A series on Rastafari Methodologies co-chaired by Dr. Jake Homiak and Dr. Jahlani Niaah
In association with:
- The Department of African Studies, University of Vienna (Course: “Introduction to Methodological Issues in African Studies”, Winter Semester 2025)
- The School of Sacrament Rastafari University (SOSACRU)
- The Estate of Carole Yawney
- The International Rastafari Archives Project (IRAP), National Anthropological Archives (NAA), Smithsonian Institution
- Comitas Institute for Anthropological Studies (CIFAS)
- Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of the West Indies
First Session: “Human Crises through Rastafari Methods”
CLICK HERE FOR RECORDING OF SESSION
Friday, 3 October, 5pm Austria Time / 10am Jamaica Time
This series seeks to celebrate the contribution of Rastafari and related scholars in creating a coherent system of knowledge-production founded in religio-political praxis. This network includes a cadre of preacher/teachers emerging from the foundation patriarchs to the present. Individuals such as Mortimo Planno were among the first leaders to pen their own accounts of the movement, thereby establishing him as a driving force in the post-independence positioning of Rastafari within the Jamaican and international spheres. Planno would move on to become a key organizer and community magnet, his public and community appearances attracting artists, musicians, academics, and at times even famous international visitors who gathered to glean African politics and other insights into the life lessons and creative inspirations of Rastafari.
On the whole, it should be noted that the members of the movement have resisted academic scrutiny from the earliest years of the movement. This fact notwithstanding, everyone doing serious in-depth work on Rastafari from the early 1960s up until his passing in 2005 made sure to seek out Planno. He was regarded as one of the most influential and most extensively documented Rastafari leaders of his generation. Planno’s approach has preserved his work and ideas in a multiplicity of forms internationally. In addition to a corpus of documents, he provided a blueprint for what now emerges as the foundations of Rastafari Studies as a “New Faculty of Interpretation.” Among the first set of scholars to encounter Planno were the UWI team of Smith, Augier and Nettleford, while others such as Comitas, Chevannes, and Yawney followed. Each experienced the charisma of Planno differently; but it was Carole Yawney who would become his first fully cultivated student where he “crosses the line”, initiating a white woman—a decision unpopular at the time—into his classroom in Trench Town. Yawney would become one of Planno’s most respected recording secretaries and chroniclers. Ironically, – it was because of this unpopular decision that much of Planno’s pedagogical process is accessible today.
With a focus on “sensitive scholarship,” this series seek to unpack more than five decades of Rastafari research to determine some of the key strategies and contributions emerging in the research transformation process that can arguably be attributed to a Rastafari pedagogical approach. The critical question being: to what extent is this pedagogical process and the scholarship associated with it necessarily invested in the idea of “crossing the line?” This figure of speech recognizes at least two related realities: one being the gritty colonial and neocolonial realities of oppression, non-being and marginalization from when the movement has sprung, and the other being a recognition on the part of researchers for a politics of “overstanding” and empathy and what Augier describes as action scholarship—and the need to “tell a story that helps”. For researchers, this goes beyond the ethical minimum of “Do No Harm;” it means developing a Rastafari research activism with a “Do Good!” approach that actively supports community perspectives, ‘overstandings,’ and causes among a historically misrepresented, vulnerable and marginalized people. It necessarily entails an awareness on the part of the researcher that s/he stands as a “witness” to all manner of events associated with infringements upon Rastafari life by the agents and powers of the ambient Babylon.
This series seeks to honour the legacy of the foundations of Rastafari scholarship and will therefore touch upon the three broad themes below, recognizing that all have a complex historical dynamic and that considerable diversity exists within the movement locally (Jamaica and the Caribbean) and in the global sphere.
