Rebel Music: Rastafarianism And Religion

Rebel Music: Rastafari, Reggae, and Cultural Resistance Introduction: "[The Rastas are] dirty, lazy, violent, ganja smoking good for nothing rascals using religion as a cloak for villainy, having no regard for the law or other people's property, loud mouths and a general nuisance."-Letter to the Daily Gleaner in 1959.1 Despite the popularity of their music, hairstyle (the dreadlocks), and other cultural symbols far beyond just African-Caribbean areas, the Rastafarians are a much misunderstood socio-religious group, as indicated in the quote above. Their prolific smoking of cannabis, or 'ganja', and the associated encounters with the legal system, coupled with a resistance to the cultural and intellectual hegemony of bourgeois capitalist ideology, have incurred the ire of many. This is not necessarily accidental; Chevannes argues that the Youth Black Faith, a radical activist group of Rastafari in the 1950s, originally adopted the dreadlocks as a hairstyle partly because of the associations between the matted unkempt hairstyle and vagrancy or other social locations outside of middle-class Jamaican culture.2 These anti-social positions, with a characteristically anarchistic refusal to accept external non-consensual authorities, have often brought Rastas into conflict with the police across the Anglophonic African-Caribbean diaspora. This essay will argue that Rastafarianism3 is best understood as a religious anarchist movement developing under multiple systems of oppression, notably racism and (post-)colonialism and that, while borrowing from previous slave religions such as Myal and Revivalism, its focus is largely liberative and it fits the category of 'religious anarchism,' to be discussed below. Although scholars such Ernest Cashmore and Horace Campbell have investigated the political aspects of Rastafari, they have avoided drawing out the parallels with anarchism, which, as this essay will prove, is detrimental to locating it within the political spectrum. Anarchism eschews simple categorization on the left-right axis dominant within the modern political science framework, and though historically most anarchists have been on the left, all anarchists share an antipathy towards the state, the police, imprisonment (particularly for non-violent crimes such as drug usage) and institutionalized religion. In this opposition the anarchists are joined by the Rastafari, whose ideology Marxist scholar Horace Campbell has described as "a complex phenomenon" which "rails against the commodity fetishism of late capitalism and the cultural project to turn humans into the zombies of Orwell's 1984" but "has not been able to settle the problem of the relations between classes."4 This imposition of class categories reflects Campbell's reductivist materialist bias and ignores the spiritual focus that the Rastas give their resistance to wage-labour, refusing to work for the "boss-man." The first chapter of this essay, titled "No Gods, No Masters" will briefly analyse the relationship between religion and anarchism, and, seeing that religious institutions have historically been frequently opposed to the political ideals of anarchism, which seeks freedom from rule by leaders, poses the question of whether it is possible to have an anarchist religion, and what this might look like, taking into account historical religious anarchists such as Leo Tolstoy. The second chapter, "They Stand Up in Babylon", will present the history of the Rastafari; the antecedents of the movement, the cultural context from which it developed and its interactions with governmental authorities. The final chapter, "Polytricks", drawing on ethnographic, anthropological, and literary/musical sources will investigate the discourse of the Rastafari surrounding politics and the state, especially the concept of "Babylon," whereby all current rulers and authorities, whatever their party affiliation or political ideology, are viewed as part of the same system of oppression, from which the Rastafari will be liberated by Jah (God). Throughout the second and third chapters similarities will be displayed between Rastafari and anarchist thinkers and movements. Drawing on the conceptual framework of the first chapter ("religious anarchism"), the conclusion will demonstrate that Rastafari can be fitted within this heuristic category, and that this has consequences for both anarchist and religious studies, breaking down the supposed antipathy between religious and anarchist political ideals. As Rastafari is a largely acephalous, non-hierarchical movement, with significant regional variations and have no officially canonical sacred texts other than the Bible, which is interpreted very loosely; rather than being bound together through the external manifestations of formal religion, Rastas are held together by a shared sense of Babylon, the oppressive system which surrounds them, the reality and immanence of God, and the Rasta way of living, which rejects membership of the proletariat, and tends towards subsistence farming, independent businesses selling reggae records, ganja dealing or hustling.5 There are a number of inherent difficulties in describing and categorising it ideologically. This variety within the movement does not mean that inquiry is impossible, merely that conclusions must be recognised as tentative. As sources of information, this essay will follow the differing methods of the ethnographers and anthropologists such as William F Lewis and Barry Chevannes, who based their research upon oral dialogues with Rastafari, and sociologist Stephen King, who analyses the lyrical content of reggae songs, which he describes as "the movement's main instrument of communication." 6These differing methods are both based on analysing and understanding the self-presentation of Rastas within their historical and socio-political context. This essay argues that other categories presented by previous scholars, including political millennialism, cultural movement and religious mystics to describe Rastafari are inadequate, for they either do not take significant account of the resistance shown by Rastas to all forms of external political and institutional authority (referred to by the shorthand "Babylon"), reduce the religion to a political ideology, or can fit within the 'religious anarchist' category. This category has the benefit of ideologically and politically locating Rastafari, without ignoring its metaphysical and biblical expression.