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Max Weber's theory of charisma and routinization is related to his concern with ideas as social forces, to his view of rationalization as the basis for human action and societal organization, and to his concern about how domination/authority is acquired and legitimated. This chapter reviews and critiques this theory and suggests that, contrary to Weber's contention, Rastafari has entrenched itself in Jamaican society without the development of formal organizational structures. Rastafari's routinization has been occasioned by the development of an informal network and ethos, by the changing attitudes of Jamaican society to the movement, and by the dominant influence the movement has exerted on Jamaican society since the 1960s.

This chapter examines two chief African responses to the European missionary enterprise from slavery to the 20th century. One response was to incorporate aspects of the Christian faith into the African religious heritage. Native Baptist (c.1830s-c. 1860s), Revival Zion (1860s- ), and Rastafari (1930s- ) traditions represent this type of religious formation. The Native Baptists were associated with the African-American evangelist George Liele, who began his missionary work in Jamaica during the late 18th century. The Revival Zion tradition represents a resurgence of the Native Baptist religion. With a Pan-African orientation and deep socio-political convictions, Rastafari, more than any other African-oriented tradition on the island, has shaped the postmodern, post-Christian African personality in Jamaica. African loyalty to Christian orthodoxy, another African-Jamaican response to European missionary Christianity, is also considered in this chapter as it was taught and reinforced by generations of missionary groups, especially after the last quarter of the 19th century.

This chapter explores attempts made to reclaim antiquity from European ownership by the Black biblical hermeneutic tradition. The argument focuses upon the political philosophies and cosmologies of Marcus Garvey and the Rastafari movement in order to investigate how they reconfigure antiquity as African by virtue of the material and spiritual prominence they give to Ethiopia instead of Greece and Rome. The chapter also explores the differing registers used by Garveyism and Rastafari to achieve this aim – the former developmentalist, the later cosmological. The argument suggests that Garveyism and Rastafari, and the shift made by the later towards a cosmological understanding of antiquity, deserve serious and critical consideration in the ongoing project to decolonize the heritage and ownership of the Classical world.

This chapter explores the new terrain for Rastafari identity formation as the movement persists well into the twenty-first century. This new terrain involves internationalization of Rastafari identity, new technologies, changes in social class, demographics, and attitude among the Rastafari as women, youth, and well-off people participate in shaping the personal and collective representations of Rastafari. All of this is occurring as older Rastafari like the subjects interviewed for the study grow infirm and “drop off” (pass on). The chapter goes on to detail the major shifts occurring within the movement, especially as Jamaica itself has changed over the years since the movement's inception. Additionally, this chapter considers the efforts made by the older Rastafari to communicate their cultural knowledge and lived experience to younger generations.

This chapter zooms in on colour blindness. Focussing on the racial domains of politics and criminal justice, it explores the correlation between race and colour and the enjoyment of civil and political rights. It argues that it was not just government inaction but also a lack of collective action from race-first and other groups why dark-skinned Jamaicans struggled more than others to exercise their civil and political rights. But while successive governments lacked the commitment to create a society where all Jamaicans irrespective of race and colour could enjoy their ‘fundamental rights’, they did their best to present Jamaica as a colour-blind nation. This chapter will also explore the purposes of this myth of racial harmony that was developed after the Second World War.

The messianic character of the Rastafari movement, and especially its apocalyptic representation of the future, deeply influences the daily life as well as worldview of the rastas. In reggae music, the eschatology is everywhere: it defines both practices and representations that belong to the present, contaminating them, as it were, by charging them with meaning. The future provides the present with an intensity that the past lacks: the effervescence of collective redemption, the fulfillment of a long-awaited justice, the final coming of the myth into human time. In the Book of Revelation, Babylon becomes the archetype of Evil. For the rastas, history offers a long list of Western wrongdoings, whose apogee was slavery and colonialism. Mental slavery is exerted through the whole social structure, from the education system to religious institutions to the media to the government, which are all viewed as actively participating in a vast enterprise of exploitation. The description of Babylon is made by using images of war and symbols from the Bible.

Reggae music expresses a central will: the recognition of a history of struggle – against slavery, segregation and colonisation – which is logically attached to Jamaica, but also goes beyond its borders. This historical memory has three main goals: first, to reveal a history of resistance considered as having been underestimated as well as hidden by Europeans; second, to restore dignity by showing that resistance started with the first captured slave; and third, to transmit this history of resistance, in particular to generations to come. The history of resistance, only ‘half told’, is cherished by the Rastafari movement and transmitted in reggae music, precisely because it has been distorted and mistold. Four major themes that build and form this history in reggae music can be identified: the Jamaican maroon communities and peasant revolts in Jamaica; Marcus Garvey; the figures of the black struggle in the United States; and the independence and anti-apartheid movements in Africa. The socio-political memory conveyed by reggae music concerns the Africans of the diaspora and the Africans of Africa.

The message contained in reggae music is above all a message of denunciation: the point is to show what is really happening, based on the fundamental distinction made by Rastafari between Good and Evil, between Zion and Babylon. Within a world viewed as a permanent struggle, reggae music develops a social critique and a denunciation of oppression. Reggae is therefore a music of resistance, based on a rhetoric of oppression that defines the terms which govern a worldview, and is rooted in the daily reality of the lives of poor people in Jamaica. Reggae music argues that poverty is neither a shameful condition nor in the order of things, but rather is only the consequence of the corruption of an elite that maintains a society based on exploitation, which therefore could be changed. Rastafari can be considered as a strong critique of consumer society and, more generally, capitalism. The rhetoric of oppression developed by reggae music articulates a fundamental opposition between the oppressors and the oppressed (based on the essential distinction of Babylon/Evil and Zion/Good), and the notion of hope.

Reggae has always been a socially and politically engaged musical style, which conveys a strong and explicit revolutionary message. Indeed, the narrative contained in reggae music is not only a denunciation: it also puts forward a call for political engagement and struggle, and even for revolution. The rejection of paradise and hell, to which the Last Judgment is substituted (eternal life for the righteous, eternal punishment for the sinners, after the return of the messiah and the judgment of God), plays a central role in the constant articulation made, within the Rastafari movement, between eschatology and revolution. The notion of revolution is present in reggae music, throughout its evolution and in Jamaica as much as in Great Britain. Reggae music can be considered as the narrative of a history as much as of a memory, as a tool of communication and of transmission of a religious knowledge and socio-political message. Through it, hope is entertained and redemption promised.

Reggae music transmits a multi-leveled memory that relates to historical knowledge – from anti-slavery icons in Jamaica to apartheid in South Africa – but also to religious knowledge: through its close association to the Rastafari movement. In reggae music, memory now appears as a complex process. Indeed, the construction of a ‘time-memory’ mobilises an articulation of both historical and mythical times: a continuity is built between the mythical origin and the present, between the mythical origin and the apocalyptic future, and, ultimately, between religious utopia and profane utopia. This book has shown that reggae music conveys a narrative of the past, which gives the latter a fundamental function in shaping the present. However, this ‘past’ quickly took on a both sacred and profane dimension. The eschatology is not, in the case of reggae music, something that is far away and separate from the present: to a certain extent, it overflows the sacred plane and spills into the profane, historical plane. The book has also articulated three concepts: tradition, revolution and revelation.

This book offers a case study in social memory that also opens onto the articulation between sacred and profane time. Through the case of reggae music, it looks at the construction, transmission and use of collective memory, and therefore at the symbolic space occupied by the idea of a historical discontinuity, within a specific context that includes a difficult past, characterised by forced uprooting and the experience of slavery. Reggae music claims a role of transmission and articulates the question of collective identity in relation to the construction of the African diaspora. The terms history and memory have here a specific meaning, situated within the Durkheimian framework, in particular in the work of Maurice Halbwachs, who distinguishes between collective memory and what he calls historical memory or history. Religion, just like music, ‘makes sense’ for individuals as well as for groups. The book discusses how the Rastafari movement builds a religious future and articulates the three temporal tenses – past, present and future – within an apocalyptic conception of history.

Reggae music is seldom analysed without a reference to the Rastafari movement, the founding event of which was the coronation of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, which took place on November 2, 1930. In Jamaica, some interpreted it as the fulfillment of the prophecy announced by Marcus Garvey before his departure for the United States. Some scholars have proposed an analysis centered on religion, usually based on the Jamaican case and focused on sacred practices, and the beliefs in which they are grounded. In contrast with the religion-focused approach, other scholars have considered the Rastafari movement from a socio-political standpoint, emphasising its historical emergence in relation to a context of domination and its articulation around the key notion of liberation; these works usually concern the Jamaican case, and often represent a Marxist approach, using terms such as neo-colonialism, social stratification, economic deprivation and racial prejudice. This chapter explores the history of reggae and the Rastafari movement, focusing on dubbing and the emergence of the reggae dancehall.

Reggae charts mix different styles (roots reggae, dancehall reggae, etc.) as well as contents (love songs, slackness, religious or sociopolitical songs, etc), and are therefore representative of reggae music as a whole. This chapter analyses reggae charts in Jamaica from 1968 to 2000 to trace the general evolution of reggae music and to determine the extent of the presence of the Rastafari movement within reggae music. For this diachronic analysis, the chapter uses Jamaican annual singles charts, which have existed since the beginning of the 1960s and are based on weekly charts. The available data were ranked music charts until 1996 (23 or 26 best sales of the year, depending on the year), and charted hits after 1996 (for example, all the singles that made it to the charts at least once during the year). The chapter uses two different variables, song content and artists, to examine simultaneously the presence of a sociopolitical and/or religious message in the charts, and the presence of artists linked to Rastafari, even when they sing love songs.

Reggae music and the Rastafari movement transmit a memory of slavery and a memory of Africa that can be characterised as diasporic, in relation to an original center as much as to the shared experience which followed a founding event: the forced exile provoked by the slave trade. This collective memory is reinforced by a strong identification with the history of the Bible, especially the story of the Twelve Tribes of Israel: a people without a land, and gods in exile who ‘are not dead’ but participate in the transmission of a memory that is alive and in the construction of a collective identity. For the rastas, the members of the African diaspora, exiled across the ocean, are the descendants of the biblical Twelve Tribes of Israel. The Rastafari movement transmits a religious memory as well as a religious construction of the origin. Within reggae lyrics are found three types of ‘Psalm borrowings’: simple references to the original Psalm, adaptations and literal quotations that conform to the original. Psalm 23 is among the most referenced psalms in reggae music.

Through a rereading of the Bible and the identification to the Twelve Tribes of Israel, Rastafari sets up a religious construction of the origin, accompanied by a transmission of the past of slavery. The Rastafari movement rebuilds a lineage on the basis of identification to a past history, which operates from the present to the past. Messianism and millenarianism are among the most fertile expressions of religious belief, expressed through the articulation of the fundamental categories of expectation and hope; and they take on a particular density and intensity in situations of colonisation, slavery or oppression, where they mix religious beliefs, social revolt, identity affirmation or even national liberation. The Rastafari movement has a pronounced messianistic and millenarian character: Haile Selassie is the messiah who announces the end of the world as described in the Book of Revelation.

The major characteristic of millenarian movements is the essential place they give to eschatology – that is, the mythical narrative of the end of the world – which, generally, implies both the destruction of the current world, rendered necessary by its gradual degradation, and the birth of a new, purified and regenerated world. This is the case of the Rastafari movement, whose eschatology is centrally based on the Revelation of Saint John. Interestingly, the eschatological narrative is one of the most central in reggae music. We live in the time of the prophecy, and the Apocalypse announced by the Bible is a near future that has already started. The rastas believe they are the descendants of the Twelve Tribes of Israel; this identification also takes on a fundamental messianic meaning within the eschatology, because it is linked to the lost tribes evoked in the Book of Revelation. Hope and redemption occupy a central and essential place within the eschatology. In relation to the specific context of the African diaspora, the advent of the New Jerusalem, Zion, is tied to Africa.