Page 10 AnthroNotes Volume 26 No. 2 Fall 2005throNotes ETHIOPIA ARISEN: DISCOVERING RASTAFARI by John P. Homiak ˜ ˜ ˜ [Editor’s Note: Anthropologist John Homiak has spent over 25 years conducting research on Rastafari commu- nities in Jamaica, the smaller islands of the Eastern Car- ibbean, South Africa, Panama, the United States, and Ethiopia. The themes he addresses in this article will be the focus of the first in-depth exhibit on the Rastafari at the National Museum of Natural History, anticipated to open summer 2007. Discovering Rastafari!, co-curated by Homiak and Ella-Maria Ray of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, will provide an opportunity to give voice to those architects of Rastafari culture who have sustained its vision of “equal rights and justice” for over 70 years. Homiak’s long-term involvement with the Rasta Movement has shaped an extraordinary level of accep- tance of his work among the Rastafari who are well- known for the guarded approach they take toward re- searchers. Today Rastafari born in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, as well as in England and North America, reside in far-flung Rastafari communities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Malawi, Benin, Senegal, and Ghana, among other nations.] The Ritual Pilgrimage Another annual cycle has passed. It is again Maskaram—Ethio- pian new year—a time of celebration and renewal throughout the countryside. In observance of the occasion, two hundred or so pil- grims have already gathered at an appointed site where they are offering praises to the Lord composed upon the ‘harps of David.’ They are assembled within a specially prepared tabernacle above which flies the Ethiopian flag emblazoned with the Lion of Judah. Framed by a rising moon, the structure is indistinguishable from hundreds of rough-clad churches that punctuate the Ethiopian highlands. Stragglers continue to trickle-in, funneling down the coun- try road by every available means of conveyance—on foot, by truck, car, bicycle and even donkey. One venerable pilgrim, Ras Daniel, appears shortly after my own arrival. Barefoot, wielding a prophet’s rod and adorned in the long flowing ‘robes of Solomon’, he is an imposing presence. Striking directly for the center of the taber- nacle, the patriarch takes his place next to an assembly of ten or so drummers. There he quickly assumes the lead role, directing the chants and exhorting his cohorts as they play a steady heartbeat rhythm that pulsates hypnotically into the night. Guided by this small group of ritual adepts, the assembled congregation proceeds to explore the spiritual possibilities of a simple repetitive chant. In the resting beats between the choral lines, Daniel punctuates the performance with short phrases in Amharic (lan- guage of the dominate Ethiopian ethnic group)—“Satta amasagana la amlak Anbessa Heuda.” As the chants go up, clouds of ‘in- cense’ drift skyward and envelope an opaque tapestry of red-gold- and-green and Judeo-Christian symbols that forms the backstage of the tabernacle. Behind this structure, two priests go about their duties. Their crowned heads, backlit by the ceremonial fire, appear as shadows alternately surreal and gorgon-like. Unexpectedly, the prevailing mood of solemnity is broken as one of the priests drives his staff into the core of the ceremonial fire sending a stream of embers and pyrotechnics into the night sky. The assembly responds with a spontaneous chorus of enthusiastic rolling ululations. To the uninitiated, this scene might appear as an ancient ritual fitting Ethiopia’s status as the only nation on the African continent never to have been colonized. The gathering described above, however, did not take place in the Ethiopian highlands—but on the island of Jamaica at a rural site surrounded by cane fields near the village of Hayes, Clarendon. I have attended thirty or more such events in Jamaica and elsewhere. The ceremony is a Rastafari gathering known as a Nyahbinghi, a ritual pil- grimage lasting for seven days during which the faithful gather to “praise Jah and chant down Babylon.” Jah is simply a praise name for His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia—the historical figure whom Rastafari brethren and sistren praise as their God and King. ‘Babylon’ is their term of reference for the entire neocolonial power structure that enslaved, oppressed and marginalized peoples of African descent over the past 400 years. The ‘harps of David’ are not actually biblical harps, but the African-derived Nyahbinghi drums, and the melodies are not psalms but evangelical Christian chants adapted to this African drumming style. The ‘in- cense’ rising around the tabernacle is neither frankin- Page 11 AnthroNotes Volume 26 No. 2 Fall 2005 cense nor myrrh, but columns of smoke from the ritual ganja pipes passed among male communicants. The ulu- lations of the congregation are not the high-pitched tones associated with the soundscapes of East Africa, but cries of ‘lightening,’ ‘earthquake,’ and ‘judgement’ hurled by Rastas at the Babylonian world. And the ‘robes of Solomon’ are not the flowing silk and gold garments of the Ethiopian Orthodox priesthood, but massive dreadlocks that cascade around and envelope the head and shoulders of Rastafari Elders who conduct the ritual. Despite its hybrid and invented symbolic ele- ments, the Nyahbinghi ceremony is arguably the most African-oriented of Rastafari religious observances. De- rived from the name of a Central African anti-colonial society and interpreted as “death to black and white op- pressors,” the term Nyahbinghi entered the Jamaican vo- cabulary of protest in the early 1930s shortly after the birth of the movement. Since that time, it has been a watchword symbolizing determined resistance to the European colonial and neocolonial forces that are viewed through the prism of slavery, oppression and denigra- tion. As the Rastafari movement evolved within a cru- cible of containment in colonial Jamaica, an array of nested meanings have become attached to the concept of Nyahbinghi. Today, the term not only refers to the re- ligious rituals described above, but to the drums played and chants sung at these events as well as to the loosely- knit organization (or “House” as it is termed) that spon- sors these events and the council of Elders associated with this organization. In Jamaica and in most parts of the Anglophone Caribbean, Nyahbinghi assemblies are typically island- wide events held six to seven times a year to commemo- rate important dates in a ritual calendar. Unlike reggae concerts and dances that are well-known expressions of the popular culture of Rastafari, these events are part of a guarded ‘backstage’ that have long been significant to the spiritual life of the Rastafari. Nyahbinghi gatherings do more than focus the worship of Emperor Haile Selassie, they periodically make communicants mindful of their self-declared status as Africans-in-exile, many of whom equate redemption with repatriation to Ethio- pia. Like all rituals, they also serve a host of subsidiary purposes. They are an arena within which Elders—those esteemed for their ability to coin ideology—authenticate their charisma through inspired oratory. These rituals are A rustic church in the Ethiopian highlands (left). Nyahbinghi tabernacle, Clarendon, Jamaica, 1988 (right). Page 12 AnthroNotes Volume 26 No. 2 Fall 2005throNotes also the context for observing the most austere forms of livity (i.e. spiritual way of life), and a periodic means of establishing community. Finally, Nyahbinghi ritual is seen as a means to channel the forces of nature, thus serving as a ritual ‘weapon’ by which the Rastafari chas- tise backsliders and destroy the oppressors of black people. Little known outside Jamaica until perhaps the last two decades or so, these celebrations began to spread to other parts of the Caribbean in the early 1980s largely through the impact of Elders who traveled as emissaries of the culture. From ‘Yard’ to ‘Nation’: Rastafari Globalization The House of Nyahbinghi is not the only expression of Rastafari culture and spirituality. Although organized around a common core of concepts and symbols, the contemporary Rastafari movement is a large-scale social phenomenon that encapsulates a broad range of ideo- logical and organizational diversity (Yawney & Homiak 2003). At least two other main organizations within the movement orient the lifeways of specific Rastafari—one known as the Ethiopian African Black International Congress (or Boboshanti House) and the other the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Because of links between Nyahbinghi House and the origins of the movement, however, the latter is most frequently acknowledged as representing the revival core of Rastafari principles and spirituality. A capsule history of the Nyahbinghi House might go something like this. In Jamaica, the aesthetic and performative elements of Nyahbinghi ceremonies evolved during the ‘yard’ and camp period of Rastafari in the legendary shanty towns of Kingston from the late 1940s through the 1960s. This was a period of wide- spread internal rural-to-urban migration that saw tens of thousands of Jamaicans, many of them young males from the Jamaican countryside (like Bob Marley and Pe- ter Tosh), swell the ranks of the black poor in the Kingston ghettoes. During these decades, the Rastafari were generally harassed and disparaged by members of the wider society. They also were routinely persecuted by the colonial authorities for claiming the right to use ganja (cannabis) as a basis of their worship and for their practice of wearing dreadlocks to publicly declare an Af- rican identity. A network of urban and rural yards (units of residence) became their haven. During these years, the Rastafari collectively agitated for repatriation to Af- rica—some seeing this as a divinely inspired event and other insisting that it was the responsibility of the colo- nial government to ensure their return to the continent. Ras Bigga with ritual ganja pipe, 1985. Repatriated Elders in the Rasta tabernacle in Shashemane, Ethiopia. Page 13 AnthroNotes Volume 26 No. 2 Fall 2005 “Those who took us out of Africa are the same ones who must return us,” many declared. Tensions between the movement and the wider society were exacerbated by these demands as well as associated cries for social justice. By the late 1960s, elements of the Rastafari mes- sage came to play a major role in the fledgling Jamaican music industry that gave rise to a new music called “reggae.” Due largely to Rastafari-inspired reggae dur- ing the early 1970s, the movement began to spread else- where in the Caribbean. At the same time, the interna- tional popularity of the music and its principal expounder, Bob Marley, resulted in widespread co-optation of the symbols and message of the Rastafari by Jamaica’s two political parties. These developments transformed Nyahbinghi celebrations into a site of political struggle over both the definition of Rastafari identity and the goals of the movement. Nyahbinghi ceremonies became in- creasingly important as the ritual context within which Rastafari re-affirmed their African-Ethiopian identity, their symbolic separation from the wider society, and their uncompromising demands for repatriation to Ethiopia. During the 1970s, reggae music and its principal ‘messen-Jahs’ inspired thousands of individuals to em- brace a Rastafari identity throughout the Afro-Atlantic world. This was followed in the early 1980s by delega- tions of Nyahbinhgi Elders who began to travel to Rastafari communities both inside and outside the Car- ibbean for the express purpose of formalizing the prac- tice of Rastafari livity (i.e., spiritual way of life). Individu- als of the generation of Elders who helped socialize Bob Marley became part of a transnational culture linking Rastafari in North American and European cities like New York, Toronto, Miami, and London with Rastafari communities across the Carribean, as well as emergent Rastafari communities on the African continent in Ghana, Benin, South Africa, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. The result is that the Rastafari now think of themselves as a nation or transnation, a far flung imagined community that is global in scope. It is increasingly in terms of the symbols and protocols of the Nyahbinghi ritual through which members of this geographically dispersed ‘community’ imagine themselves bound in mutual communion. At the Nyahbinghi ceremony described on page 1, one of the well-traveled Elders in attendance addressed the congre- gation asserting his understanding of Rastafari as a transnational community: Rastafari procession in Shashemane,Ethiopia, July 23, 2002. Beloved bredrin and sistrin, the great thing about Iyahbingh (Nyahbinghi) is that as I-nI (we) celebrate here this light (night), Nyahbinghi is being celebrated in Artwork proclaiming repatriation to Ethiopia. Rastafari often speak of Marcus Garvey’s Black Star shipping line as their means of return to Africa. Page 14 AnthroNotes Volume 26 No. 2 Fall 2005throNotes St. Lucia, in Grenada, in Antiqua, in Jamaica, in Shashemene (Ethiopia), in Cape Town, in London, and all over the earth…through the power of His Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I. Ethiopia Arisen: Preludes to Rastafari and the Black Transnation Ask the average person on the street what they know about Rastafari, and they are likely to say “Bob Marley and reggae.” Most are aware that Rastafarians are well known for wearing dreadlocks and smoking ganja (can- nabis) but they are likely to know little about the mean- ings of these practices in Rastafari religious belief. Out- siders would certainly be unaware of the fact that the herb marijuana (ganja) is considered sacred, that it is consumed communally in a ritual pipe known as a chal- ice, or that many Jamaican Rastafari refer to well devel- oped locks and to the most potent forms of ganja by the same term—kali (a Hindi word appropriated from East Indian indentured laborers that came to Jamaica follow- ing Emancipation.) Few are aware that Rastafari is far deeper and older than Bob Marley and reggae music. And even in Jamaica—where Rastafari emerged—the vast majority of Jamaicans themselves have little to no idea about the role that Jamaican Elders have played in spread- ing Rastafari culture over the past 25 years. Nor are they likely to understand the complex interplay that exists between the popular culture and orthodox expressions of Rastafari as these have been disseminated globally. Perhaps it is not surprising that a once-despised movement of social outcasts in the slums of a British Crown colony has become a world-wide movement or- ganized around issues of social and racial justice. As the descendants of slaves in Jamaica, the Rastafari are part of the violent history of plantation slavery and its links to the origins of modern capitalism and the spread of European Christianity. Jamaican history, in particular, resulted in more slave rebellions than anywhere else in the Caribbean. At the same time, resistance to European control in Jamaica from the eighteenth century onward has been expressed primarily in religious terms. But most outsiders to Rastafari are still perplexed by the connec- tion between the descendants of slaves in Jamaica and the last Emperor of Ethiopia and the land he ruled: “Why Haile Selassie?” and “Why Ethiopia?” many ask. Caribbean Societies Examined The answer to these queries—as to most questions about the Rastafari movement—is best explored in thinking about Jamaica and other Caribbean societies as artifacts of modernity. These post-plantation societies are not merely linked with European expansionism, they have long been strategically positioned between the influences of North America and Europe on the one hand, and Africa on the other. Caribbean societies are ones in which questions of identity, as well as conceptions of social justice and a moral order, have long been tied to the legacy of plantation slavery and to the tragic history of exploi- tation of peoples of African descent. So why Ethiopia? The overwhelming majority of peoples of African descent in Jamaica came from West and Central Africa and many of the cultural elements woven into Rastafari culture reflect these connections. The answer to “why Ethiopia?” traces to English colo- nies in North America and to Christianity as it was in- terpreted by African American Christians as far back as at the eighteenth century. It was in the American colo- nies, after all, that a small group of educated black Chris- tian converts—including figures like Phyllis Wheatley and Prince Hall—identified themselves with references to Ethiopians in the Holy Bible (Exodus 18:22-24; Psalms 68:32). Also in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, literary and cartographic practices frequently referred to the entire African continent as “Ethiopia.” English set- tlers applied the term to Africans upon their arrival in the New World, a practice that was similarly adopted by Africans themselves (Scott 1993: 14). Over time, Ethiopianism emerged with powerful redemptive asso- ciations. References in the Bible that depicted blacks in a dignified and human light were particularly valued, the most frequently cited of these being Psalm 63: 31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” These references to racial na- tionhood first reached Jamaica in the aftermath of the American Revolution as British loyalists left the North American colonies with their slaves for England’s Carib- bean possessions. In 1784, a black preacher from Savanna, Georgia, by the name of George Liele, started the first Ethiopian African Baptist church in Kingston, Jamaica. Then, in March of 1896, reports circulated in the world press that drew the worldwide attention of black people to the modern country of Ethiopia, the only free and Page 15 AnthroNotes Volume 26 No. 2 Fall 2005 Marcus Garvey in ritual attire during a UNIA parade. sovereign nation on the African continent. Forces of the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II had defeated a large in- vading army of Italians at Adwa in the Abyssinian high- lands and thwarted Europeans in their attempt to extin- guish the final symbol of African freedom. Marcus Garvey’s Impact The Ethiopian victory at Adwa not only inspired a con- tinent of Africans under the yoke of colonialism, it mo- bilized millions of Diasporic blacks in their own local struggles, especially in the Caribbean. Menelik’s victory over an invading European power crystallized a new iden- tification among Afro-Americans and Afro-West Indi- ans with the actual country of Ethiopia such that virtu- ally all Pan-Africanists of the day—from Albert Thorne and Edward Wilmot Blyden to W.E.B. Dubois and Ja- maican-born Marcus Garvey—drew prominently upon Ethiopianist rhetoric in their writings and public speak- ing. It was in association with Garvey’s United Ne- gro Improvement Association (UNIA)—the largest black movement in history and one that spanned four conti- nents—that Ethiopianism acquired the trappings of ritual nationhood. The Garvey movement, which reached its height in Harlem during the 1920s, was characterized by florid oratory, rituals, and pageantry, all organized around the motif of nationhood. This included a constitution, a list of officers (including Garvey as the Provisional Presi- dent of Africa), ministers, titles, and agencies assigned to perform quasi-governmental tasks. His functions and parades featured UNIA members in variegated military uniforms with swords, helmets, and plumed hats. Garvey drew prominently upon both religious and back-to-Af- rica themes with Ethiopianist associations. It was Garvey who argued for a unified religious faith for all black people and who encouraged his followers to view God in their own image—“through the spectacles of an Ethiopian.” Two events in the early 1930s transformed these precedents into the socioreligious movement that would become Rastafari. The first of these was the crowning of a young Ethiopian nobleman, Ras Tafari Makonnen, as Emperor Haile Selassie, monarch of Ethiopia, an event attended by representatives of the European powers and widely reported in the world press. The other was Mussolini’s invasion in late 1935 of Ethiopia (a nomi- nally Christian country from the fourth century). Most accounts of the Jamaican genesis of Rastafari point to the relationship between the biblical literacy of the masses of Jamaicans and a few black preachers who submitted the events of the coronation and the Italian-Ethiopian War to biblical interpretation. Like Ethiopian monarchs before him, Ras Tafari claimed descent from the biblical union of Solomon and Sheba and assumed the titles in the Holy Bible reserved for the Second Coming of Christ. The preaching of Emperor Selassie’s identity as the Returned Christ converged with a militant form of Afro-Christian Revivalism that had already come to be cast in racial terms. This, in fact, grew out of the collec- tive experience of tens of thousands of Jamaicans who— from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century—had been drawn up in the cycles of labor migration throughout the wider Caribbean Basin and North America. These itinerant Jamaicans had gained a new perspective on the place of black people in the world order—one that placed them at the bottom and one in which they routinely suf- fered racial prejudice and insult. It was within this con- text that not only Garveyism, but a series of proto- Rastafari preachers (and their published pamphlets and tracts) gained currency as they circulated throughout the Afro-Atlantic world, from Colon, Panama to Kimberley, South Africa. Equally important, and largely overlooked in treatments of the movement’s origins, was the nature of news reportage and the associated visual media related to the spectacle of Haile Selassie’s ascension to the Throne of David in Addis Ababa on November 2, 1930. Page 16 AnthroNotes Volume 26 No. 2 Fall 2005throNotes Virtually all of the European colonial powers as well as the United States and Japan sent representatives to the coronation where they paid honor to the world’s only sovereign African ruler. American and European film companies were there to record the event, and Emperor Selassie ultimately appeared on the covers of all of the major European illustrated news publications in full coro- nation regalia. The press, in fact, objectified for African peoples the sight of European nobility bowing to an African counterpart whose own symbols of authority (crown, scepter, robes) were familiar (i.e., European in form). The National Geographic magazine (January 1931) ran a full 60-page spread on the coronation. What evolved from this combination of texts and visual media was a re-ordered Christian cosmology that interpreted the collective experiences of African- Jamaicans. This was a cosmology shaped by an opposi- tion between the domains of Zion and Babylon—both of which are seen to entail an alliance between church- and-state—holy and unholy, respectively. Zion (Ethio- pia/Africa), identified with the theocratic state ruled by Emperor Selassie, is regarded as a sacred and inviolate domain. By contrast, Babylon (Europe/America) is iden- tified as the corrupt neocolonial and imperialist sphere sustained in its spiritual and temporal dimensions through an unholy alliance between church-and-state. Just as Selassie is the living and incarnate God of Zion, so the Pope of Rome is seen as the embodiment of the Anti- Christ and ruler of Babylon (see Homiak 1987; 1999). The Challenges to Representing Rasta-Far-Eye in the Twenty-First Century Working with and moving amongst Rastafari is not for the faint of heart. Within the interpretive community of speakers that constitutes the movement, there is a gener- alized understanding that “every tub haffa siddong ‘pon its own bottom” (i.e., that each individual stands to be judged on his own words and deeds). Rastafari apply this prin- ciple to themselves as well as to outsiders and especially to researchers to whom they have always taken a guarded approach irrespective of their race, color, or class. Suf- fice it to note here that I was fortunate to work with Elders who had seen and heard both Marcus Garvey and the founders of the movement preach in the 1930s and 1940s. In their generous spirit, these Elders provided me with the cultural competency to ‘move amongst’ other Rastafari brethren and sistren. It is notable that there has never been a single individual in the history of the movement authorized to speak on behalf of the Rastafari as a whole. With a few notable exceptions, Rastafari has remained a diffuse, de- centralized movement structured in terms of egalitarian principles. Within the House of Nyahbinghi, for example, it remains the case that male adherents assert their own individual prophetic ‘commissions’ based on the personal visionary relationship that each claims with Jah Rastafari. This relationship is expressed in manifold ways. The most common is through the use of Rastafari speech and the term I-n-I. The Rastafari use this term rather than the phrase “you-and-me” to express their understanding of all communicants as a single spiritual corporate body. But the phrase also expresses the spiritual and mystic inter-dwelling of God-in-man as well as the individuality of each communicant (Homiak 1987). This gives rise to a broad range of contending voices, ones that in any given situation call into question who speaks for Rastafari and with what authority. And herein rests one of the Emperor Haile Selassie on white charger (see Revelation 16). This image circulated during the Italian-Ethiopian war and has become enmeshed in the visual culture of Rastafari. Page 17 AnthroNotes Volume 26 No. 2 Fall 2005 most significant challenges to representing Rastafari whether in publications or exhibition form. In its contemporary global context, the Rastafari ‘nation’ (its egalitarian ethos notwithstanding) is hetero- geneous not only in terms of race and gender, but in terms of class, ideological orientations, ethnicity and national boundaries (if not national origins). Although the Rastafari movement developed as a response to the dominant white European colonial order, it is now the case that asymmetries of power exist within the ranks of the Rastafari themselves that tend to shape the workings of authority within local and global spheres of influ- ence. Since the mid-1980s, the international Rastafari community has evolved its own emerging intelligentsia. The global or transnational context in which the move- ment operates is one in which some individuals are in- creasingly free to travel and speak on behalf of the move- ment while others remain ‘yard bound.’ It is also the case that Jamaican Rastafari, based on the claim that Jamaica is the birthplace of the movement, frequently mount something of a rear guard action in asserting their place as ‘first among equals’ relative to Rastafari elsewhere. Surprisingly, none of these internal factors have been the subject of critical scholarship to date (see, however, Homiak 2005). All of these factors—related to what one might call the positioning of ‘the voice’—constitute major chal- lenges to mounting an exhibit on Rastafari in the twenty- first century. Because Rastafari (wherever they may be) have experienced oppressive treatment from the state, their contending voices also raise challenges about how to adequately cover the enormous sacrifice and struggle that has been part of the collective Rastafari experience. Nearly all of the Elders I have known over the years have served prison and jail terms (mostly for marijuana possession) and have had to find ways to support them- selves and their families outside the framework of the formal economy. But there is a danger in representing this only as “the Jamaican” experience. Rastafari in the Eastern Caribbean have suffered equally. In Grenada, it is little known that many of the first members of the New Jewel Movement, which brought Maurice Bishop to power, were Rastafari and were subsequently harassed and killed by those who ousted Bishop. Similarly, in Dominica, those who wore dreadlocks were—under a law called the “Dread Act”—subject to being shot on sight during the 1970s. Similar testimony of persecution and sacrifice exists for South Africa. Beyond that, there are challenges to incorporating the voices and story of Rastafari women who, in a movement with strong patri- archal values, have traditionally had a low profile. Finally, there is the challenge of striking a balance in giving voice to the varied ‘Houses’ within the movement, each with its own somewhat distinctive ideology and forms of so- cial practice. Conclusion: ‘Half the Story has Never Been Told’ Rastafari has long been a maligned and poorly under- stood movement. The Rastafari themselves are fond of pointing out that “No one knows how Rastafari has sur- vived—I-n-I are here today against all odds.” The an- swer they assert is in “the half of the story that has never been told.” From an intellectual perspective, various ques- tions arise. How is it that a movement whose first preach- ers were all sent either to the mental asylum or impris- oned for sedition has now become woven into the fabric of Jamaican life and Jamaican nationalism? How is it that a movement without any formal positions of authority or any formal organizational structures has managed to spread not only throughout the Caribbean, but around the world? What actually serves to constitute culture and community among such a far-flung and differentiated group of communicants? How does a movement that began among peoples of African descent, and, which is organized around African symbols, incorporate and ac- commodate people of different races—including those historically associated with their white oppressors? And, for that matter, how do Rastafari construct their notions of race? The answer to these and other questions is not merely of interest to understanding Rastafari but has relevance to contemporary issues in anthropology asso- ciated with concepts of diaspora, globalization, cultural hybridity, and concepts of place and belonging. For Further Reading Carnegie, Charles. 1999. Garvey and the Black Transnation. Small Axe 5: 48-71. Post, Ken. 1970. The Bible as Ideology: Ethiopianism in Jamaica, 1930-1938. In Christopher Allen and R.W. Johnson, eds., African Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (continued) Page 18 AnthroNotes Volume 26 No. 2 Fall 2005throNotes Jake Homiak is director of the Collections and Archives Program, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History. Jake Homiak (center) with Nyahbinghi Elders Ras Irie Ions (left) and Bongo Shephan at the First Rastafari Hispanic Summit, Panama City, Panama. Homiak, John P. 2005. Understanding a Modern Antique: Chal- lenges to Representing Rastafari in the Twenty-First Century. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 79 (nos. 1&2): 79-90. ________. 1999. Movements of Jah People: from soundscape to mediascape. In John Pulis, ed., Religion, Diaspora and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean. Gordon & Breach Publishers. ________. 1987. The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari: Visionary Communication in a Prophetic Movement. In Barbara Tedlock, ed., Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yawney, Carole D., and John P. Homiak. 2001. “Rastafari” and “Rastafari in Global Context” [with Carole D. Yawney]. In Stephen D. Glazier, ed., The Encyclopedia of African and African American Religions. New York: Routledge. ________. 1995. Tell Out King Rastafari Doctrine Around the Whole World: Rastafari in Global Perspective. In A. Ruprecht and C. 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