Reading: 'The Material Roots of Rastafarian Marijuana Symbolism'

(by Akeia A. Benard, 2007, History and Anthropology, 18:1, pp.89-99)

Short but interesting article on Jamaican history, tracing the beginnings of cannabis use. Apparently hemp was first introduced to Jamaica by Europeans who wanted to use it as a source of fibre (presumably for stuff like rope), but that idea fell through and it became an invasive weed. During the period where black Jamaicans were slaves, there's no evidence of anyone smoking it (it's possible that the type of hemp growing in Jamaica at this point didn't even contain high enough THC levels for it to be worth smoking anyway). (p.95)

Then slavery ended and black Jamaicans became officially free people. Understandably, they refused to go back to work for their former masters. From 1845 onwards, the white landowners responded by replacing them by shipping in indentured labourers from India.

Cannabis-smoking has a long history in India. The Rig-Veda (written earlier than 1000 BCE) describes 'ganja' or 'gaja' as a gift to humanity from the god Indra, who wanted humanity to “attain elevated states of consciousness, delight in worldly joy, and freedom from fear”. It was also used as a treatment for a very wide range of health problems. The Indian arrivals may have recognised the wild hemp, and probably brought their own varieties of marijuana with them too. Benard reckons that Rastafarian ideas about vegetarianism, each nation having its own God-King and the relationship between caste/class and colour may also have been heavily influenced by this contact with Hinduism (even though there were presumably also tensions between the black population and the Indian labourers who'd been brought in to take their jobs) (p.95).

However, when the practice of cannabis-smoking was transmitted from Hinduism to black Jamaicans, religious meanings were not immediately transmitted along with it. Initially, black Jamaicans used cannabis as a 'drug-food' (that is, as something that doesn't actually have any nutritional value, but is almost like a food because people need it in order to make it through the day. Nicotine and caffeine are common examples. Drug-foods are often good news for business-owners, because it means their employees can keep doing exhausting work for longer) (p.95-6).

Then in the 1930s, shifting economic conditions led to many black Jamaicans migrating to Kingston looking for work. However, when they got there they often found it very hard to find decent jobs. Many ended up squatting on government-owned property ('yards') and living off stuff they'd found in rubbish heaps. Some Kingston yards ended up forming 'camps': places where people (usually men) could buy, sell and smoke cannabis. These camps were also often places where people could hold 'sessions': meetings to discuss politics and religion (collectively referred to as 'reasoning'). It was out of these sessions that central tenets of Rastafarianism emerged (e.g. devotion to the contemporary Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, aka Ras Tafari, and the idea that European society was the 'Babylon' described in Revelations) (p.92).

People who accepted this philosophy started making commitments to oppose Babylon (e.g. by refusing to take jobs in white-owned factories). The adoption of dreadlocks was a symbol of this commitment- since whites felt dreads looked disreputable, they were effectively a statement saying that you didn't care if you couldn't get hired for a factory job. This was also backed up by reference to the story of how Sampson lost his strength after Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair (p.93-4).

However, although cannabis was used during sessions, it was not initially seen as a religious object in and of itself. Benard argues that "when marijuana was criminalized in Jamaica in 1954 at the urging of the United States, it became necessary to make it a sacred form of resistance" (p.97, emphasis hers). She has a citation for this (Rastafari and other Afro-Carribbean worldviews, ed. B. Chevannes, p.84), so maybe she's onto something, but I would have liked to see her flesh out this idea a bit more- what does she mean by 'necessary'? As in, politically necessary, in the sense that calling it a 'religious' practice makes it harder to prosecute? (cf something like the debates over whether peyote should be illegal for secular use but legal for people who belong to specific religious organisations like the Native American Church). I have no idea if the act of calling cannabis a religious sacrament had any effect at all on how willing the Jamaican government was to prosecute users, though. Wikipedia says that the US and UK governments don't consider religious use of cannabis to be legal.

(Incidentally, from the same Wikipedia link, here's an interesting bit of legal logic:

"On January 2, 1991, at an international airport in his homeland of Guam, a US territory, Ras Iyah Ben Makahna (Benny Guerrero) was arrested for possession and importation of marijuana and seeds. He was charged with importation of a controlled substance. The case was heard by the US 9th Circuit Court November 2001, and in May 2002 the court had decided that the practice of Rastafari sanctions the smoking of marijuana, but nowhere does the religion sanction the importation of marijuana. Guerrero's lawyer Graham Boyd pointed out the court's ruling was "equivalent to saying wine is a necessary sacrament for some Christians but you have to grow your own grapes."")

Part 2 of 'The Concept of Shamanism'

Just realised that there's some stuff from Hamayon's essay that I missed last time due to it being in the endnotes:

p.24- the definition of shamanism in the work of Mircea Eliade (an influential writer who had a somewhat Golden Bough-ish approach to comparative mythology) was basically phenomenological. Cards on the table: I really don't get what phenomenology IS, as a philosophical movement. Wikipedia seems to be saying it's basically about trying to describe how people experience stuff like consciousness in a way that's anti-reductionist and based on philosophical intuitions (i.e., phenomenologists aren't happy to settle for approach which attempts to teach us something about consciousness by focusing on description of how human neural impulses work- they would prefer to go for an approach which involves philosophers discussing the issue from first principles without relying on empirical research).

Unless I'm misreading the summary, it sounds like there isn't much that phenomenologists could possibly do to make me disagree with them more (at least, not unless they started arguing that our aperception of the subjectivity within another lived-body can only be fully intuited once we radically come to terms with the noema of our lifeworld by killing kittens with flamethrowers). So I wouldn't be massively surprised if you could see a similar line of thought in Eliade, because I'm not a big fan of Eliade either.

Hamayon argues that Eliade's definition of shamanism is "composed of a mere addition of features from which no operative definition can be made". Eliade apparently also wrote in his diary that he hoped his writings on shamanism would be "read by poets, playwrights, literary critics, painters. Would they not better benefit from this reading than orientalists and historians of religions?" (I wouldn't have a problem with this, if only we could just agree to call him a poet or a metaphysical philosopher or something, instead of pushing his writings as stuff which is meant to provide an etic description of what different cultures actually say about shamanism in practice). Hamayon reckons that Eliade only became popular by influencing non-specialists whose ideas then trickled back into academia (rather than by directly convincing researchers that he was onto something). Don't know if that's true.

p.25 Hamayon notes that shamanism is often symbolically linked to hunting (even in cases where the individuals or cultures who practice shamanism don't actually hunt very much these days). Hamayon argues that this is because both shamanism and hunting are linked to a specific type of "relation to the world" (by which I think she means a particular kind of social organisation based on a particular kind of subsistence strategy). I'm leaning towards the idea that subsistence strategies might have more impact on Westerners' views of a culture than they have on the culture itself, but I don't yet know enough about the topic to be confident about making a definitive statement to that effect.

Also, useful quote:
"The contributors of the present book rightly criticise any trance-based understanding of shamanism. I have also done so, on the ground [sic] of the following arguments: "Trance" is used to cover a full range of modes of behaviour that go from convulsions to lethargy, as well as a full range of states of mind that go from loss of consciousness to focused awareness. In native languages the shaman's behaviour is defined as a rule by reference to his meeting spirits, i.e. in terms of symbolic representations. In the multifarious uses of 'trance', a link is implicitly made between physical behaviour, a state of mind and a cultural attitude. This link presupposes a determinist standpoint that is unacceptable as such to most scholars. In addition, the idea that a a given pattern of behaviour implies a given state of mind and vice versa would make social life impossible!"

Hamayon is also dubious about the idea (which I've seen in several places) that people in many cultures share the idea of a tripartite universe- that is, a world where living humans live on one plane, in between a heaven/overworld and a hell/underworld (where the different levels may or may not be assumed to imply a moral hierarchy. Sometimes there's also some sort of World Tree or Axis Mundi or something connecting the different levels). Hamayon thinks this sort of mental image is less universal than some argue. For example, in the Tungus culture that gave rise to the word 'shaman', they apparently haven't traditionally believed in any sort of vertical organisation of planes. According to Hamayon's book La chass a l'âme, when Siberian shamans talk about visiting different "floors" or "levels" of the world, they're usually just talking about nomadic journeys to different bits of the steppe. She reckons that any Siberian shamans who DO talk in terms of an underworld and overworld do so because they're trying to reconcile their indigenous belief systems with Russian Christianity and/or Chinese Buddhism (in a way which other people in their societies often don't find very convincing). I obviously haven't read the original source here, due to having abysmal French, but I'd be interested to see if anyone else backs this up.

p.29- Also she uses the word 'experiential', which is useful because I was trying to think of what the word for something like this yesterday and failed to come up with anything. " 'Experiential' is neither empirical (the fruit of observation) nor experimental (the results of laboratory experiment'. 'Experiential' refers strictly to what the individual feels at the moment and sometimes reports afterwards."