From Garvey to Marley: Rastafari Theology. By Noel Leo Erskine. University Press of Florida, 2005. 224 pages. $39.95

Abstract

Noel Erskine’s book, From Garvey to Marley, is an excellent study of the social origins and significance of the Rastafarian religion in Jamaica. It is Erskine’s ability to make clear the social significance of this religion, its roots in the disinherited and racialized lumpen stratum of Jamaican society that is really impressive. Consequently, the text is marked by an almost seamless unity between the material, socio-historical, and spiritual dimensions of Rastafarian life. As the book unfolds, the Rastafarian religion emerges as a powerful spiritual response to the dehumanization that European colonialism had imposed on this particular stratum of Jamaican society. Yet there is no way in which one can say that Erskine’s text is sociologically reductionist. The successful negotiating of this particular tension is a very important key to the intellectual achievement of this work. Erskine’s text opens with a masterful historical analysis of the roots of Rastafarian theology. He locates these roots in a tradition of religious resistance to slavery and colonialism that dates back to the period of plantation slavery in Jamaica. The first phase in this tradition of religious resistance was obeahist. It is distinguished by its use of magical practices to bring harm and misfortune to slave owners. Obeah, together with the more spiritually oriented religion of Myalism, constituted the first major phase in Afro-Jamaican religious history.