Begin with Leonard Barrett's The Rastafarians, the 1977 study by a Jamaican-born scholar of religion that introduced the movement to an academic readership and remains the narrative everything else responds to. It is dated in places and it is still the right first account. Then Ennis Edmonds's Rastafari, the best modern short survey, focused on how a despised sect became a source of Jamaican national identity, and more careful than Barrett about the movement's internal variety.
Both of those are scholarship, and that label matters here more than in most subjects. The literature on Rastafari divides into academic sociology and history on one side and, on the other, the movement's own sources and books written from close inside it. The two are not interchangeable, and most confusion about Rastafari comes from reading one as though it were the other. Every entry below says which it is.
A cataloguing note first, since it will bite you at the shop. Two different books on this path are held under the bare title Rastafari. The Edmonds one is his 2002 Oxford study, published as Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers; the other is Barry Chevannes's 1994 Rastafari: Roots and Ideology, the major ethnographic and historical study, built on his own fieldwork and arguing that Rastafari grew out of an older Jamaican Revivalist religious culture rather than appearing from nowhere. Check the subtitle before ordering. Two other well-known books are absent from our catalogue entirely: Edmonds's later Very Short Introduction, and Chevannes's edited collection Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews.
Where it came from: primary sources
Marcus Garvey's Philosophy and Opinions, compiled by Amy Jacques Garvey and held here under a mangled display title, is the Pan-Africanist programme Rastafari inherited and reinterpreted — a primary source, and worth reading before any account of what Rastas made of him. Hélène Lee's The first Rasta is a journalistic biography of Leonard Howell, who founded the Pinnacle commune and was repeatedly jailed and finally committed; it is not academic history and it is openly sympathetic, and it recovers a person the movement itself partly forgot. Walter Rodney's The groundings with my brothers is the second primary source: 68 pages of lectures and talks the Guyanese historian delivered in Kingston in 1968, banned by the Jamaican government, and the origin of the word grounding as it is used of reasoning sessions.
Inside the movement
Joseph Owens's Dread the Rastafarians of Jamaica was built from years of reasoning sessions and quotes Rastafari at length, so the theology arrives in the movement's own words rather than paraphrased. It was written by a Catholic priest and is sympathetic throughout, which is the frame to keep in mind. Chanting down Babylon is the essential scholarly reader — essays on theology, language, the role of women, the houses and the relationship with Christianity, by Caribbean and North American academics including several Rastafari. It is the single best book for the internal diversity that survey accounts flatten: the Nyabinghi, Twelve Tribes and Bobo Shanti houses do not agree with each other.
Politics, reggae and the world
Horace Campbell's Rasta and resistance is an argument rather than a survey — an explicitly political reading running from Garvey to Rodney and treating Rastafari as a movement of resistance across the Caribbean, Britain and Africa. Read it after the ethnographies. Timothy White's Catch a fire is the standard Bob Marley biography and unusually good on the Jamaican religious and political world Marley came from rather than only on the records; Jason Toynbee's Bob Marley, also catalogued under a bare title, is the analytical counterweight, an academic study of Marley as a cultural and political figure and of what was lost in translating Rastafari for a world market.
Close with Stephen King's Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control, on how the Jamaican state moved from suppressing Rastafari to using reggae and Rasta imagery in tourism marketing. It is the sharpest account of the commercialisation problem, and the right last book: the honest difficulty with this subject is that most people meet Rastafari through music and merchandise rather than through anything it teaches. The full ordered path is at /paths/pt_ai_rastafari.
Ready to learn something deeply?
Build a reading path — free
