Les Rastafaris : dans les poumons de l'hégémonie :
matérialisme symbolique d'une négation idéologique
This work explores Rastafari culture through its symbolic structuration, focusing on three cultural manifestations of significance: Nyabinghi Assembly, Ceremonial Chants and Iyaric language. I have sought to study the way Rastafari’s symbolic order establishes itself through Jamaican History and through multiple cultures of resistance. My objective is to study symbolism from a materialist perspective, namely showing that symbolism is both determined and determinant, that History shapes just as it is shaped by History. Rastafari culture, making a break with the established order, proved to be a fertile context for the research and analysis of a symbolic materialist approach in anthropology.  I have grounded my approach in a yearlong Jamaican research residency where I socialized with various Rastafari communities, both in rituals spaces and at the crossroads of interaction between Rastafari adepts and ordinary Jamaicans. This stay reasserted to me the importance of guiding this research with a theoretical framework allowing to grasp particularities in the cultural dynamics involved while at the same time enabling bridges with other cultures of resistance through a given universalism.  A framework addressing culture through ideology, counter-hegemony and heterotopia as much as recognition’s dialectic had guided this research. These theories allow deeper analysis and discussion concerning the collected data of three symbolic spaces; ritual assembly, ceremonial chants and the construction of a language.
Rastafari Nyabinghi Iyaric Altérité Materialism Symbolism Structuralism Ideology Counter-Hegemony Heterotopia Otherness