Stepping in Iration: Rastafari Ital Livity, Ecologies and Ecotheologies in Saint Lucia/Iyanola

Abstract

This dissertation represents an exploration of the ecologies and ecotheologies present within the philosophical outlooks of the Rastafari spiritual movement in St Lucia/Iyanola. Primarily, this research seeks to elucidate “Ital Livity”, a bricolage of Rastafari philosophical and cosmological concepts, and to place it in contemporary dialogue taking place in ecological and ecotheological scholarship. This seeks to generate both awareness of an under researched spiritual group and to further novel connections that might exist between new conversation partners. “Ital Livity” exists as an idealisation of, and a yearning towards, the greenest and most natural form of all in creation - human, non-human, earth, spirit. “Livity” itself serves as a broad categorisation for an individual’s own spiritual outlook, a “lived” spirituality in contrast to one that exists purely conceptually. “Ital” serves an Iyaric ‘I’ form of the word vital to confer a sense of the most essential and most organic form. The two together then convey a sense of the most ‘vital’ and the most organic philosophical outlook, one which valorises and divinises the natural world, humanity, non-humanity, the Almighty, feelings, sounds and vibrations, in their most natural form. This dissertation seeks to explore the development of this rubric, as well as its manifestation in the present. In doing so I attest, as others have, that the development of Rastafari philosophy is intimately connected to the history of the movement as emergent from a context defined by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its colonial aftermath, as well as the spiritual milieu present in Jamaica in the form Jamaican folk cosmology and Christian inspired religious groups. From this, this dissertation argues that in regards to Ital Livity three core strands emerge which serve to define it in the present, a yearning for the green and organic, a sense of a common divinity and a rejection of death. These core elements are then explored and examined through ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork, crudely divided into chapters exploring the spiritual and the ethereal, the more practical, physical manifestations, and lastly the spiritual sources which inform them. The point reached through all of this allows for an ending which seeks to establish Rastafari Ital Livity as a vibrant and dynamic conversation partner for groups and thinkers operating in ecological and ecotheological spaces, suggesting ultimately that a plurality of voices is fundamentally necessary in generating both sensitivity towards divergent human communities as well as in heightening the possibility of novel ideas and approaches towards the various environmental crises faced today.