Overview
- Traces the reproduction of a Rastafari community in the Jamaica neighbourhood of Shashamane
- Highlights a Caribbean Rastafari diaspora as a case of cosmopolitan thought and action
- Argues for a rooted cosmopolitanism
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology (PSLA)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This is a book about the power of the imagination to move persons from the Global South as they reinvent themselves. This ethnography focuses on Caribbean Rastafari who have undertaken a spiritual repatriation to Ethiopia over several decades particularly, though not exclusively, from Jamaica. Shelene Gomes traces the formation of a Rastafari community located in the multicultural 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. In presenting narratives of spiritual repatriation, everyday behaviours and ritualised events, Gomes provides an ethnographic account of Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. 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 cosmopolitanism from the Global South.
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. This spiritual repatriation, in its emic sense, foregrounds the Caribbeanist contribution to anthropology. Ethnographies of the Caribbean have been at the forefront of anthropological enquiries into global interconnections. This discussion of spiritual repatriation is both specific to the diasporic Caribbean and relevant to wider world-making processes and representations.Authors and Affiliations
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Cosmopolitanism from the Global South
Book Subtitle: Caribbean Spiritual Repatriation to Ethiopia
Authors: Shelene Gomes
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82272-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-82271-2Published: 15 September 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-82274-3Published: 16 September 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-82272-9Published: 14 September 2021
Series ISSN: 2946-4218
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4226
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 209
Topics: Ethnography, Diaspora, African Culture, Social Anthropology, Migration