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In this thought provoking collection of essays, anthropologist
Barry Chevannes carefully exposes the underlying ideas and values
that have given and are giving shape to social life in Jamaica and
the Caribbean Region in general. In so doing, he goes beyond a mere
examination of social structure, best exemplified by the works of
earlier anthropologists like M.G. Smith, to present a comprehensive
examination of the nature of Jamaican society. Chevannes advances
our understanding of the complex issues of African-Caribbean
identity and culture that have plagued intellectuals and scholars
form Melville Herskovits right through to contemporary writers like
Maureen Warner-Lewis and artists like Kamau Brathwaite. The
approach focuses on the worldview, which, he argues, gives shape to
a culture by informing the people's patterns of behaviours, their
social values and sensibilities. The place of Africa has been an
important component of that worldview, influencing modes of
survival, reconstruction and change, and central to an
understanding of identity, sexuality, religion, morality and
politics in Jamaican and Caribbean society.
As Caribbean communities become more international, clinicians and
scholars must develop new paradigms for understanding treatment
preferences and perceptions of illness. Despite evidence supporting
the need for culturally appropriate care and the integration of
traditional healing practices into conventional health and mental
health care systems, it is unclear how such integration would
function since little is known about the therapeutic interventions
of Caribbean healing traditions. Caribbean Healing Traditions:
Implications for Health and Mental Health fills this gap. Drawing
on the knowledge of prominent clinicians, scholars, and researchers
of the Caribbean and the diaspora, these healing traditions are
explored in the context of health and mental health for the first
time, making Caribbean Healing Traditions an invaluable resource
for students, researchers, faculty, and practitioners in the fields
of nursing, counseling, psychotherapy, psychiatry, social work,
youth and community development, and medicine.
By focussing on the worldview of Jamaican and other Caribbean
peoples, this collection of essays explores the themes of cultural
continuity and change between the Rastafari, on the one hand, and
Revival, Ndyuka and Winti religions, on the other. A wide range of
topics are covered: continuity between Rastafari and Revival, the
origin and symbolism of the dreadlocks, the process of Rastafari
integration into British society, the Gaan Gadu cult, home rituals,
and the theoretical problems of African retention in the Caribbean.
As Caribbean communities become more international, clinicians and
scholars must develop new paradigms for understanding treatment
preferences and perceptions of illness. Despite evidence supporting
the need for culturally appropriate care and the integration of
traditional healing practices into conventional health and mental
health care systems, it is unclear how such integration would
function since little is known about the therapeutic interventions
of Caribbean healing traditions. Caribbean Healing Traditions:
Implications for Health and Mental Health fills this gap. Drawing
on the knowledge of prominent clinicians, scholars, and researchers
of the Caribbean and the diaspora, these healing traditions are
explored in the context of health and mental health for the first
time, making Caribbean Healing Traditions an invaluable resource
for students, researchers, faculty, and practitioners in the fields
of nursing, counseling, psychotherapy, psychiatry, social work,
youth and community development, and medicine.
Interviews with 30 converts from the 1930s and 1940s are a
component of Barry Chevanne's book, a look into the origins and
practices of Rastafarianism. From the direct accounts of these
early members, he is able to reconstruct pivotal episodes in
Rastafarian history to offer a look into a subgroup of Jamaican
society whose beliefs took root in the social unrest of the 1930s.
The little that most people know about Rastafarianism has come
through the Jamaican music, Reggae, which resonates with the
contemporary social and political struggle of the poverty-stricken
cities of Trenchtown and Kingston. Bob Marley and the Wailers, for
instance, with their politically charged lyrics about the ghetto,
became emissaries for the Jamaican poor. Here Chevannes traces
Rastafarianism back to 1930's prophet Marcus Garvey and his mass
coalition against racial oppression and support of a free Africa.
Before Garvey, few Jamaicans, the overwhelming majority of whom had
been brought to the island from Africa and enslaved by Europeans,
held positive attitudes about Africa. The rise of black
nationalism, however, provided the movement with its impetus to
organise a system of beliefs. Likewise, Chevannes explores the
movement's roots in the Jamaican peasantry, which underwent
distinct phases of development between 1834 and 1961 as freed
slaves became peasants. The peasants established themselves in the
recesses of the island and many eventually moved to cities, where
the economic and social hardship already inherent in Jamaican
society, was even more desolate. Between 1943 and 1960, detrimental
social changes transformed Jamaica's rapidly expanding cities.
Kingston's population grew by 86 percent, and crime and disease
were rampant. It was under this severe social decay that Rastafari
became a hospice for the uprooted and derelict masses. As a
spiritual philosophy, Rastafarianism is linked to societies of
runaway slaves or maroons and derives from both the African Myal
religion and the Revivalist Zion churches. Like the revival
movement, Rastafarianism embraces the 400-year-old doctrine of
repatriation. Rastas believe that they and all Africans who have
migrated are but exiles in ""Babylon"" and are destined to be
delivered out of captivity by a return to Zion or Africa - the land
of their ancestors and the seat of Jah Rastafari himself, Haile
Selassie I, the former emperor of Ethiopia. ""Rastafari"" is a work
with an historical and ethnographic approach that seeks to correct
several misconceptions in existing literature - the true origin of
dreadlocks, for instance. It should be of interest to religion
scholars, historians, scholars of Black studies, and a general
audience interested in the movement and how Rastafarians settled in
other countries.
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