Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction by Ennis B. Edmonds

Author:Ennis B. Edmonds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Rastafari international: the making of a global movement

In ‘I Shot the Sheriff’, Bob Marley sings of a Sheriff John Brown who gives orders for every seed Marley plants to be destroyed before it has a chance to germinate. The most obvious allusion is to the efforts of Jamaican authorities to stamp out the growing and use of ganja, which is an essential part of Rastafarian ritual. However, given his penchant for multi-vocality, Marley is probably also alluding to repressive measures by law enforcement against Rastafari. Despite these measures in Jamaica and elsewhere, Rastafari has grown from its obscure beginnings in Jamaica in the early 1930s to become an international movement in the twenty-first century. Estimates put the number of Rastas at between 700,000 and 1,000,00 worldwide. While these numbers cannot be verified, by the early years of the twenty-first century, adherents of Rastafari can be found in most of the major population centres and many outposts of the world. But the global significance of Rastafari goes far beyond the number of people who adhere to its principles and pursue its lifestyle. Its significance extends to the racial, political, and cultural consciousness it has fostered among African peoples in African diaspora as well as the African homeland, the inspiration it has provided for other dominated peoples (e.g, the Maori, the Hopi, and the Punjabi) to resist political and cultural domination, and its influence on musical and artistic production in the Caribbean and around the world. Rastafari can truly be considered an emerging world religion, if not in term of numbers, certainly in terms of global reach and influence. Though the research on the global spread and presence of Rastafari is still in its infancy, the growing ethnographic and journalistic data indicate that an interplay of migration, media, and ‘missions’ has facilitated its taking root in communities around the world.

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