Sensitive Scholarship: A Review of Rastafari Literature(S)

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Sensitive Scholarship: A Review of Rastafari Literature(S)

Introduction

The understanding of Rastafari presented to the world through scholarly interpretation has been coloured by the early interest of North Atlantic scholars or their institutions. George Simpson, Susan Kitzinger, Carole Yawney and Klaus Albuquerque are among the earliest with such interest. Noticeable in the class of work is often an attempt to emphasise the Movement's 'lackings' especially through the lenses of religious evolution. Such a compartment if immediately imposed on the Movement immediately misses its religious, social and political subversive intention. Kitzinger provides us with an example. In updating fieldwork done in 1965, in 1969 she writes:

"Yet with all this, Rastafari faith does nothing directly to reconcile the worshipper to the world he knows and lives in. If one function of religion is to aid in adjustment to the inevitable, then Rasta faith is sorely lacking in this respect. For instead of aiding assimilation in Jamaican society, it serves to pull away those who are already marginal to that society. Salvation is catapulted far into the future. It performs the major psychological function of reducing hopelessness in an otherwise hopeless life situation... It has become an inturned self-generating and self-justifying system of belief and action." (Sheila Kitzinger, p.262, 1969, Oxford University).

This interpretation essentially rejects the foundation logic of the Movement's critic and like Leonard Barrett in the first PhD on the Movement, picks up on the Movement's dysfunction (hinged on the miraculous migration from their land), and laments it injurious effect on the population's economic availability and the potential damage it would do to the tourist market ( 1968, pp. 176-177 & 189). Both these assessments miss the alternative logic of the Rastafari consciousness. They take as given the prevailing 'scholarly logic' and consensus within the current global system about the expression of 'hope', and rational socio-political approaches. Rex Nettleford is among the earliest Jamaican Scholars to have worked with the Movement, in updating his reading of the Movement places a more cognitive spin after years of study, he comments:

"[T]he entire Rastafarian Movement, has to be one of the most dynamic movers and shakers of modern development, in the Caribbean." (Nettleford, 1998, University of the West Indies).

Chevannes brings likewise understanding and has expounded much in this direction and through anthropological techniques he has been able to establish claims for the Rastafari Movement as constituting the most advanced African Caribbean worldview.

My objective in this review is to highlight the Rastafari Movement not in the religious sense but in the pedagogical sense, the "inturned" self-generating and self-justifying system of faith and action or what Clinton Hutton refers to as the "sovereign learner", providing a poignant critique of conventional systems of leading and learning. In this sense the Movement may be understood as a religiopedagogy, by which is meant a system to link the knowledge of self-empowerment.

The "Rasta", "Rastafari" or the "Rastafarian Movement" has grown to near universal proportions. There is no paucity of literature(s) documenting the witnes...

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