developed during this research has involved the employment of Rastafari epistemology during the fieldwork, in order to enter the Rastafari space in their own terms, reach mutual overstanding, and decolonise this research. This choice was pivotal because it emphasised, used and gave attention to disregarded Rastafari language, worldviews and ontologies. The use of Reasoning practices enables me to learn more about Rastafari, to reach a high degree of intimacy with them, and position myself as a learner. The employment of Rastafari concepts and practices in the research methodology provides a model through which other researchers can take steps to decolonise their research processes and 267 religious studies. My engagement with Rastafari epistemology was useful also in moderating outsider/insider dichotomies and self-reflexivity. Furthermore, the employment in the fieldwork research of Rastafari terms such as Reasoning, InI and overstanding, resonates with Singh’s (2010) discourse about the revaluation of epistemic knowledge as a counter-cultural tool against epistemic coloniality or colonialism. Singh assesses that, Moving from understanding to overstandin[g] means becoming aware of the fact that the colonial modern systems of power-knowledge, of which the academy is only the tip of the iceberg, offer you only restricted access to the ‘real’ meanings of the signs that are globally circulated (2010: 2). Therefore, in this way by the employment of Rastafari words/concepts, I attempted to replace Western terminology by employing terms, such as Reasoning, InI, Overstanding, that stand outside Western linguistic borders and academic norms. My work is an invitation to social scientists to decolonise research fieldwork and performances by reevaluating and employing the language and worldview belonging to the people studied. 8.2 Fieldwork’s Decolonisation Practices For every fieldwork chapter, I have chosen to use African concepts which resonate with Rastafari views and ontologies, as part of my effort to decolonise this research. I have done this to apply a form of epistemic decolonial politics based on the use of concepts and philosophies coming from non-Western peoples and cultures, to overturn the Western hegemony in the production of knowledge, and to better access and reflect on Rastafari experiences. Therefore, I relied on these concepts from outside the usual Eurocentric/Western tradition to decolonise my research, as they emerged during Reasoning. The use of African philosophical concepts was a useful tool to bring decolonial awareness and cultural plurality to 268 the research and the wider academy. Consequently, in writing the various chapters, I was keen to show how African philosophical concepts, respectively Nommo, Ashe and Sankofa, helped to frame the study of Rastafari languaging, materiality and embodied practices. I have investigated Rastafari language and, therefore, how and to what extent Rastafari in Britain and Italy performs and experience it, through the African concept of Nommo. I took this choice because as already underlined by previous scholars of Rastafari, such as Chevannes (1994), and Brathwaite (1971), one Rastafari core belief is that words contain or convey power. I have shown that word-sound-power is not only a Rastafari or an African concept, but as underlined by Austin (1976), people globally ‘do things with words.’ Therefore, I dedicated this chapter of the thesis to the Rastafari use of language, focusing on how and to what extent they engage in languaging and translanguaging practices in the development of their identities. I was inspired by Nye (2000) and his idea of religioning to emphasise the motion and constant creativity which characterises the Rastafari language and the relationship between speech, orality and written resources to the enunciation of Rastafari. This thesis argued that not only do words (oral or written) contain power and work as a medium for religious identity creation, but also objects are fundamental and powerful mediators for the development of new Rastafari identities. In this research, I have investigated the use of objects, their meanings, what they materialise, their circulation and value through the African concept of Ashe, which insists that objects are far from being passive or inert, but they are contributors and mediums in the development of religious identities. I strongly agree with Latour (1996) when he stresses to social scholars the importance of accepting and revaluate ‘a certain dose of fetishism’, while studying identities and cultures. During fieldwork, I was able to enter intimate Rastafari spaces such as their homes. Here, Rastafari often showed me their Ethiopian, Jamaican, or African souvenirs, dresses, jewellery, altars, and collections 269 which materialised their identities, imaginaries and social connections. The power and value given to an object by the devout is the materialisation and expression of its Ashe. As this research has underlined, within Rastafari objects and symbols have been adopted and fashioned mostly as a medium to affirm and create feelings of identity and belonging. This thesis argues that the focus on materiality in religion studies is necessary to acknowledge how, and why certain objects and embodied performances are more valued than others, in different contexts and societies. I continued the analysis of Rastafari as a lived religion looking at embodied practices through the African concept of Sankofa. The testimonies collected during fieldwork demonstrated that Rastafari are materialising and displaying in various subjective and creative ways the Nazirite law and their love towards Africa in their lived religious practices, by trying to (partially) recover and remake the past, creating new cultural and religious identities. Amongst Rastafari, style is a strong and visible embodiment of practice and identity features. Today, as I have shown in this research, the use and meaning (political, religious) of Rastafari styles and their fashion can be quite personal among diasporic and transnational communities. Rastafari style is constructed and created locally by the glocalisation and creolisation of Rastafari symbols and meanings and by the context where it develops. The adoption of a style and a particular symbolism works as a language within Rastafari in both its diasporic and transnational contexts, however the feelings that they convey are subjective. There are several embodied practices that I have observed and analysed during this research, and which bear different feelings, meanings and values amongst Rastafari, such as the Nazarite vow, dreadlocks, dressing style, Ital food, the use of healing herbs and gardening. The linguistic, material and embodiment performances and activities discussed in this thesis, together with the experiences of primarily ordinary Rastafari, involved and privileged a 270 bottom-up approach to religions that seeks to represent marginalised Rastafari voices. Together these choices worked as methodological tools, to de-essentialise and decolonise religious studies and this research. Studying and approaching Rastafari as a lived religion and employing what I called a Rastafari methodology were pivotal to this research. 8.3 Future possibilities Considering that this research was limited by the pandemic disruption and by fieldwork timing, I believe that more research must be carried out to address further local developments, activities, and needs of Rastafari living in Britain and Italy. I am stressing this point because when fieldwork ended, I continued, as a supporter, to stay in touch with Rastafari in both countries and followed their activities, especially those concerning forms of reparation such as wellbeing and education. While Reasoning with Sista Stella, she stressed more than once the necessity for Rastafari to have a spiritual, mental and cultural reparation, ‘as much trauma is inherited, so it’s healing’ she told me once. To achieve reparative healing, she, together with the other Rastafari members of the Rastafari Movement UK, developed a programme of recommendations, based on sustainability, which underlines the Movement and Rastafari need to achieve wellbeing while living in Babylon. This pamphlet called the ‘Seven ways to good mental wellbeing & Rastafari’, was developed as a source of information about Rastafari needs and way of life, also for governmental bodies, such as the NHS. 271 Figure 52 The seven ways of well-being according to Rastafari livity (Public picture, verbally authorised). This pamphlet contains suggestions to improve spiritual, physical, educational, dietary, social, and economic well-being within the community according to the Rastafari faith. I believe that through the testimonies collected, this research contributed very much to showing Rastafari activities related to the above suggestions. The testimonies collected have shown many relevant Rastafari practices and ideas. Therefore, I decided that in this section I will rely on the RMUK Food & Well-being’s sustainable practices of wellbeing to explore suggestions for further studies. For instance, the pamphlet developed by the RMUK emphasises the need for an improvement in physical, spiritual, and economic well-being through the consuming and growing of ‘cultural’ [mainly Caribbean] food and herbs. This point was often emphasised during Reasoning especially by diasporic Rastafari, who told me that in Britain, because they were living in flats, they were missing their kitchen gardens, which they used to have back home in the Caribbean. I believe this is a topic that needs to be analysed further, in the light that this practice not only gives dignity to Rastafari way of life, but also aids economic 272 independence and mental well-being.29 Furthermore, growing plants and herbs is part of Rastafari Livity and as emphasised by many Rastafari it is a practice based on Biblical references. I have shown as Ras Wise used Biblical references in his allotment to stress the necessity for humanity to go back metaphorically to ‘the garden of Eden’, from where once they were expelled, to find again their humanity. Other Rastafari as Ras Mikael, use Biblical references such as Leviticus for his dietary view and choices, [As Rastafari] We don’t eat meat but if we gonna eat meat we get a goat and kill it, and make sure, we have to make sure is a lamb goat. You can eat cow as well, as a Rastafari you can eat any animal that has his paw slit in the middle of the hoof. Rastafari are not the only ones to refer to the Bible for their dietary choices, others such as Adventists or Māori Christians do the same. This opens the way to the possibility for further research concerning Rastafari or other movements and faiths’ food practices based on Biblical references. While continuing to participate in Rastafari activities in Britain, one way in which Rastafari are trying to improve well-being is through the foundation of a food bank for the local London community and Rastafari households. This food bank was developed through the hard work of Sista Stella and other volunteers, and it is the main activity of the RMUK. In March 2023, while volunteering for the RMUK, and delivering food to local people with Sista Stella, I was shocked to realise in which economic, unhealthy, and degrading conditions some 29 At the moment there is one ongoing research project that touches this topic called ‘Rastafari healing traditions in Britain’ – promoted by the Centre for Biocultural Diversity - Research at Kent. 273 Rastafari and local elders are living, abandoned by social services, their families, and Rastafari themselves. As Sista Stella told me, At the beginning we had eight people registered [to the food bank], now we have two hundred and fifty-eight, and every day the demand increases. The food bank is not only for helping people economically, but it also helps the environment, because part of the Rastafari mission is to preserve mother nature and be active against environmental injustice. When we deliver food, it stops good healthy food from being buried in the ground, it gets to people instead as aids, good health, and well-being, so people can focus on their family, contribute to the community and not worry about their empty fridges. Everyone should have the right to good food, instead companies overproduce and throw it or bury it…it is outrageous. Today RMUK is playing a crucial, active and Ital (Vital) role to support and provide food and psychological support to Rastafari (and non-Rastafari!) struggling in their everyday life, by having a strong and positive impact on their life. Furthermore, their work had a positive impact also on people’s mental health and the surrounding environment. Nevertheless, at the moment their willingness to help and their work is limited to the areas of Southwark, Lambeth, and Lewisham, due to the lack of funding and support. A further Rastafari practice that would be very interesting to study is the use of radio to promote music and other activities of wellbeing. Music is very crucial as a form of wellbeing amongst Rastafari and many of the people that I have interviewed have been involved in radio podcasts. As recorded from the interview with Ras Mikael, Me a play a lot of Rasta music [in my radio], but what happen I try to run di radio station where I was growing up [in Jamaica]. There was a way on how we used to run 274 the radio. On Sunday you get like gospel in the morning, a lot of mento for the afternoon, you don’t get no reggae music, except Bob Marley on Sunday [evening]. But then Monday, on Monday morning the first reggae music that [was] play[ing] is [was] Bob Marley and Bunny Wailers and Peter Tosh. Furthermore, while Reasoning with Sista Stella, she told me that when she was a young single mother without a house, working for the first Lewisham community radio (First Love Radio) saved her life and contributed to her mental well-being, as she stated on The Voice (1999), My driving force was wanting to have a local service that could entertain people, educate them and alleviate their isolation as well as mine. First Love Radio lasted for about ten years, however, in October 2022, Sista Stella together with the radio team decided to go back and broadcast for Black History Month. The whole broadcast was focused on topics related to well-being. While I was helping them as a volunteer, I had the opportunity to meet and interview an old Rastaman from Jamaica, called Bush Doctor. During the interview, he told me to collaborate with Omega Radio (a further British online Rastafari radio) with a transmission based on herbal healing and wellbeing. Amongst the Rasta that I met during the interviews, some are using the radio as a space to promote and teach about Rastafari ways of life. In chapter five, I have shown as Ras Julio uses the radio to teach Italian Rastafari about Rastafari’s culture, worldviews and language. However, while reasoning with Ras Prime in London, he also told me to run a radio in which he promotes and explains Rastafari Livity. In 2022, he decided to add to his radio a YouTube channel with videos, where he is reasoning with other local Rasta, or shows to his audience places that he visited, or Rastafari Ital recipes. 275 The fact that Rastafari are using radio to promote and share their worldview, language, and culture, demonstrates that this media could be an interesting and fruitful research area. Furthermore, keeping in mind that the majority of Rastafari that I have Reasoned with are using social media, I am also open to the possibility of carrying out further studies exploring Rastafari and their use of social media to promote Livity and wellbeing. On social media such as Facebook it is already possible to find many pages owned by Rastafari dedicated to different topics. It is possible to find pages dedicated to Haile Selassie, others dedicated to Bible teachings, Livity, Ital food, music, etc… in almost every language and from many countries. This opens up infinite possibilities for further research about Rastafari everyday life online. Further studies are necessary, firstly, to address Rastafari’s global and glocal everyday practices, issues and challenges to access well-being and their Livity, secondly, to develop social awareness on the strategic ways in which Rastafari are responding to poverty, mental and physical well-being and keep their Livity alive while living in Babylon. Reparative activities, for Rastafari wellbeing, are not limited to food, gardening, radio, and social media activities, but they involve also Rastafari decolonial activities related to education in England and in Italy. For example, in September 2020 I assisted in a Rastafari talk regarding the repatriation of African objects stolen during colonialism. Activities of decolonisation are happening also in Italy. Here Rastafari are not only creating new Rastafari pilgrimage routes, or translating Ethiopian documents, but they are currently collaborating with the Ethiopian embassy to repatriate objects stolen during the war and denouncing fascist monuments and architecture which are still stand without any formal information about links to fascism. These kinds of activities need further study because they have the function of developing new knowledge and reclaiming history and are experienced with a sense of conscious historical local decolonial justice by both diasporic and transnational Rastafari. 276 In light of this, this research is also a call to academics and governmental educational bodies to develop interest, and research about African Caribbean cultures and religions and their presence in Europe. Further studies are needed for what concern the presence of other African and African Caribbean religions such as Candomblé, Santeria and Vodou, besides Rastafari, in England and in Italy. The British Commission on Religious Education UK ‘Final report Religion and Worldview’ reports, In order to understand the full diversity of religious or non-religious worldviews, pupils may also benefit from awareness of a broader range of worldviews…these may include ancient (and still living) traditions from China (e.g. Daoism, Confucianism), Japan (e.g. Shinto), Africa… [it] may also include groups formed more recently that pupils may meet or belong to themselves, including Baha’i, Latter Day Saints (Mormons), Jehovah’s Witnesses and Rastafari (Commission on Religious Education UK, ‘Final report Religion and worldviews, the way forward’ 2008: 75). Unfortunately, from my personal experience as an RE teacher, although it is suggested that these religions could be studied, in 2023 they are still absent in the school setting, due to the lack of practical implementation in the school’s curriculum, i.e., RS school books, GCSE exam, A level. The fact that these religions are not part of the exam board, leads them to be neglected despite the presence of diasporic communities in England and Italy. Furthermore, although in March 2021 the Sewell report emphasised England’s structural racism about health and education, at the same time it was overlooked by the government which did not implement a new and compulsory educational route for integration but left to teachers the will and choice to implement it or not. This developed in what is currently called ‘cultural war’. The same situation is happening in Italy, where despite the sad history of fascism, colonial epistemologies are still affecting the national curriculum. Historical figures such as Christopher Columbus or 277 Napoleon are still studied in public schools as heroes, and there is no mention of the Italian historical involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, or of the fascist war crimes in East Africa. Furthermore, religious studies in public schools are still run by the Vatican and focus only on Catholicism. Therefore, I hope this study will help other academics and governmental bodies in charge of education in both countries, to re-think the importance of studying marginalised and stigmatised religions and communities and to develop a decolonised curriculum for all, or at least for the communities hosted. Caribbean religions are tools to decolonise history, culture and education in general, because, as I have explained in this research, they are the outcome and creation of an endless historical struggle between Caribbean people and Western political, social and religious hegemony. Black history is part of European history, and at this stage, this cannot be neglected anymore. The same act of neglect would lead again to further epistemic and cultural colonialism, of what is popularly called the ‘colonisation of de-colonisation’. Although the promotion of the BHM is an achievement of inclusivity for local black communities, its limitation is to be thought only for one month in a year, it’s a form of colonisation of de-colonisation. Furthermore, as I stated above, this research was limited to the study of Rastafari diasporic and transnational communities. Further research is needed for what concerns Rastafari from different backgrounds than British-Caribbeans and Italian, and therefore, addressing additional local Rastafari identities. For instance, during fieldwork in Italy, I interviewed a few Rastafari refugees coming from Africa, but I limited myself to exploring this field, to avoid the research becoming too complex. However, conducting further research in this field would be very interesting, in the light that refugees in Italy come from different African areas and background as many embraces Islam, Christianity, African traditional religions and Rastafari (sometimes simultaneously). Therefore, it would be very interesting to 278 look at white British Rastafari and any Rastafari amongst East and West African immigrants to Italy, in order to address and compare the development of further new local Rasta identities. In addition, it would be fascinating to explore Rastafari in the Mediterranean area, considering the African migration to southern European countries and the development of further local Rastafari identities. Further studies in this area are important since in recent years there has been a proliferation of Caribbean and African faiths in Europe, to the point that academics should start analysing the Black Mediterranean as an extension of the Black Atlantic phenomenon. The study of the Black Mediterranean, as I have underlined already, does not concern only the study of Africans’ migration to Europe, but it calls the academy for a historical, cultural, and political decolonial review concerning the historical relationship and constant influences between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean happening in the Mediterranean area for centuries. 8.4 An overview of my research journey This thesis has been a long journey in which I have been ‘travelling’ up and down the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, moving’ between Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and Italy constantly, in historical, social and cultural terms. Before starting fieldwork on Rastafari in Italy and in Britain, in order to create a general overview of the movement concerning practices and beliefs, I had to search, access, retrieve and analyse past and contemporary studies about Rastafari in Jamaica and elsewhere. Furthermore, to have an understanding of the context where Rastafari developed, I needed to build an overview of the history and development of the major African Caribbean religions such as Vodou in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba, Shango in Trinidad and Tobago, and Revivalism and Obeah in Jamaica, before being able to focus on the development of Rastafari in and out of Jamaica. To reconstruct the Caribbean social and political context, I relied on contemporary sociological, anthropological and historical research concerning the 279 transatlantic slave trade, French and British colonialism, West African traditional religions, and Caribbean religions. Whilst researching, I consulted a wide range of academic sources about African Caribbean religions such as Vodou, Obeah, Santeria, and Rastafari. I have relied on contemporary historical, sociological, and anthropological resources and authors, to describe the development of African Caribbean religions and Rastafari in Jamaica. By assembling all this knowledge together, it was possible to create a more profound realistic view of these religions and of the violent colonial social, political, and religious context where they developed. This was essential for understanding the complex history of the Caribbean and Caribbean identity development. This thesis has shown that, the inception of Rastafari (and other Caribbean religions) was influenced in its foundation and development by the complex cultural melting pot created by four hundred years of encounters and clashes between African and European societies in the Caribbean, and by the violent context of slavery. Consequently, I have analysed contemporary studies about how the Western narrative and epistemology have subjugated the ‘other’ with a sense of superiority, creating generational traumas, especially in the formation of Caribbean identities, by four hundred years of slavery, and violence which has never been fully acknowledged economically or culturally. This part of the research was very sad, but also interesting because it highlighted the double aspect of Rastafari as a religion but also as a movement for black liberation. I continued researching contemporary scholarship about Rastafari and globalisation, to delve deeper into the glocalisation of Rastafari. In order to reveal the complexity of Rastafari glocalised identities, I have decided to compare the development of Rastafari in local diasporic and transnational settings. Although, comparative analysis is not new in religious studies, this is the first comparative analysis of Rastafari identities in a diasporic and transnational setting. The research process led me to think critically, since the beginning of this research, on how to study Rastafari and its complexity. I have shown that although religious scholars’ favour diasporic or transnational religions in their 280 studies, my choice was to study both dimensions, in order to highlight the nuance and creativity behind the formation of new Rastafari identities and how they are developing through social processes of globalisation, such as mediation and migration. This study demonstrated that only by studying Rastafari in both contexts and dimensions it is possible to show a whole range of new Rastafari identities, their complexities and contingent necessities. This gave me the opportunity to demonstrate how Rastafari as a movement and religion is always in motion within social processes of globalisation, and able to cross national, cultural and religious borders. Furthermore, studying both contexts such as Italy and Britain, gave me the opportunity to share connected histories and de-essentialise the movement. For my methodology chapter, I needed to research an ever-increasing volume of knowledge from a range of sources concerning the recent advent of decolonial methodologies. Working with and interpreting these different sources – academic books and articles alongside the voices and words of my research participants – was a time-consuming but also a rewarding process and one that led me to find novel ways of framing the theoretical aspects of the thesis. For example, in terms of African philosophical concepts, while I re-employed some Rastafari social practices as part of my research methodology, to decolonise this research and move away from imposed Western epistemology within the academy. In order to approach Rastafari with a decolonial mind and to decolonise this research, I have communicated and relied on new social decolonial methodological approaches and practices, throughout the whole research. I have in fact based my methodology on what I called a Rastafari methodology and, on the employment, for each fieldwork chapter, of African concepts such as Nommo, Ashe, and Sankofa, which resonate with the Rastafari worldview concerning language, materiality, and embodied practices. The research process led me to choose to employ Rastafari social practices as part of my methodology, such as Reasoning and the use of Rastafari words such as InI and 281 overstanding. The use of what I called a Rastafari methodology was very useful in terms of approaching and creating relationships and trust with Rastafari. Furthermore, it was not only a way to approach Rastafari in their own terms and worldview, but also a way to decolonise social science methodologies and create new knowledge by introducing a Rastafari methodology within the academy. For instance, the employment of Reasoning as a pedagogical practice, helped me to define my positionality as a learner of the Rastafari movement and facilitated the gathering of people's testimonies. Similarly, during the Reasonings processes the employment of dreadtalk (InI and Overstanding) simplified mutual comprehension and positionalities within the research and between me and Rastafari. In addition, adopting a Rastafari methodology during fieldwork, helped to minimise the impact on the participants, by approaching Rastafari in their own terms and worldview. This was pivotal in order to create trust and empathy between me and the participants. The methodological choices undertaken, such as employing a bottom-up approach and focusing on everyday lived performance, helped me to prioritise marginalized Rastafari voices and lived realities. My previous knowledge about Rastafari worldviews and language was really useful in gathering data and creating trust, but it also helped me to consider and engage in professional practice, including ethical, health, and safety aspects. My passion for Caribbean religions and Rastafari in particular, allowed me to bring enthusiasm, perseverance, and integrity to the fieldwork activities. Although, I have chosen a one-to-one personal approach for my Reasoning with Rastafari, I was ready to move the Reasoning online if eventually, something wrong happened, such as the pandemic, always adhering to professional practices by following privacy and ethical advice and guidelines. In fact, even though this research was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, I was able to plan, manage, and deliver data analysis. I took the choice to use the internet in order to carry out fieldwork, taking into consideration the risk of not gathering enough data by engaging in hybrid 282 fieldwork. However, I was able to continue my research online, by collecting data professionally and always adhering to privacy laws and ethical guidelines. Furthermore, during the research process, I had many opportunities to share my knowledge in a professional way and with integrity, by connecting with other academics studying similar subjects and by sharing my knowledge with them through academic blogs and conferences. In 2017 I participated in the Open University Conference ‘Religions in Contemporary Perspective’, presenting a paper on Rastafari and globalisation, where I presented my previous master's research about Rastafari in Israel. Furthermore, in 2019, I contributed to the OU blog ‘Religions in Contemporary Perspective’ with a short article about Rastafari in Israel, entitled ‘Jewish Rasta’? In 2020, I delivered a presentation for the Race and Ethnicity hub, Open Learn (OU) called ‘An Introduction to African Caribbean Religions and Cultures’. I started the talk explaining firstly, the similarities in beliefs and practices of African Traditional religions, such as the notion of the divinity, ‘Communotheism’, the concept of Ashe (Axe’) as a mystical power, ancestral veneration, food offering, possession, divination, herbalism, and drumming. Secondly, I described the historical presence of African traditional religions and the development of African Caribbean Religions in different Caribbean islands such as Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. I felt the necessity to explore these three islands, in light that they experienced different colonial European hegemonies, which led these religions to develop differently. The aim of this talk was to decolonise the negative meta-narrative surrounding African Caribbean religions and show that they were and are the outcome of forms of resistance and accommodation toward a violent and awful European context of slavery and plantation society, on the other side of the Atlantic. 283 In 2021, I delivered a talk about ‘The Role of Religious Leaders in the Caribbean Resistance to Colonialism’ for the Race and Ethnicity Hub (OU). This talk explored the pivotal role of religious African Caribbean leaders in the resistance to colonialism, and in particular on the role of women leadership. This talk was inspired by Verena Shepard's discourse about the importance of decolonising and reclaiming Caribbean history. This talk highlighted how women such as the Nanny of the Maroons in Jamaica, Cécile Fatiman in Haiti, La Mulattrese Solitude in Guadalupe, Breffu in Saint John (Virgin Islands), and Rastafari women in Jamaica, were practicing African traditional religions in the Caribbean, and how these practices were pivotal for the development of forms of resistance and revolts. All these religious leaders, through their beliefs, found the strength to rebel against slavery and made Caribbeans and European history. Furthermore, I elucidated how African Caribbean religious practices had helped the enslaved to survive psychologically in such an unhuman context such as slavery and gave them a sense of dignity. This talk was an invitation to the academy to look at the Africans’ experience in the Caribbean not only as people subjected to slavery, but as people that actively fought and contrasted colonisation and slavery in any sort of way, especially through religious performances. In 2022, I worked as a consultant for the OU Black History Month, delivering a talk concerning my research about ‘Rastafari and glocalisation’. This talk explored the presence, development, and practices of Rastafari in Cuba, Mexico, and Japan, leading to my actual research about Rastafari in Britain and Italy. Finally, in 2022, I delivered a talk at the conference called ‘Religion in Latin American and the Caribbean: Past, Present and Possible Futures’, organised by CLACS University of London. During this conference, I presented an extract paper from my Ph.D. about Rastafari languaging practices as a source of self-empowerment and decolonisation. 284 During the research process, I had also the opportunity to share some of my research with a non-academic audience through public conferences, and Black History Month activities. For instance, in 2020 I wrote an article for the OU Black History Month about the ‘The ‘Boundarylessness’ of African-Caribbean Religions’, published on the Open Learn platform. This article shows how, the forced and constant movement and encounter of different people, languages, goods, cultures, religions, and objects, in the Atlantic space, assisted the development of new religious identities, during the Middle Passage, or Maafa (the Black Holocaust). The result of this multicultural encounter is what Gilroy called the Black Atlantic (1993). As this article highlights how today African Caribbean religions are becoming ‘Boundarylessness’ within processes of globalisation. In fact, in my own words, ‘Santeria, Vodou and Rastafari are not embraced only in the Caribbean, but they have travelled globally through social processes of globalisation, such as migration and the development of new media and social networking. The globalisation of African-Caribbean religions and their attitude of being boundarylessness (Niaah, 2008) led these religions to be localised, and to be embraced, developed, and re-created in more diverse contexts than the Caribbean’, such as Britain or Italy. African Caribbean religions are the outcome of ‘the creative fire which was burning in the souls of the enslaved in order to resist and survive in a context of slavery’ (Capparella, 2020). Furthermore, in 2021 I wrote an article for the OU Black History Month on ‘African and African-Caribbean religions and the problem of representation’, published by The Open University, available to public access on the Open Learn platform. This article highlights the negative meta-narrative and stigma created by the West during four hundred years of slavery and colonialism toward the ‘other’, but in particular toward everything that is African or of African origins, such as African traditional or African Caribbean religions. This article highlights how Europeans conceived African things as ‘fetish’ and by giving them a low value, 285 they undervalued African cultures. As argued by Matory, African objects come to be called fetishes precisely because ‘Africans, Europeans, and their descendants have looked at them and intensely disagreed about the value and agency that can legitimately be attributed to them and their makers’ (2018: p. xix). The article, emphasises how, in my own words ‘the prototype of Africans as “uncivilised” or “fetishised” people is visible even today in everything that concerns African or Caribbean cultures, social structures, rituals, objects, religions, and languages. Recently, it has been noticed and criticised by various academics how anything African is treated within the academic world, where African and African American religions (see Matory, 2018), languages (see Thiong’o, 2018), and cultures (see the Black Mediterranean Collective, 2021) are not even considered and studied as valuable. They are constantly devalued and dehumanised as something primitive and devilish or something not important for cultural progress. This alone shows how not only objects but also cultures and African Caribbean religions have always been involved and subjected to the arbitrariness of Western values’ (Capparella, 2021). As underlined by D. M. Stewart in an academic speech ‘the misrepresentation of African Caribbean religions as devilish or fetish is the result of centuries of Western Race-craft’ (Capparella, 2021). Moreover, at the end of the pandemic, in 2021, I was invited to participate in the Freedom in the City festival, to give a talk about my research. This gave me the chance to engage in professional practices as an academic and expert on the globalisation and glocalisation of Rastafari publicly. I was honoured to participate in this Reasoning because it was podcasted directly from Fairfield House, the house of Haile Selassie in Bath. I presented an extract from my Ph.D. about Rastafari and globalisation entitled, ‘Rastafari Identities and Communities in Motion.’ This article highlighted that today, Jamaican Patois and dreadtalk (Iyaric) are spoken in Jamaica, England, and non-Anglophone countries such as Italy. 286 Migration and new media are allowing people worldwide to access, combine, learn, absorb, and perform dreadtalk in many ways, guided by different subjective and contextual necessities. Furthermore, it shows how Rastafari's flexible and improvised languaging practices, are all social practices of ‘soft power’ exercised by and among Rastafari in their everyday life, as agents of decolonisation, sonic ontology, and authority. All these practices around ‘word, sound, power’, subvert colonial identities and as such become an agent of decolonisation, and ‘deliverer of social justice’. Languaging practices demonstrate the subjective creativity and contextual contingent complexities, that are always in motion, behind the formation of new religious-cultural identities among diasporic and transnational Rastafari living in Babylon. I performed all the activities mentioned above with awareness and sensitivity toward equality, diversity, and cultural issues. I believe that my participation in these activities together with this thesis, has been my humble contribution to the promotion and application of decoloniality toward social science and related methodologies, within the Western academy and amongst the public. In conclusion, this thesis has contributed to the field of religious studies by demonstrating the pivotal importance of investigating and analysing the glocalisation of Rastafari (and religions in general) as a lived religion in its diasporic and transnational dimension, which established the formation and existence of new Rastafari religious identities. The study of Rastafari lived languaging, material and embodied performances is offering new ways to explore the social dynamisms behind the formation of new religious identities. The methodology employed has informed and pointed to new ethnographic and decolonial ways to do research. By employing African and Rastafari concepts throughout the thesis, this research wanted to offer a contribution and answer to the call within the academia to decolonise the field of religion studies and related methodologies. Therefore, this research has contributed to the field of religious studies by analysing the globalisation and glocalisation of Rastafari as a lived 287 religion through the use of a decolonial methodology, to have an Overstanding view of the development and complexity of new religious Rastafari identities in this globalising era. This thesis has contributed to the academic field of Rastafari, Caribbean religions, lived religion, materiality, multiple religiosities, creolisation, decolonisation and the mobility of religion. 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Q6 Do you consider Rastafari a religious or political movement, or a way of life? Please explain your answer. Q7 Do you think there are differences between Rastafarians in Jamaica and Rastafarians in your present country of residence? If so, please explain. 303 Q8 Do you consider England Babylon? (In which term?) Q9 Would you consider Rome Babylon? Q10 Do you think Rastafari has changed since its inception in Jamaica in the 1930s? If so, how? Q11 Which Rastafari practice is the most important for you to be a Rasta? Q12 Which Rastafari symbol is the most important to you? why? Q13 Do you have any special Rastafari object? If so, why is so special for you? Q14 Which is your favourite Rastafari word? Please explain your answer. Q15 What is Zion for you? Q16 What is power for you? Q17 Why did you change your name? Did you choose it for a reason? Q18 Do you always wear a turban? Q19 Are you married? Q19 Is somebody else in your family Rasta? Are your children Rasta? 304 Q20 This is a weird question, how would you like your funeral to be like? Or your tomb be like? Q21 How do you feel in this Pandemic time? What do you do? Is it Covid affecting your life? Appendix 2: Rasta’s Chronology 1900 The first Pan African Conference was held in London 1914 Garvey founds the UNIA and the African Communities League in Jamaica 1924 Publication of the Holy Piby (the first black Bible), by Shepard Athlyi Roger in USA 1926 Publication of the Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy in Jamaica by Rev. Balintine 1927 Garvey arrived in Jamaica 1929 Garvey’s theatrical prophesy of a king to be crowned in Afrika 1930 Rastafari crowned Emperor Haile Selassie 1933 Howell starts to sell pictures of Selassie as a ticket to go back to Afrika. Newspapers and prints were the most important visual instruments used to evangelise. He seems to have been the first person to teach about the divinity of Selassie 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia 1937 The Ethiopian World Federation (EWF) was established in New York City 1939 Howell founded the Ethiopia Salvation Society 1940 Howell set up the first Rastafari camp to Pinnacle on Kingston’s hills, with about 1,600 followers 1941 Howell Pinnacle raided but not totally, and he is arrested. Selassie re-enters Ethiopia after the defeat of the Italians 1947 Ras Boanerges, Bredda Arthur, Philip Panhandle, Kukukong, and others found the Youth Black faith a further branch of Rastafari 1953 EWF increased activity in Jamaica 1954 Howell Pinnacle totally raided 305 1954-56 Prince Emmanuel and other Rastas hold annual conventions regarding Rastas 1955 Selassie announced the Shashamane land grant administered under the EWF and sent a representative of the EWF in order to promote it among Jamaicans and Rastas 1958 Prince Emmanuel and other Rasta held the first national Rasta groundation and founded formally the Ethiopian African International Congress, Order of the Nyabinghi 1959 Henry Affairs, selling the ticket for repatriation – Police and Rasta clash in the so-called Coronation Market Riot, on May 7, which led to the police destruction of many Rastas community 1960 The Jamaican government sent a mission (which included Rastas) to five African countries to determine whether the eventual repatriation of Rastas would be possible. The police arrested Henry 1961 The Jamaican government sent a mission among whom there were Rastas, to five African countries to analyse if it was possible to have an eventual Rastas repatriation 1962 another mission was sent to Africa 1963 violent national persecution of Rasta by the police 1966 Emperor Selassie I made a state visit to Jamaica, welcomed by about 10,000 Rasta at the airport. 1967 Selassie met Rev. Evans of EWF, who on behalf of his organisation received a land grant reported to be 10,000 acres 1968 Vernon Carrington, also known as Prophet Gad, founded the Twelve Tribe of Israel, in Jamaica. This group becomes one of the most successful Rastafari organisations, with an extensive international membership 1969 Ras Solomon Wolfe departed Jamaica for Ethiopia and received the administrative responsibility for the Shashamane land grant from His Imperial Majesty 1970 Ethiopic Orthodox Church active in Jamaica 1972 PNP was re-elected after 10 years, and another Rasta mission was sent to Africa. Furthermore, some brethren started a Rasta tour to Trinidad 1973 Mortimo Plano (a Rasta Elder) visit Canada. Release of the movie “The harder they come” 1974 Selassie is deposed in Ethiopia, but the Council of Nyabinghi Elders formally established the Theocratic Government of Emperor Selassie I 306 1975 Ras Boanerges carries the Nyabinghi order to Barbados and Ras Michael (son of Negus) performed in Antigua; Emperor Selassie disappeared in Ethiopia; Jamaican Rasta participated to forum on Rastafari and the Press 1976 Prime Minister Manley met with a Council of Nyabinghi Elders; Publication of Owens, Dread the Rastafarians of Jamaica, which contains personal Rasta experiences 1978 Ras Samuel travel to Zimbabwe; Rastafari Universal Zion, the first community-based organisation established in London; First Rasta vernacular publication, adopted even successively in London 1980 Mortimo Plano and other Rasta Elders participated in Canada in a workshop on Rastafari; Rastafari Movement Association became the International Rastafari Assembly; Bob Marley performed on the Zimbabwe Independence day (18 April); Trinidad launched a Rastafari Newspaper, as a vehicle for news among the whole Rasta Caribbean community 1982 Rastafari globalise and get international, First International Rasta Conference in Toronto 1985 The Universal Rastafari Improvement Association of Tanzania sent a mission to Jamaica 1986 Rastafari Focus, The first International Rastafari Conference held in United Kingdom 1992 First International Assembly of Rastafari in Ethiopia Sources: Stephen (2001); Garrison (1979). |
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