Beschreibung
This research monograph is about the power of the imagination to move persons from the Global South as they reinvent themselves. This case focuses on Caribbean Rastafarians who have undertaken a spiritual repatriation to Ethiopia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2008-2009 and subsequent visits between 2012-2015, Gomes traces the formation of a Rastafari community located in the Jamaica Safar or Jamaica neighbourhood in the Ethiopian city of Shashamane. Following a twentieth century grant of land from the former Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I, this community has developed from several migrations of Rastafarians (Rastafari) from the Caribbean, in particular from Jamaica, to Ethiopia. Through everyday behaviours and ritualised events, Gomes provides an ethnographic account of what she refers to as Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. As in many anthropological studies, history matters. Situated in the historical conditions of colonial West Indian plantations and the asymmetries of freedom and bondage within modernity, a recognition of global positionalities and local situatedness characterises this case of southern cosmopolitanism. As such, while this study of spiritual repatriation delves into the historical formation of global networks, models of citizenship, and community conceptions of belonging, the stakes are much greater. Shifting the centre of worldviews from Europe to Africa, Rastafari both challenge global disparities as well as reproduce hierarchies in the local space of the Jamaica Safar. In positioning Ethiopia as the spiritual birthplace of humanity, Rastafari also engage in ontological and epistemological reinvention. Rather than cosmopolitanism rooted in the Western tradition, Gomes argues that there is nothing antithetical or contradictory about a pan African cosmopolitan attitude and orientation, as evidenced in Rastafari praxis.
Autorenporträt
Shelene Gomes teaches social anthropology and the sociology of culture at The University of The West Indies, St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago. She is a senior research associate in the Department of Anthropology and Development, University of Johannesburg.
