Review by Choice Review
Anthropologist Price (Univ. of North Carolina) unites the personal and the social in his exploration of identity formation among Rastafarians in Jamaica, where the Rastafari religion originated in 1930. Price, himself a member, offers a new entry into Rastafari studies through personal narratives that disclose individual paths toward and reasons for conversion. Price's interlocutors were born between 1906 and 1925, the generation succeeding the founders. The author discerns a pattern in their narratives: each convert had a decisive experience that crystallized his or her thinking about blackness, poverty, and repression. Price's research engendered his thesis of "morally configured Blackness" (p. 99). (The author caps the terms "black" and "white" throughout the text.) Rastafari identity is shaped around the belief that blacks are obligated to fight racism, poverty, colonialism, and capitalism, and to work for the common benefit. The experiences of converts have led them to this moral conception of blackness, which is central to Rastafari religion. Rastafarianism valorizes black identity and liberates the person from hegemonic white culture and Eurocentric interpretations of the world. It is a process of ethnogenesis that develops a community founded on satisfying religious, moral, and racial consciousness. This well-written, sophisticated, and continuously engaging account belongs in all libraries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. R. Berleant-Schiller emerita, University of Connecticut
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
