A Community Ten Miles Away

Abstract

A connection and a yearning towards a communal and primarily agrarian existence connects the Rastafari the world over. Many Rastafari yearn for a life in direct communication with the earth through agricultural labor in a space created for and by the community, a space “up in the hills” away from the pollutants of a contaminated, corrupting Babylonian society. This was no less the case amongst those in Saint Lucia with whom I conducted recent fieldwork. Different from previous conversations on this topic however, was a new context defined by a global pandemic and a subsequent widely mandated social withdrawal. This engendered a dual response of envisioning rural flight as now more urgent and, in some cases, as a necessary response to COVID-19.