Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity by Charles Price (review)

Reviewed by: Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identityby Charles Price Darren J. N. Middleton Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity. By Charles Price. New York University Press, 2022. 352pages. $89.00 hardcover; $30.00 softcover; ebook available. New religious movements are often viewed as vantage points from which to look and then act in an unfriendly world. And in the language of the Rastafari religious movement, such "trodding through Babylon" frequently seems wicked, at least to outsiders, because it robustly reclaims an appreciation for Black somebodiness that colonial racial capitalism has consistently denied. Charles Price's insider account of the Rastafari's modest and mutinous origins, which are traceable to the 1930s, is a highly readable astute analysis that explains as well as describes how an allegedly villainous group evolved across several decades to become popular in several global contexts. Rastafariis based on thorough research, drawing on news media, archival texts, and personal fieldwork to delve deeply and, at times, elaborately and movingly, into how race and religion influenced Rastafari self-understanding. Throughout the book's ten chapters, Price chronicles the movement's forebears in faith through the lens of collective identity formation, beginning with Alexander Bedward's Jamaican Ethiopianism. Bedward used Africa's place in the biblical tradition to inculcate a spirit of "moral Blackness" in African-descended people. And numerous Bedwardites, like Robert Hinds, opposed colonial and Eurocentric exceptionalism. Hinds later joined with the first Rasta, Leonard Howell, and used the texts and ideas of Marcus Garvey, Fitz Pettersburg, Robert Athlyi Rogers, as well as Annie and David Harvey, to conscientize Black Jamaicans. For their part, the Jamaican colonial authorities vilified their marginalized detractors. Price finds such vilification deeply instructive. The scorn of Jamaican elites created a power asymmetry that affected "Rastafari ethnogenesis," which Price views as "a dialectical exchange between and among the efforts of Rastafari and non-Rastafari to define what constitutes Rasta" (41). Put differently, Babylon and Jah Kingdom are in an ever-changing circle of influence. And Price believes "we can better understand a group's identity by specifying the cultural matrix of their origins and by charting how they evolve over time, attentive to the interaction of power, cultural resources, non-members, and the often unpredictable results of these dynamic interactions" (47). Briefly, Rastafariexplores this model of collective identity formation. [End Page 108] Colonial anxieties about the rise of moral Black consciousness among the colonized escalated between 1890 and 1930, and newspaper accounts of figures such as Bedward, Hinds, Howell, Archibald Dunkley, and Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert, reveal the lengths to which Jamaican elites were prepared to go to pathologize or even liquidate Jamaica's anticolonialism. Attempts to thwart Rastafari gatherings were swift and brutal. But such "vectors"—Price's term for the unintentional as well as intentional agents of ideological transmission—encouraged rather than subdued the movement's message (6–8). Howell and Hinds were found guilty of sedition, for example, but their legal dramas provided the platform for the first soundings of Rastafari belief and practice and, ironically, interest in the movement intensified. A commune, Pinnacle, eventually surfaced. And even though non-Rastafari ordered the police to raid Pinnacle in 1941 and then again, for the last time, in 1954, Rastafari regrouped and then diversified their doctrines, rituals, and organizational structures. Nyabinghi music emerged, together with a fresh vocabulary of faith (Iyaric or Dread Talk), and figures like Claudius Henry replenished Black Jamaican desire for repatriation to Africa. The vilification continued. Non-Rastas blamed Rastafari for elevated crime in the Kingston ghettos. "The menace became dreadful," Price reports, and additional crackdowns followed. Nevertheless, the Rastas persisted. Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia visited Jamaica in 1966, and renewal followed. Some Rastas entered politics, others pursued the intuitive arts, and even more performed reggae music—with this last item, especially in its concert form, acting as a "significant vector amplifying Rastafari images and messages" (244). Rastafari's "growing influence" brought "growing pains," Price concedes, yet societal attitudes slowly but surely changed. Babylon became far less antagonistic. And Rastas secured their place on the world's cultural map, although today they face fresh or...