Region

The Caribbean

Also Known As Caribbean

The Americas and the Caribbean

The island arc between Florida and the South American mainland, from Cuba and Jamaica through Hispaniola and Puerto Rico to Trinidad and the Lesser Antilles. Kept distinct from the wider Atlantic world that links the islands to West Africa, and from any single island, so that a tradition formed across several islands can be placed without being tied to one of them.

Facts

Traditions

Principal Religious Traditions

Catholicism and the African-derived traditions formed under slavery beside it, Vodou in Haiti, Lucumi or Santeria and Palo in Cuba, Obeah and Kumina in Jamaica, Orisha and Spiritual Baptist practice in Trinidad; Rastafari, which began in Jamaica in the 1930s; Hinduism and Islam among the indentured communities of Trinidad; and the Protestant churches of the English-speaking islands. 2

Sacred and Liturgical Languages

Haitian Creole and its langaj registers in Vodou, Lucumi, a liturgical Yoruba, in Cuba, and Kikongo-derived speech in Palo; Latin, French, Spanish and English in the churches, with Sanskrit and Arabic among the indentured communities. 3

Geography

Latitude

18 degrees north 1

Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a large or historical region has no formal center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a precise boundary claim.

Longitude

66 degrees west 1

Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a large or historical region has no formal center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a precise boundary claim.

Modern Area

The Greater and Lesser Antilles, from Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico south to Trinidad. 1

Learn More

A Coronation in Addis Ababa and the Faith It Started in Jamaica

On 2 November 1930 Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, an event reported in Jamaica's newspapers and read by preachers already steeped in the island's Ethiopianist and Garveyite currents as the arrival of a promised African deliverer. Leonard Howell began preaching in the parish of St Thomas in the early 1930s that Selassie was the living God, drawing crowds large enough that the colonial government arrested him for sedition in 1934 and later committed him to an asylum, treatment that did nothing to stop the movement that took the emperor's pre coronation title as its own name, Rastafari.

The new faith grew for decades as a movement of the rural and urban poor before reggae carried it worldwide in the 1970s, Bob Marley chief among the musicians who set its language of Babylon, repatriation and Zion to a beat that reached far beyond Jamaica's shores. It took its place beside, not instead of, the island's older faiths, the Catholicism and Protestant churches of the colonial centuries and the African derived traditions slavery had already formed alongside them, one more faith the Caribbean's plantation history and its Atlantic ties to Africa had a hand in shaping.

The Caribbean

2 entries

Place of Origin

Denominations

Scriptures

Origin Era

Conception of the Divine

Status Today

Establishment Status

Closed Practice Status

Giving Obligation Enforceability

Usury Position

Marriage Position

Sexuality Position

Kind of Tradition

Islam

The Caribbean

Rastafari

The Caribbean

Connections

Associated With

Bonacci, "The Return to Ethiopia of the Twelve Tribes of Israel," New West Indian Guide, vol. 90 (2016)

This source names The Caribbean directly: "opening its first branches outside the Caribbean and Britain in 1985, in Barbados, Canada, the United States and Tobago."

Source Bonacci, "The Return to Ethiopia of the Twelve Tribes of Israel," New West Indian Guide, vol. 90 (2016)Giulia Bonacci

Bonacci, Exodus! Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia (University of the West Indies Press, 2015)

This source names The Caribbean directly: "movement's return to Africa from the Caribbean, the United States and Britain, situating the Twelve Tribes of Israel's international growth within the wider history of Ethiopianism, Pan Africanism..."

Source Bonacci, Exodus! Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia (University of the West Indies Press, 2015)Giulia Bonacci

Cocolo Dance Drama

This source names The Caribbean directly: "fewer of its younger members retain the Caribbean English in which its songs and dialogue were composed."

Source Cocolo (dance) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

LWF World Service

This source names The Caribbean directly: "the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean, coordinated from Geneva, Switzerland, with emergency hubs in Yaounde, Cameroon and Kathmandu, Nepal."

Source For Hope and a Future: LWF World Service 2024 Annual ReportThe Lutheran World Federation, World Service

Mariamman

This source names The Caribbean directly: "of Southeast Asia, South Africa and the Caribbean."

Source The Village Gods of South India (Whitehead)Henry Whitehead

Saint Kitts and Nevis Becomes the First Caribbean Nation to Recognize Rastafari in Law

This source names The Caribbean directly: "Kitts and Nevis was thereby first in the Caribbean, pointing to Jamaica's own 2011 Charter of Fundamental Rights and its 2015 sacramental ganja provisions, while allowing that Saint Kitts and..."

Source Saint Kitts and Nevis First in Caribbean to Recognize Rastafarian Faith in Law (SKNIS)

The Twelve Tribes of Israel Opens Its First Branch in Canada

This source names The Caribbean directly: "house, carried its structure outside the Caribbean and Britain for the first time."

Source Bonacci, "The Return to Ethiopia of the Twelve Tribes of Israel," New West Indian Guide, vol. 90 (2016)Giulia Bonacci

Attested Here

Chupacabra

First reported in Puerto Rico in the 1990s, the chupacabra legend is attested in the Caribbean.

Habla Congo

A liturgical language with origins in Cuba, spread to the Caribbean Basin.

Source Habla Congo (Wikipedia)