Rastafari: Roots and Ideology

Barry Chevannes was a Jamaican sociologist, and this academic book, published by Syracuse University Press, traces the historical origins and development of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica, working from archival research and direct fieldwork with Rastafari practitioners themselves. Its strength is that Chevannes writes as a Jamaican scholar with sustained direct access to the movement's own communities, correcting outside accounts that treated Rastafari mainly through its international reggae era image rather than its earlier Jamaican social roots. Its limit is that it focuses on Rastafari's formative decades and Jamaican context specifically, so the movement's later international diaspora and doctrinal variation across different houses and mansions needs separate, more recent sources to cover.