Roots reggae from Cape Town to Helsinki : an ethnographic study of local belonging and cosmopolitan imagination in Rastafarian reggae music

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Roots Reggae

fRom Cape town to Helsinki

an ethnographic study of local belonging and cosmopolitan imagination in rastafarian reggae music

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Tuomas Järvenpää

Roots Reggae

fRom Cape town to Helsinki

an ethnographic study of local belonging and cosmopolitan imagination in rastafarian reggae music

Publications of the University of Eastern Finland Dissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology

No 99

University of Eastern Finland Joensuu

2017

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Juvenes Print, Suomen Yliopistopaino Oy Tampere, 2017

Sarjan vastaava toimittaja: Vesa Koivisto Myynti: Itä-Suomen yliopiston kirjasto

ISBN: 978-952-61-2423-0 (nid.) ISBN: 978-952-61-2424-7 (PDF)

ISSNL: 1798-5625 ISSN: 1798-5625 ISSN: 1798-5633 (PDF)

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Järvenpää, Tuomas

Roots Reggae from Cape Town to Helsinki – An Ethnographic Study of Local Belonging and Cosmopolitan Imagination in Rastafarian Reggae Music Joensuu: Itä-Suomen yliopisto, 2017

Publications of the University of Eastern Finland

Dissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology, 99 ISBN: 978-952-61-2423-0 (print)

ISSNL: 1798-5625 ISSN: 1798-5625

ISBN: 978-952-61-2424-7 (PDF) ISSN: 1798-5633 (PDF)

abstract

In this doctoral dissertation, in disciplines of cultural studies and cultural anthropology, I study roots reggae music as a transnational and cosmopolitan phenomenon.

Historically, the Jamaican roots reggae genre has evolved in conjunction with the socio-religious Rastafarian movement, which holds an explicitly Africanist ideology.

Currently, however, the genre has developed into a popular international music phenomenon that crosses social and cultural borders.

Against this background I ask in this dissertation 1) In which ways is local belonging enacted in Rastafarian reggae music in Finland and in South Africa, and 2) how do musicians imagine the genre as a global community in these contexts?

Popular music research has called scholars to acknowledge the ways in which music genres, and ideologies associated with them, function in the everyday lives of music aficionados in different social contexts. The current dissertation answers these calls by approaching roots reggae music with the methods of multi-sited ethnography, where the research phenomenon is understood from the point of view of the musicians and music aficionados themselves.

Earlier research has also urged researchers to look at Caribbean-derived popular culture and religion from comparative and multi-sited points of view, given the transnational and highly dynamic nature of these cultural phenomena. Because of these theoretical challenges, the material in the current dissertation is constructed from two ethnographic field periods, in Finland and in South Africa, which are juxtaposed and compared in the analysis.

The dissertation consists of a theoretical and methodological introduction and four research articles. The first article presents the case of Finnish reggae musicians who search for continuity with the Jamaican roots reggae tradition and its values.

The second article is an ethnographic inquiry of a weekly Rastafarian music event in a township in Cape Town. The third article analyzes the life histories and music productions of Capetonian reggae vocalists. The fourth and the final article draws together the common themes of the previous articles by looking at the interaction between Finnish and Capetonian reggae aficionados and the performances of South African musicians in Finland.

On the theoretical level, the conclusions of the dissertation show how the concepts of autochthony and musical cosmopolitanism can be operationalized in a complemen- tary way in anthropological research, particularly in the study of Southern African urban life. The study demonstrates how South African roots reggae aficionados ne-

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gotiate and combine the social commitments of autochthony and cosmopolitanism in their musical activities.

Secondly, the dissertation demonstrates how local belonging is understood in different ways in Finnish and South African roots reggae cultures. Whereas the Finnish artists participating in the current study experience their music as international and European music, Capetonian vocalists see their music as the voice of particular town- ships in Cape Town.

Thirdly, the dissertation establishes how patriarchal and heteronormative values and practices have emerged as being central to the roots reggae genre in its adaptation to new social contexts outside of Jamaica.

Fourthly, the dissertation shows how roots reggae is a distinctively modernist cultural phenomenon, where elements such as non-conforming individualism and self-stylization are central. However, numerous musicians have negotiated these values creatively and combined them with world views, which are distinctive from the rational Western modernism of which roots reggae musicians are strongly critical around the world.

A significant part of the dissertation has been funded by the Academy of Finland and realized between 2013 and 2016 as part of the research project “Youth Music and the Construction of Social Subjectivities and Communities in Post-apartheid South Africa”, based at the University of Helsinki in the discipline of social and cultural anthropology.

Keywords: Rastafari, reggae, multi-sited ethnography, cosmopolitanism, autoch- thony, South Africa, Finland, local belonging, music genre, cultural style, religion, popular music, Cape Town

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Järvenpää, Tuomas

Roots reggaen matka Kapkaupungista Helsinkiin – etnografinen tutkimus paikalli- suudesta ja kosmopoliittisesta mielikuvituksesta rastafari reggae -musiikissa Joensuu: Itä-Suomen yliopisto, 2017

Publications of the University of Eastern Finland

Dissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology, 99 ISBN: 978-952-61-2423-0 (nid)

ISSNL: 1798-5625 ISSN: 1798-5625

ISBN: : 978-952-61-2424-7 (PDF) ISSN: 1798-5633 (PDF)

tiivistelmä

Kulttuurintutkimuksen ja kulttuuriantropologian aloihin kuuluvassa väitöskirjassa tutkin roots reggae -musiikkigenreä ylirajaisena ja kosmopoliittisena ilmiönä. Histori- allisesti jamaikalaisperäinen roots reggae on muodostunut tiiviissä yhteydessä uskon- nollispoliittisen ja afrikkalaisnationalistisen rastafari-liikkeen kanssa. Tänä päivänä roots reggae on kuitenkin kehittynyt kansainväliseksi populaarimusiikki-ilmiöksi, joka on levinnyt laajasti ympäri maailman yli yhteiskunnallisten ja kulttuuristen ra- jojen.

Tätä taustaa vasten kysyn väitöstutkimuksessa 1) miten roots reggae -musiikin paikallisuus rakentuu Suomessa ja Etelä-Afrikassa, ja 2) kuinka muusikot kuvittelevat tämän musiikkigenren maailmanlaajuiseksi yhteisöksi näissä konteksteissa?

Populaarimusiikintutkijat ovat kehottaneet kiinnittämään entistä enemmän huo- miota siihen, kuinka musiikkigenret ja niihin liittyvät ideologiat toimivat osana niihin sitoutuneiden yksilöiden arkipäivää erilaisissa sosiaalisissa konteksteissa. Väitöskir- jatutkimus vastaa tähän tutkimustarpeeseen lähestymällä tutkimuskohdettaan mo- nipaikkaisen etnografian menetelmillä, jossa roots reggaeta pyritään ymmärtämään muusikoiden ja organisaattoreiden omasta näkökulmasta.

Aikaisempi tutkimus on lisäksi kiinnittänyt huomioita siihen, että erityisesti ka- ribialaislähtöisen populaarikulttuurin ja uskonnollisuuden ilmiöitä tulisi ymmärtää vertailevasta ja monipaikkaisesta näkökulmasta niiden ylirajaisen ja nopeasti kehitty- vän innovatiivisen luonteen vuoksi. Tämän teoreettisen haasteen vuoksi väitöskirjan aineisto on muodostettu kahdesta etnografisesta kenttätyöjaksosta, Suomessa ja Etelä- Afrikassa, jotka asetetaan tutkimuksessa vertailevaan tarkasteluun.

Väitöskirja koostuu neljästä julkaistusta artikkelista sekä näitä yhdistävästä teo- reettismetodologisesta johdannosta. Ensimmäinen artikkeli tarkastelee suomalaisia muusikkoja, jotka etsivät jatkuvuutta jamaikalaiseen roots reggae -perinteeseen ja sen arvoihin. Toinen artikkeli on etnografinen tutkimus paikallisen rastafari-yhteisön ylläpitämästä viikoittaisesta musiikkitapahtumasta Kapkaupungin esikaupungissa.

Kolmas artikkeli analysoi kapkaupunkilaisten reggae-vokalistien elämäntarinoita ja musiikkituotantoa. Neljäs ja viimeinen artikkeli puolestaan kokoaa yhteen edeltävien artikkelien teemoja tarkastelemalla suomalaisten ja kapkaupunkilaisten roots reggae -muusikoiden välistä yhteistyötä ja eteläafrikkalaisten muusikoiden esiintymisiä Suomessa.

Tutkimuksen johtopäätökset osoittavat teoreettisella tasolla sen, kuinka juurtu- neisuuden (engl. autochthony) ja musiikillisen kosmopolitanismin käsitteet voidaan

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operationalisoida toisiaan täydentävällä tavalla antropologisessa tutkimuksessa ja erityisesti eteläisen Afrikan kaupunkielämän kontekstissa. Tutkimus osoittaa kuinka eteläafrikkalaiset roots reggae -muusikot ja -harrastajat sovittavat yhteen näitä sosi- aalisia sitoumuksia musiikillisessa toiminnassaan.

Toiseksi, tutkimus osoittaa, kuinka paikallisuus käsitetään eri tavoilla suomalaisessa ja eteläafrikkalaisessa reggaemusiikkikulttuurissa. Siinä missä tutkimukseen osallis- tuneet suomalaiset roots reggae artistit kokevat musiikkinsa olevan kansainvälistä ja eurooppalaista, kapkaupunkilaiset vokalistit katsovat musiikkinsa olevan tiettyjen kaupungin marginalisoitujen esikaupunkien ääni.

Kolmanneksi, työ konkretisoi kuinka patriarkaaliset ja heteronormatiiviset arvot ja käytännöt ovat muodostuneet keskeisiksi roots reggae -genrelle sen mukautuessa uusiin sosiaalisiin konteksteihin Jamaikan ulkopuolelle.

Neljänneksi, tutkimus havainnollistaa, kuinka roots reggae on leimallisesti moder- nistinen kulttuuri-ilmiö, jossa yksilölliset elämänvalinnat ja tyylin kehittäminen ovat keskeisessä asemassa. Lukuisat muusikot ovat kuitenkin neuvotelleet näitä arvoja luovasti yhteen sellaisten maailmankatsomusten kanssa, jotka poikkeavat länsimaa- laisesta rationaalisesta modernismista, jonka äänekkäinä kriitikkoina roots reggae -muusikot toimivat ympäri maailmaan.

Merkittävä osa tutkimusta on tehty Suomen Akatemian rahoituksella osana Hel- singin yliopiston sosiaali- ja kulttuuriantropologian oppiaineen tutkimusprojektia

”Nuorisomusiikin rooli sosiaalisten identiteettien ja yhteisöjen luomisessa aparthei- din jälkeisessä Etelä-Afrikassa” vuosina 2013–2016.

Avainsanat: Rastafari, reggae, monipaikkainen etnografia, kosmopolitanismi, juur- tuneisuus, Etelä-Afrikka, Suomi, paikallisuus, musiikkigenre, kulttuurinen tyyli, us- konto, populaarimusiikki, Kapkaupunki

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aCknowleDgements

I would like to express my gratitude for the vital support of various individuals and institutions that made this dissertation project possible. This research has not been an individual effort by any means.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors during the dissertation project: Teuvo Laitila, Stig Söderholm, and Helmi Järviluoma-Mäkelä from the Uni- versity of Eastern Finland and Tuulikki Pietilä from the University of Helsinki. They have guided me professionally and meticulously throughout the years.

The dissertation was generously supported by several funding agencies. Grants that enabled my dissertation work were provided by the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Eastern Finland, the Olvi Foundation and the Karelian Culture Trust (“Karjalaisen Kulttuurin Edistämissäätiö”). In addition, the work was enabled by the Academy of Finland through their funding for the project “Youth music and the construction of social subjectivities and communities in post-apartheid South Africa.”

The latter part of the dissertation process was realized within this research project, which also enabled my field trip to Cape Town. For the aforementioned project, I am grateful for Tuulikki Pietilä for initiating and managing the project with great care.

During the dissertation work, I also received essential travel grants from the Finnish Doctoral Programme of Music Research and from the Finnish PhD Programme in Popular Culture Studies.

In addition to the guidance that I received from my supervisors, academic peer support was indispensable for the completion of this dissertation. Here, I would like to acknowledge the numerous colleagues from the University of Helsinki and the University of Eastern Finland who have contributed to my work through informal discussions and formal seminars. I would also like to acknowledge the crucial support that I received from my colleagues in the Finnish Doctoral Programme of Music Research, the Finnish PhD Programme in Popular Culture Studies, the UEF Doctoral Programme in Social and Cultural Encounters, the Music Censorship Research network as well those from the seminars of the Finnish Jazz and Pop Archive. The research seminars in the aforementioned institutions have also featured several external commentators, who gave valuable insights to the present work. I am also grateful to the Helinä Rautavaara Museum, which kindly allowed me to access their private library containing classical studies on Rastafari that would have been impossible for me to access otherwise.

Outside of the aforementioned academic contexts, Tuomas Äystö from the Uni- versity of Turku and John Homiak from the Smithsonian Institute read parts of my manuscripts and provided me with valuable insights. I also received vital feedback from the pre-examiners of the dissertation, Jeremy Gould from the University of Jy- väskylä and Odd Are Berkaak from the University of Oslo, as well as from the edi- tors and anonymous referees of Temenos, Suomen Antropologi, Etnomusikologian vuosikirja and Popular Music and Society. Heta Ängeslevä kindly allowed the reuse of her photographic work in the fourth article of the dissertation.

During the field work, I met numerous individuals who shaped and influenced my work profoundly. Without these encounters and discussions, this work would not have been possible. I have quoted and acknowledged some of these individuals as research participants, but I have not had the opportunity to credit most of them in the

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research text. Because of this, I would like to mention and accredit as many of them as possible here. The following names come in no particular order: JahNa, Ker-One, Lempow, Andor, Nestori, Jah-Vice, Nestori, Papa Zai, Iya-Karna, Nina Roots, Salomo, Studio Red, Jah-Gun, Jammy-G, Jere Dangerous, Natural Marcus, Ras Kontti, Thaison, Mo’ Fire, Waterhouse Lion, Suvi Itkonen, Izajah Korianda, Ras Sugar, Ras Mau-Mau and Ras Niqulah of Judah Square, Sista Kerri, Heidi Lappalainen, Ras Benjamin of Gugulethu and his family, Zebulon of Marcus Garvey, Bongani of Marcus Garvey, Redbeard of Marcus Garvey, Gumeleni of Marcus Garvey, Sista Ricky (Ghetto Queen) of Marcus Garvey, Ras Judah of Marcus Garvey, Dubmaster China, Tefoman Red, Sista D (Dundee), Mdalaga Habonimana, DJ Fletcher, Iain Harris and the Coffeebean Routes, King Themba, King Yellow, Luyanda Mafiana, Marius Mighty Mas, Ras Poi- son of Paarl, Ras Spikes of Paarl, Ras Guilo of Paarl, Junior B of Paarl and his family, Ras Vuyo, Ras Wakhile, Ricky of The Azania Band, The Real Rozzano, Sensimiller, Suvi Itkonen, Jah-Sam (Ras Militan), Supa Kool-T, Nesta (Reunion Island), Joseph Makeleni, Simeon of Dread Kings, Blak Kalamawi, Jah Noah, Wildlife (Jamaica), Kingly-T (Jamaica) and The Young Generations Band.

My research trip to South Africa would not have been possible without the warm hospitality that Crosby Bolani and Katrin Haunreiter showed to me. I am deeply indebted to Crosby Bolani for his virtuosity when working as my research assistant in South Africa. His wide personal contacts and social skills, dazzling mechanical skills in car maintenance, and knowledge of South African music and Rastafari livity made this research much richer. In addition to Katrin and Crosby, I am deeply indebted to Teba Shumba and Daddy Spencer for their assistance and kindness to me during my time in Cape Town.

Even though this research was influenced and shaped by all of the aforementioned institutions and individuals, the final arguments and any possible errors are of course ultimately my responsibility.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Maija and Pauli, and my partner Hanna, for their continuing patience, love and understanding over the years.

Joensuu, March 2017 Tuomas Järvenpää

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list of oRiginal pUBliCations

The articles are reprinted with permissions of the publishers

I Listening to Intergalactic Sounds – Articulation of Rastafarian Livity in Finnish Sound System Performances. Temenos 2(50), 2014: 273–297.

II Jumping Nyahbinghi youths – Local Articulations of Roots Reggae Music in a Rastafarian Dancehall in Cape Town. Suomen antropologi 1(40), 2015: 5–26.

III The Voices of Azania from Cape Town – Rastafarian Reggae Music’s Claim to Autochthonous African Belonging. Etnomusikologian vuosikirja 27, 2015: 112–141.

IV From Gugulethu to the World: Rastafarian Cosmopolitanism in the South African Reggae Music of Teba Shumba and the Champions. Popular Music and Society 4(40), 2017.

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1 intRoDUCtion

“Jah Rastafari¹ bless you all!” The performer lifts his staff into the air and toward the audience and ends the encore of his stage show. With these words, he retreats from the stage with his white flowing robes flying after him. The crowd, consisting of maybe several thousand people almost entirely White² and Finnish, cheers and stays in front of the stage hoping for yet another encore. For them, this has been the last performer of the reggae stage of the festival. The year is 2007 and this has been the first time for me, and for many other youngsters in the audience, to witness the live performance of a Jamaican musician.

This Jamaican reggae musician that blessed me and others in the audience was none other than Anthony B, who was at the time one of the leading figures in the revival of roots reggae music in Jamaica. I did not have to go anywhere from Finland and from my home town, Joensuu, to experience the stage show of Anthony B. Joensuu is a university town of around 75,000 inhabitants in the nationally peripheral and rural province of North Karelia, which is situated close to the Russian border. Curiously enough the town hosts a vibrant local reggae scene. The annual popular music festival in the town, “Ilosaarirock”, has featured Jamaican music artists, such as Skatalites, Queen Ifrica, Buju Banton, Capleton and Beenie Man, regularly in its line up since 2004. The Ilosaarirock festival and the reggae scene in Joensuu are not in any way exceptional phenomena in Finland, where local reggae scenes have existed in various cities at least from the beginning of the new millennium. In addition to this, reggae music has influenced other forms of Finnish popular music since the early 1970s. Now, at thirty years of age, I can look back and say that I have grown up with the sound of both Finnish and Jamaican reggae and that the music has not only brought me joy and pleasure, but has also served as an intellectual stimulation and inspiration throughout my life.

When I started to buy records as a teenager, the mystical references of the music sparked my curiosity, since there was fairly little knowledge available on Rastafari. At the time, most of the Finnish bands and artists from a White middle-class background, such as Jukka Poika, Laulurastas, Raappana, Soul Captain Band and Suhinators, were clearly influenced by the social and religious message of Jamaican music, and some identified themselves on stage as Rastafarians. So when Soul Captain Band (2004) re- frained Bob Marley’s classical lyrics and sang the following lines in Finnish “Babylon system is burning and when it burns the order of nature thus returns,” ³ I remember being very puzzled by the meaning of these lyrics.

In recent years, the international spread of Jamaican popular culture has sparked a growing academic interest (See for example, Jones 1988; Bilby 1999; Hansing 2002; Con- nell & Gibson 2003, 174–182; Alvarez 2008; Jaffe & Sanderse 2010; Sterling 2010; Cooper 2012; Hope 2013; Ramstedt 2014) and the present dissertation aims to contribute particularly to the emerging research strand on the internationalization of reggae and Rastafari

1 In this dissertation I use the term ”Rastafari” to refer to the socio-religious movement as a whole as well as to individual adherents of Rastafari. I hope that the difference between the two is traceable from the context. In addition, among the adherents of the movement, the name Rastafari can refer to the coronial title of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, as it does in this quotation.

2 The use of racial terminology in the dissertation is discussed at the beginning of chapter 2.

3 ”Babylonin systeemi palaa ja kun se palaa niin luonnon tasapaino palaa.”

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with interlinked ethnographic case studies of roots reggae music in Finland and South Africa. As indicated above, Finland is a European country where reggae enjoys wide popularity. Countries such as Finland are a potential market areas for reggae musicians, not only in Jamaica, but also in countries like South Africa, where the socio-religious influence of Rastafari has been growing significantly in recent decades, but where the commercial potential of the music has remained modest in the domestic markets.

In this research, I try to understand the point of view of the Rastafarian musicians as a relative outsider, since I myself have never ventured deeper into the philosophy of Rastafari or into music making. These musicians have, however, sparked my curiosity as exceptional and innovative individuals, who are clearly seeking a radically different way of life. Literature on the Jamaican Rastafarian movement (Chevannes 1994; Homiak 1995; Price 2009; Bilby 2013, 339–345) has shown how the movement was born as a response to modernization at the time of radical transformation of the socioeconomic structure of the island. In this situation, belief in the divinity of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie and the development of the Rastafarian bodily style was a major break both from the hegemonic values and norms of Jamaican colonial society as well as from earlier Afro-Caribbean ritual life. In recent decades, Rastafari has developed into an international cultural phenomenon that now exists in such dis- crepant places as Finland and South Africa. In both locations, Rastafarian individuals continue as “voices in the wilderness” and question in various ways the surrounding society, or “the Babylon system”, around them.

The roots reggae era in Finnish music the early 2000s was short-lived. As time passed, most of the Finnish reggae artists, such as Jukka Poika, distanced themselves from their former Rastafarian identification and broadened their musical scope to other genres. “In the long run, the role of a Rastafarian prophet was not a very con- ceivable template in the Finnish music market for singers who were seeking to build a professional career,” as one Finnish reggae musician⁴ and a research participant of this study expressed it. At the beginning of the research process, it seemed to me that Rastafarian reggae might have been only a passing fad in Finland, since no new music releases with this theme had come to my knowledge in the past few years. However, when entering the field, I soon discovered that Rastafarian identification was central to the reggae sound system⁵ events in the cities of southern Finland. Here, I encountered soundscapes with deep bass sound accompanied by the occasional scents of cannabis and lyrical praises to Haile Selassie. However, Africa was not only present in these spaces as an abstract symbol, since some Finnish aficionados⁶ hold actual social con-

4 In this dissertation, I use the term “musician” to refer collectively to vocalists and players of instruments as well as to DJs, who are called “selectors” in reggae terminology.

5 With the term “sound system” I refer here to reggae ensembles typically featuring vocalists, selectors and audio engineers. These groups often have their own personally customized audio equipment and public address systems, and in their events they mix recorded music and their own vocal performances. Sound system groups and their performances have been central to reggae music throughout the history of the genre (Stolzoff 2000; Henriques 2011).

6 In this dissertation, I use the term “aficionado” to refer to the devoted followers of reggae music in general, although I am aware that the term has not been in common use in this specific context. Nevertheless, I see the term as useful, since it acknowledges that music genres are not created by the musicians alone, but instead through collective cultural processes. Furthermore, the term aficionado highlights how musical practices emerge through the shared passion of musicians and their audiences (see Hennion & Grenier 2000). It is also important to note that there are many different ways to be an aficionado of roots reggae music, and being one does not necessarily include a commitment to the Rastafarian world view.

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nections to the African continent and its diaspora, for example to South Africa. This interconnected musical process of claiming belonging to an imagined global community and creating a locally bound home at the same time is the main theme that the present dissertation focuses on.

1.1 the research traditions and the research questions

Throughout the history of the Jamaican Rastafarian movement, adherents of the faith have been conscious of their ancestry as the descendants of slaves, denied their belonging to Jamaica and looked to Africa as their homeland. Partly because of this conviction, reggae music has always been developing in the active transnational interaction between different Afro-Caribbean communities across the Atlantic Ocean. The United Kingdom has been a particularly important hub in the development of this music.

Approximately 150,000 African-Caribbean people migrated between World War Two and the 1960s to the United Kingdom. In the late 1960s, reggae was considered as the definitive voice for the growing young Black British population (Cashmore 1982;

Jones 1988; Hebdige 2002, 30–45; 2003; 2006). This emergence of reggae in Britain also coincided with the development of cultural studies as an academic practice. Reggae music and the Rastafarian movement fascinated the early scholars at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham as the pri- mary public manifestation of politically oppositional black British culture. Pioneer- ing cultural studies scholars Stuart Hall (1997, 11–16; Grossberg 1996, 143–144), Dick Hebdige (2002, 30–45; 2003; 2006) and Paul Gilroy (1994; 1995; 2005) found in reggae an intellectual resonance for their attempts to critically assess the colonial legacy of Britain and to recognize the cultural creativity of marginalized immigrants and diasporic traditions.

I also align this dissertation primarily to the academic tradition and practice of cultural studies, which I understand as a transdisciplinary approach “interested in culture as a source of power, difference and emancipation and often closely connected with social movements and cultural critique” (Johnson & et al, 2004, 24; see also Dur- ing 1999). In the empirically-oriented British cultural studies tradition, the focus on power and difference has meant interest in cultural meanings, which are seen as the symbolic expressions of the social reality and social aspirations of a given human group. In Learning to Labour, which became one of the classical work of ethnographically-oriented cultural studies, Paul Willis (1979, 1–4, 119–126) defines “the cultural”

as the result of collective, creative and unconscious human behavior, where the social principles of individuals’ actions are defined. In his work, Willis takes distance from the scholarly definitions, where culture is seen as a set of structures, which are social- ized into individual behavior, or seen as mediated by hegemony or ideology. Instead, for Willis, the cultural is the site for both collective innovation and negotiation of differences. The theorization of the present dissertation builds from the above-mentioned understanding of culture, where cultural meanings are studied from the point of view of everyday lived experience of the research subjects.

To address the collective and everyday cultural innovations surrounding Rasta- farian reggae music, I have adopted multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1998; Candea 2009; Falzon 2009; Cook, Laidlaw & Mair 2009) as the main methodological framework of the dissertation. I see multi-sited ethnography as a research approach, where I document the transnational circulation of Jamaican roots reggae music compara-

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tively through several different field sites with the methods of participant observation and interviewing. It is from this angle that I seek to contribute to the aforementioned theme of the internationalization of reggae, which has attracted growing interest from scholars in the transdisciplinary field of popular music studies. Several music researchers (such as Cohen 1993; Connell & Gibson 2003; Holt 2007 4–9; Bennett 2008) have called for ethnographic work on the ways in which international musical genres are put into practice in social interaction at a grass-roots level in different geographical and cultural contexts. In recent years, such research traditions have been emerging in the framework of various music genres, including reggae music (Bilby 1999; Hansing 2002; Sterling 2010; Jaffe & Sanderse 2010; Cooper 2012; Hope 2013; Ramstedt 2014).

Cultural studies research has commonly taken place in the modern industrialized context and has taken particular interest in the role of mediatized cultural products, such as popular music, on the social dynamics of human communities or subcultures, such as punkers, bikers or Rastafarians (During 1999). At its best, the classical works of the cultural studies approach (such as Willis 1979; Jones 1988; Gilroy 1995; Hebdige 2002; Hall & Jefferson 2006) connect micro-level observations of social life to larger contemporary political processes of the surrounding society. However, a significant amount of criticism has been levelled against this approach, especially from the perspectives of sociology and anthropology, where the ethnographic methodology was initially developed (Howell 1997; During 1999, 17–28).

Anthropologist Signe Howell (1997, 107) summarizes the criticism against the cultural studies project to include its 1) focus on cultural representation instead of con- crete social practices, 2) lack of long-term and consistent fieldwork, 3) idiosyncratic use of theoretical language, 4) ethnocentric focus on the Western world, and 5) lack of methodological reflexivity. In the context of popular music studies, perhaps the most pressing matter is the first criticism, as cultural studies scholars have had the tendency to study cultural meanings directly from song texts or from the self-representations of the music artists. These texts are often read in the research as a direct reflection of the lived working-class reality and as a result, the collective subversive uses of popular music are often over-assessed (Bennett 2008; Coplan 2005, 25–26).

As one of the founding figures of cultural studies, Paul Willis (1997), in turn, has responded to some of the criticism by restating that the starting point of British cultural studies was never to study cultural representations in isolation, but instead to analyze the dialectical relationships between cultural meaning making, individuals, and society. According to Willis (1997, 190), cultural studies should aim for “con- textual study of how the new resources of cultural meaning – commoditization, globalization and all the rest of it – are used, not in truncated audience studies, but in terms of understanding the relationship of the continuing main important sites of life.” Willis is, however, ready to admit that in many works of cultural studies, the dialectical focus between cultural meanings and social structure has been absent, or the homology between these two levels is addressed in an overtly deterministic and straightforward manner.

Paul Willis (2004, 145–150) continues that in order to achieve dialectical and sociocultural analysis, it is crucial to differentiate analytically between social structure and cultural meaning making. He defines social structures as social relations that are mediated by issues of social power, class, and economic production. These relations define the “positions of agents in systematic groups” (Willis 2004, 147) as well as the hierarchical relationships of these groups to each other. Culture, on the other hand, can

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be a source of self-reflexivity of this structure and a catalyst of social change, but it can very well also reinforce the prevailing social structure, as Willis (1979) demonstrated in Learning to Labour by showing how working-class men perceived their structural posi- tion in monotonous and low-waged manual labor as preferable, precisely because of their collective cultural understandings that prevailed in their masculine subculture.

To achieve analysis of both social structures and collective cultural innovation, which Willis (1979, 1–4, 119–126; 1997; 2004, 145–150) sees as fundamental to cultural studies, I use the concept of articulation as my guiding analytical concept alongside ethnographic methodology. I understand the concept as defined by Stuart Hall (Slack 1996; Grossberg 1996), who uses it to refer to the social processes in which attempts are made to separate or combine cultural meanings. According to Hall (Grossberg 1996, 139–147), the concept draws attention to the negotiations and socio-structural conflicts inherent in this meaning making, as there are always several different attempted articulations over a single phenomenon. I will discuss the use of the articulation concept in the context of this study further in Chapter 2, where I discuss the theoretical issues of the research in more detail.

With the concept of articulation, I examine the different and conflicting ways in which Rastafarian reggae music and its Afro-Caribbean lifeworld create novel social subjectivities in their spread to new social contexts. Thus, the research strands on the transnational dissemination of reggae music and Rastafarian movement form the most important bodies of literature for this dissertation. Most of this previous research (such as King 2002; Hansing 2002; Hebdige 2003, 25–150; Manuel & Bilby & Largey 2006, 183–215; Veal 2007; Toynbee 2007; Katz 2012), however, has examined the development of Rastafarian reggae within the social networks of Afro-Caribbean communities (with the notable exceptions of Jones 1988; Yawney 1994a; 1995; Sterling 2010).

On the other hand, Paul Gilroy (2005, 241) argues that ethnic and racial in-be- tweenness and “belonging to more than one place” has defined “the diasporic consciousness” of Rastafarian reggae music since its early stages. As mentioned in the opening of this chapter, the early Jamaican Rastafarians specifically sought to reject their belonging to the island, which they did not see as “I-land”,⁷ as some Rastafar- ians expressed it (Chevannes 1994, 1). Thus, the main empirical hypothesis in this dissertation is that in the genre of Rastafarian reggae, Jamaica is not the kind of central social hub that it is often assumed to be in the everyday understandings of the genre.

Instead, the roots reggae aficionados form connections in many different directions with their musical activity. Hence, the present dissertation contributes to the exist- ing research on the internationalization of reggae and Rastafari by analyzing with ethnographic detail how global and interracial communities and communality are imagined through Rastafarian popular music.

Since questions of intercultural interaction and imagination of global community are central to the present dissertation, I also draw theoretically from the discipline of cultural anthropology, where the aforementioned themes have been central since the beginning of the 20^th century. For example, Bronislaw Malinowski’s seminal anthropo-

7 In Rastafarian language, the terms “I” or “I and I” commonly refer simultaneously to the speaker and to the Rastafarian movement as a whole. At the same time, “I” is one of the central spiritual concepts of the movement. According to John Homiak (2013b, 119), for the Rastafari the principal “I” is “the Creator, Jah Rastafari, who lives within the temple of every individual.” In addition, through its homonymous relation with the word “eye”, the word “I” relates to higher knowledge and vision in Rastafarian speech (Pollard 2005 62–63).

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logical work, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, was essentially a study of a translocal ceremonial exchange system, the Kula ring (Candea 2009, 25–28; Werbner 2008a, 51–59). Ethnographically-oriented cultural studies research has adopted much of its vocabulary from anthropology, even though the study of mediatized cultural products has become a source of anthropological interest fairly recently (Nugent 1997).

In addition to mainstream cultural anthropology, the dissertation is informed by the discipline of ethnomusicology, where the ethnographic study of music has mainly been theorized. Ethnomusicological researchers have been traditionally interested in the way in which music and its sounds reflect and shape the life of human communities (Nettl 2005, 22–25). The focus in the present research is not however directly on the analysis musical sounds or structures, but rather on the social and ideological level that surrounds the musical activity.

Within the disciplines of ethnomusicology and anthropology, the present dissertation seeks to partake especially in the discussions on cosmopolitanism and autochthony, which have been central topics in the anthropological research of Southern Africa urban life during the last few decades. In the context of this study, I understand cosmopolitanism both as a form of embodied cross-cultural competency, and as social identifications, which are based on an imagination of a global and intercultural music community (Stokes 2007). In the context of music, cosmopolitanism thus means an active interest and appropriation of foreign musical elements and the associated embodied practices, as well as an ideological stance, where social diversity and global connectivity are celebrated with and within the music culture. These qualities are often present in the analyzed forms of roots reggae music, as I will demonstrate in the course of this dissertation.

Autochthony, in turn, has been used in Africanist literature to refer to a process where the connection between a certain human group and place is justified by naturalized arguments, usually by claiming that they have been the first inhabitant of a place (Geschiere & Nyamnjoh 2000; Comaroff & Comaroff 2001; Geschiere & Jackson 2006; Schumann 2009; Geschiere 2009). Somewhat paradoxically, alongside cosmopolitanism, naturalized claims to cultural authenticity have also been characteristics for Rastafarian reggae music, as the term “roots reggae” itself implies (Bilby 1999;

Alvarez 2008; Schumann 2009; Chude-Sokei 2012). I will return to discuss this paradox and the concepts of musical cosmopolitanism and autochthony further in section 2.2.4 of this dissertation.

Keeping the aforementioned theoretical groundings in mind, the research questions of this dissertation are: 1) In which ways is local belonging enacted in Rastafar- ian reggae music in Finland and in South Africa, and 2) how do musicians imagine the genre as a global community? Although these themes overlap and are present throughout the dissertation, the first three articles of the dissertation (I–III) seek to primarily answer the first research question, while the last case study (Article IV) focuses mainly on the second question. With these two research questions, I seek to understand the ideological values and social subjectivities that Rastafarian reggae constructs as a music genre outside of the Afro-Caribbean communities.

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1.2 the outline of the dissertation

In the following Chapter 2, I will begin by introducing the theoretical and methodological groundings of this study. I will examine the main methodological framework of this study, multi-sited ethnography, and present the main analytical and critical concepts of the study: music genre, articulation, identification, indexical order, cultural style, social subjectivity, cosmopolitanism, and autochthony.

In Chapter 3, I will form a historical outline of the research phenomenon, roots reggae music, on the basis of earlier research literature. I will first discuss the way in which Rastafari emerged from particular Afro-Caribbean experiences of displacement and travel, and from the broader historical trajectories of pan-African international- ism. From here I move to describe the birth of the Rastafarian cultural style or “livity”, and its entanglement with the Jamaican music industry. After this, the chapter moves on to look at the international spread of Rastafarian reggae music, with special refer- ence to Finland and South Africa, the two national contexts for the case studies of this dissertation. In presenting these national contexts, I explore further the relationship between Rastafarian cosmopolitanism and the embodied Rastafarian style, which I argue is central to the mutual recognition of roots reggae aficionados across different social and cultural borders.

Chapter 4 will discuss the ethnographic formation of the research data of the dissertation. The chapter begins with a self-reflexive description of the two separate fieldwork periods of this research in Finland and in South Africa. The chapter explores how I formed the methodological framework of multi-sited ethnography gradually as a response to different unexpected events during the research process. At the end of the chapter, I analyze my research practice from the point of view of academic ethics.

The final section of the introductory part of the dissertation, Chapter 5, will present the conclusions of the research. This is done by comparing the results of the four articles (I–IV) of the dissertation. These case studies are drawn from two societies, which appear to be historically and socially almost diametrical opposites: South Africa is a socially polarized young postcolonial nation, while Finland is an economically wealthy Nordic state. The chapter discusses the similarities and differences between the cultural role of Rastafarian reggae music in these contexts, and addresses the creative connection that exists between autochthony and cosmopolitanism, particularly in the South African case studies. Later on, the chapter moves on to examine the ways in which the cosmopolitanism of Rastafarian reggae is also linked to a particular type of gender performativity. I close the chapter by discussing what I see as one of the main conundrums in understanding Rastafarian reggae music: The musicians both embrace modernist ideas, such as cosmopolitanism, but at the same time adamantly express their alienation from modern Western society.

The dissertation consists in total of four research articles or ethnographic case studies, which are in the chronological order of their publication. The first article (I) and case study, named “Listening to Intergalactic Sounds – Articulation of Rastafar- ian Livity in Finnish Roots Reggae Sound System Performances” examines a Finnish roots reggae group, Intergalaktik Sound, which seeks continuity with the traditions of Jamaican sound systems. I ask how the vocalists of the sound system, Nestori and Jahvice, identify themselves as Rastafarians in performance, given that this religious conviction is highly marginal in domestic reggae culture and in the secularized Finn- ish society at large. The paper examines these dynamics using a range of analytical concepts from the comparative study of religion, sociolinguistics and popular music

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studies. The article concludes that roots reggae is in this context constructed from the aesthetics of the Jamaican dub music tradition, which is seen as closely connected to the Rastafari faith by the research participants. The sound system space is a pluralistic space by its values, in the sense that this Rastafarian meaning is not shared by all the participants of the events. Many experience and describe the space in more secular terms. The Rastafarian musicians nevertheless see themselves as representing a spiri- tually conscious music tradition that they considered being lost in Jamaica, and being upheld in Europe and especially in the UK. Thus the musical material for Intergalaktik Sound events comes from new European music releases, older Jamaican music, and from their own productions, rather than contemporary Jamaican music.

The second case study (II), “Jumping Nyahbinghi youths – The local articulations of roots reggae music in a Rastafarian dancehall in Cape Town” – is similar to the previous case in the sense that it takes a look at the use of recorded music in a weekly music event. The article is an ethnographic description of the event from the perspective of the organizing sound system group, “Triple Crown Sound”, who are Rastafarians by conviction. Unlike in Finland, in Cape Town Rastafarians are an es- tablished social group and a religious minority. The event under analysis takes place in an explicitly religious setting in a Rastafarian community situated in an impover- ished informal settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town. The article examines the ways in which the dancehall event constructs black working-class masculinities and bears significant continuities to indigenous South African forms of Christianity, and their understandings of spiritual purity. To comprehend these articulations and the social negotiations they entail, I draw on the earlier research of the Jamaican dancehall phenomenon, the Rastafarian movement, and African religiosity in South Africa. In contrast to the previous case in Finland (Article I), here the identification with Rasta- fari is constructed with contemporary Jamaican music, as the organizers of the event have direct working relationships with Jamaican artists. The community and the event are affiliated with the international Rastafarian organization, the Nyahbinghi Order, which in the earlier research literature (Yawney 1994a; 1995) has been described as suspicious toward reggae music and Jamaican media culture in general. The article concludes that this religious use of Jamaican dancehall music is a significant new and local innovation for the Nyahbinghi Rastafari practice.

While Article II discusses the use of recorded music, the third article (III), named

“The Voices of Azania from Cape Town — Rastafarian Reggae Music’s Claim to Au- tochthonous African Belonging”, focuses on the music productions of four Capetonian vocalists, Teba Shumba, Crosby Bolani, Daddy Spencer, and Korianda. The vocalists hail from an African township area of Cape Town, Gugulethu, which has experienced intense migration from the rural province of Eastern Cape in reent decades. Against this background, I ask how these African artists claim belonging to Cape Town as Rastafarians, since Cape Town has been previously known as a hegemonically White and Coloured city. Here, the guiding analytical concept of my analysis is autochthony, which draws attention to the ways in which these musical artists claim a naturalized connection to Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape Province. At the end of this article, I conclude that through roots reggae, these musicians are able to connect together different and seemingly contradictory musical tropes on township reality and the mythological African past that have been historically dominant in South African urban Black popular music.

The final article (IV), “‘From Gugulethu to the world’ – Rastafarian cosmopolitanism in the South African reggae music of Teba Shumba and The Champions” contin-

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ues with two Gugulethu musicians, Teba Shumba and Crosby Bolani. The article is a micro-historical ethnography of their music tour of Finland in 2005 as part of the Young Africa cultural project funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland.

This case continues and broadens the theme of musical cosmopolitanism that has been implicitly present in all the previous articles (I–III). Analytically, cosmopolitanism of roots reggae is interpreted in the paper as a form of embodied and performative style, which is adopted across social and cultural borders, but which requires certain cultural competence. Cosmopolitanism and its contradictions are then discussed in the article; firstly by analyzing in detail the organization and marketing of the music tour across Finland. Secondly, I analyze the encounters that the South African vocalists had with Finnish reggae artists during their stay in the country. In the end, I argue that Rastafarian reggae and its socially conscious message and focus on rootedness to the “ghetto” of Gugulethu, fitted particularly well with the political aims of the Young Africa project, which aimed to inform the general public of the alleged hardships of South African youth. The highly flexible nature of the Rastafarian style enabled Teba and The Champions to articulate their music through different music genres and to meet the various expectations projected to them in different social and musical situ- ations during the tour.

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2 tHe metHoDologiCal fRamewoRk anD tHe CentRal tHeoRetiCal

ConCepts

Before delving into the theoretical concepts of this dissertation research, a clarifica- tion of the central empirical terms is in order. This study is specifically about “roots reggae music”, which is an ambiguous term at best, as most of the terminology surrounding popular music often is. I align the current dissertation with the constructivist understanding of human culture and thus, I approach the research object by not giving it a ready definition, but by examining how the label “roots reggae” is used as an emic term in different ways by the research participants themselves. I will discuss my understanding of music genres in detail in section 2.2.1, but now it needs to be noted that I have chosen this definition instead of musicological classifications, since I am specifically interested in the social and ideological dynamics of the Rastafarian identifications in popular music. Often I also use the term “Rastafarian reggae” syn- onymously with “roots reggae”, since Rastafarian values were commonly seen as a defining factor for the genre by the research participants themselves. What exactly

“Rastafarian values” are, however, is ultimately subject to social negotiations. This constructivist formulation of the research object allows me to concentrate on the different social contexts and mobilizations of roots reggae as a genre label.

In the academic and public discussion, the term “roots reggae” is often used to refer exclusively to reggae music of the 1970s and the subsequent musical style coming out of this particular musical practice. In music performances, this form of roots reggae commonly features ensembles with guitars, bass, piano, drums, percussions and pos- sibly a horn section. Sonically, this style is characterized by offbeat ostinato by a guitar or a piano, a relatively slow tempo and an emphasis on low-frequency bass sounds.

When I refer to this musical style, instead the aforementioned emic conceptualization of roots reggae, I will specify my designation with historical or musicological attrib- utes, such as “the roots reggae of the 1970s” or “instrumental roots reggae ensembles”.

Some scholars, such as Michael Veal (2007) and Norman Stolzoff (2000), also use the term “reggae” to refer exclusively to the aforementioned historical roots reggae tradition. They both see reggae as Jamaican popular music produced with instrumental ensembles until 1985, and thus distinguish it from later digital genres, which they see as dancehall music. In this dissertation, I reserve the broad category of “reggae”

as an umbrella term for both electronic and instrumental Jamaican popular music, including genres like dancehall, ska, rocksteady, roots reggae, and dub. Although these are very distinct musical genres in the history of Jamaican popular music, I use the term in this wide meaning, because these different Jamaican music styles are strongly interrelated in the case studies. Aficionados of these genres are likely to act in the same human network, and for example during a typical Finnish reggae club event, it is probable that the audience will hear the selector play something from all of these genres. Several other scholars of Jamaican popular music (such as Toynbee 2007; Katz 2012; Cooper 2012) have also used the word “reggae” in this meaning, as an all-encompassing category for popular music with Afro-Jamaican roots.

Throughout its history, reggae music has been deeply connected to the politics of race and because of this, racial vocabulary is central in the present dissertation.

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In South Africa, the Apartheid era racial categories of “Black African”, “White” and

“Coloured” are still in official and everyday use today. In this terminology, the category “Black African” refers to people who hold one of the Bantu languages as their mother tongue, while “Coloured” refers to members of the heterogeneous South African ethnic group, with a mixed ancestry, who speak Afrikaans as their mother tongue. Lastly, in the South African context, the term “White” refers to the English- and Afrikaans-speaking minorities who developed a distinctive White South African nationhood.

While the aforementioned racial vocabulary remains hegemonic in South Africa, most of the Rastafarians and reggae musicians do not accept it and instead seek to destabilize it, since it is seen as a legacy of the Apartheid ideology. In this sense they seek continuity with the South African Black Consciousness Movement,⁸ which used the term “African” for the Bantu speaking ethnic groups and the term “Black” from all of the ethnic groups, both “Coloured” and “African”, who were the victims of the apartheid. Some academic researchers (such as Dolby 2001) have also adopted this terminology in their work in order to challenge the prevailing Apartheid era categories. In the present dissertation I also use this specific terminology in the research text, mainly because in Capetonian reggae music, Coloureds are regularly included in the category of “Black.” That being said, it should also be borne in mind that this usage is not dominant in the everyday parole in South Africa. When referring to specific ethnic groups I write the terms “Black” and “White” with a capital letter and when discussing international perceptions of race, I use the terms without the capital letter.⁹ The concept of race is theorized further from the point of view of constructivist epistemology in section 2.2.3 of this dissertation.

2.1 the methodological framework of the study – multi-sited fieldwork

In the current dissertation, I understand ethnography as described by Sara Ahmed (2000) as a relatively long-term encounter and relationship between researcher and research participants. According to Ahmed, an ethnographer listens to the research participants and learns from them, but at the same acknowledges that their knowledge can never completely become his or her own knowledge as a researcher. In this subchapter, I will discuss the theoretical implications of the multi-sited ethnographic work that this study is based on, and in Chapter 4 I will return to describe in detail the research material of the dissertation as well as the pressing matters of ethics and positionality in my ethnographic encounters.

In the current research, I see the “field” in fieldwork not as a geographical site

8 The South African Black Consciousness Movement was initiated as a loose grass-roots civil movement in the late 1960s. Its main tenet was that Black people should recognize their shared racial oppression and build their resistance to it by shared solidarity. This solidarity and resistance should abandon White political paradigms and develop from the Black experience itself. Although as a political organization the Black Consciousness Movement was short-lived, its ideological legacy remains influential in post-apartheid South African society as a whole and continues both in the Rastafarian movement as well as in academia (Frueh 2003, 45–48).

9 I adopted the use of a capital letter when referring to specific groups relatively late in the research process and this format is not used in articles I, II and IV, where the names of ethnic groups are written with a small initial letter.

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as such, but as a process of social encounter between the researcher and research participants. The term “field” then corresponds neither with the concept of space, which I see as a material geographical location, nor with place, which I see as a cul- turally meaningful space. The nature of the fieldwork is not shaped by location, but is dependent on the relationships that form between the researcher and the research participants, and on the way in which they both represent their experiences during the encounter. This means that the researcher is ultimately responsible for shaping and bounding the field so that it can answer meaningful research questions (Clifford 1997, 17–47; Cook, Laidlaw & Mair 2009).

In the course of this research, I initiated encounters with research participants in Finland and in Cape Town, which are separated by vast spatial distance. The ethnographic work was based mainly on the snowballing method, where each of the research participants referred and recommended me to the next ones. This also meant that my field encounters in Finland affected the fieldwork in South Africa, since some of the Capetonian research participants had done musical collaborations with Finnish musicians and were very familiar with European reggae culture. The South African musicians were keen to know which Finnish reggae musicians and/or Rastafarians I had contact with and how well I knew them. My assumption is that my initial contacts in Finland thus determined some social aspects of the later fieldwork in South Africa.

Because of this interconnectedness of these two social networks in Cape Town and in Finland, I have come to consider the empirical work of the dissertation as one single multi-sited fieldwork, instead of a set of separate fieldworks.

How then is one to theorize about this type of network of musicians and ethnographic research conducted via these kinds of social connections? The nature of my fieldwork appears to be radically different than the traditional mode of anthropological fieldwork, which was developed by Bronislaw Malinowski and others at the beginning of the 20^th century, and where the researcher spends usually at least one year in one geographical location to provide him or her with a deep form of knowledge on cultural practices.

The question of dispersed fieldwork arose to prominence in anthropology in the mid-1990s, when the research topics of global scale and impact, such as migration, the flow of capital, international politics, and international media industries, became prominent. In a series of influential articles, George Marcus (1998) attempted to re- spond to these challenges by proposing that ethnographers could conceptualize the research objects of their studies, not as phenomenon constructed in immediate social interaction in a given geographical site, but as social entities which come into being as part of translocal relations. According to Marcus, this means that intensive fieldwork in one place and on its social relations will not necessarily provide the researcher with deep ethnographic knowledge, if the aim is to study broader social phenomena. Deeper understanding is rather acquired by strategically selecting one or several places for fieldwork, where the researcher would concentrate specifically in the translocal formation of the phenomenon. Marcus named this approach “multi- sited ethnography” but he reminds us that this method is not to be defined as ethnographic work done in many locations, but as a research orientation where the studied phenomenon is treated as a set of social relations extending beyond one geographical site (Marcus 1998, 79–99).

A multi-sited research setting has been applied in much of the ethnographical work done on reggae and Rastafari (see for example, Sterling 2010; Wittman 2011; Yawney 1994; 1994b; 1995; 2013) as well as in popular music studies in general (see for example,

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Holt 2007). For the current dissertation, Caroline Yawney’s (1994; 1994b; 1995; 2013) anthropological works on the Rastafarian movement are particularly important pre- decessors, since they first introduced the multi-sited approach to the study of Carib- bean popular culture. For Yawney, the internationalist orientation of the Rastafarian movement “problematized the place-oriented concept of culture and/or community”

(Homiak 2013a, 66) and drew her attention to the way in which Rastafari was enacted as an imagined global community. In the course of her career, Yawney documented Rastafarian social networks across the world ¹⁰ and her works stand today as one of the earliest examples of multi-sited anthropology in general (Homiak 2013a).

Caroline Yawney (2013, 172; see also Yawney 1995; Homiak 2013a; Homiak 2013b, 104–106) proposes that the multi-sited approach is particularly important in understanding Rastafari as a sociocultural phenomenon, since the movement “is open to so many readings, and because Rastafari themselves call into question the nature of any ethnographic generalization.” Thus, “we need ethnographic reportage of Rastafari that constantly triangulates from multiple perspectives” (Yawney 2013,172). After Yawney’s seminal work, multi-sited orientation has remained almost as an implicit orientation in the ethnographic research of reggae and Rastafari, and has not under- gone detailed theoretical discussions. For example, in his study of Japanese reggae and Rastafari, Marvin Sterling (2010, 29–34) mentions that his approach to fieldwork is multi-sited, without discussing explicitly how this specific choice affected his ethnographic knowledge production. Currently, this discussion would be very relevant since after Yawney’s and Marcuse’s influential works, multi-sitedness has become a rather vaguely used catchphrase in all ethnographically-oriented social studies, and as a result a significant amount of critique has been levelled against the concept in anthropological discussion.

First, the theoretical usefulness of the very concept of multi-sitedness has been questioned from the perspective of anthropological scholarly tradition. In his writings, George Marcus (1998) seems to assume that anthropologists would not have previously studied social relations, which extend beyond their immediate field sites. Sev- eral writers (Candea 2009; Werbner 2008a, 51–59; Cook, Laidlaw & Mair 2009; Falzon 2009) have pointed out that anthropologists have always been interested in translocal phenomena, such as commercial exchanges across social and national boundaries, but they have studied these processes intensively from the perspective of a certain field site. The concept of multi-sitedness can be seen to obscure the fact that according to its very definition – as a long-term encounter between the researcher and the research participants – ethnographic fieldwork is able to provide only very personal knowledge, which is rooted to a certain place. Delimiting the fieldwork consciously to a certain place can thus be considered as a self-critical methodological choice, through which one is able to attain analytical depth. From this perspective, dispersed ethnography, which includes numerous quickly formed “thin descriptions” of several places, instead of a more concentrated “thick description” (Geertz 1976, 5–10), does not seem to carry much additional value to anthropological research.

Mark-Anthony Falzon (2009) has responded to the aforementioned criticism by pointing out that George Marcus did not set out to challenge the practice of ethnography itself, but sought to adapt it to the new conditions. Marcus (1998, 79–99) writes

10 Just before her untimely death, Caroline Yawney started also a fieldwork among Rastafarians in Cape Town that she was about to expand in the future. She however addresses the initial results of this South African fieldwork briefly in her last published writings (Yawney 2013, 190–194).

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that one typical way to compose a multi-sited ethnographic research is simply to fol- low and observe the research participants or other objects or concepts under study wherever they might travel. With the verb “following”, Marcus refers to participant observation and to the associated ethnographic research process. The use of the verb

“following” underlines how a participant observation is not a static process, which happens in one place only, but often involves traveling with the research participants.

At this stage of Marcus’ work, one can trace the influence of the preceding work of James Clifford (1997, 17–47), who in his influential essay described ethnography as

“traveling practice”. In fact, according to Falzon (2009, 7–10), the practice of accom- panying the research participants in their routines and travels is what anthropologists have pretty much always done. What has changed in the contemporary situation, and what Marcus acknowledges in his work, is that contemporary subjects of ethnographic studies are often more mobile than before. Falzon argues that the goal of multi-sited ethnography is precisely to take this mobility seriously. What really changes with multi-sited research is the long geographical circuits that the researchers have to ac- company their research participants on in their routines.

In the ethnographic work of the present dissertation research, I have followed two sets of empirical phenomena. The first of these are the musicians, namely the Intergalaktik Sound System group from Finland (Article I), and the Triple Crown Sound System (Article II) and the Gugulethu dancehall vocalists from Cape Town (Articles III–IV). All three groups of musicians are mobile and are not confined to any single place. For example, Intergalaktik Sound tours across southern Finland and the main performance opportunities of Gugulethu dancehall vocalists are outside of South Africa. These kinds of life experiences are precisely the type of mobility that Mark-Anthony Falzon (2009, 7–10) describes. The second empirical object under ethnographic scrutiny in the dissertation is the Jamaican roots reggae music itself. All three groups of individuals have been influenced by this same musical content, from Jamaican Rastafarian artists such Bob Marley to Sizzla and Capleton, although they have all modified it and reused it in novel ways. Thus, the first reason why I call my research setting multi-sited is that the dissertation is ethnographic research where I have followed musicians with an internationalist orientation as well as musical style, which is in wide international circulation.

Perhaps one of the most significant critical observations from multi-sited methodology has been that many of George Marcus’ writings have holistic ambitions to study global social system in their entirety. Marcus (Marcus & Fischer 1986, 91; quoted in Candea 2009, 36) explicitly states that the goal of multi-sited ethnographic work is

“to grasp whole systems, usually represented in impersonal terms, and the quality of lives caught up in them.” The aim to “grasp these whole systems” has indeed been one of the historical aims of anthropological research, but its relevance has been seriously questioned since the beginning of the 1990s. The critique of holism has perhaps been articulated most forcefully in the seminal work of James Clifford (1986), where he demonstrated, using the methods of literary criticism, how ethnography is able to provide only “partial truths” of the researched phenomenon. (Candea 2009.) It should however be noted that this critique is aimed at holism as comprehensiveness and not as contextualization. As a form of contextualization, the term “holism” refers to the view that human behavior is to be understood within the larger social and cultural framework. This kind of contextualization continues to be one of the undisputed starting points of cultural anthropology. Instead, what has come in for heavy criticism are the academic views that see the comprehensive ethnographic descriptions of the whole

Roots reggae from Cape Town to Helsinki : an ethnographic study of local belonging and cosmopolitan imagination in Rastafarian reggae music

Roots Reggae

fRom Cape town to Helsinki

Tuomas Järvenpää

Roots Reggae

fRom Cape town to Helsinki

abstract

tiivistelmä

aCknowleDgements

list of oRiginal pUBliCations

Contents

1 intRoDUCtion

1.1 the research traditions and the research questions

1.2 the outline of the dissertation

2 tHe metHoDologiCal fRamewoRk anD tHe CentRal tHeoRetiCal

ConCepts

2.1 the methodological framework of the study – multi-sited fieldwork