Two Book Tuesday: Roman Cyprus and The Rastafarians

I’m finally getting some reading done again and started to slowly churn my way through my “to read” pile. This weekend, I managed to read one book to prep myself for going to the ASOR annual meeting next week and one book for some vague future project that is distracting me.

Book the First

I read and enjoyed Ersin Hussein’s Revaluing Roman Cyprus: Local Identity on an Island in Antiquity (2021). This book had been rattling around my “to read” list for a couple years and I finally found a time to sit down and read it. It is one of those short, but useful books that anyone interested in Roman Cyprus should have in their library.

The book effectively does what it says on the cover: it explores local identity on Cyprus during the Roman period. Hussein does this largely through textual sources — both literary and epigraphic — although she is not averse to selective engagement with archaeological evidence. Her argument, in a nutshell, is that individuals remained attached to their cities even when they received Roman citizenship. This is because cities retained certain distinctive historical features that served to reinforce their distinctive identities well into the Roman period. Thus, the long period of Hellenistic and Roman rule on Cyprus which reduced the political authority of the former city kingdoms did not eliminate civic identities. This is consistent, it would seem, with highly urbanized areas elsewhere in the Roman East (especially Greece).

The notion of civic identity articulated in Hussein’s book offers a top down perspective. Her use of epigraphic and textual sources offered a perspective on elite identity. Over the past 20 years, my colleagues and I have been considering grittier evidence for the same question as we studied the distribution of Roman and Late Roman ceramics across the island. Our hypothesis is that ceramic assemblages, particularly of table ware, offer another window into how individuals in Roman Cyprus identified themselves. In fact, we have suggested that the distribution of Late Roman ceramics does not reflect access or the circulation of good alone and suggests that communities on Cyprus favored different styles, forms, and types of table ware. Whether this produced or reflected different identities is a murkier proposition, but the arguments advanced by Hussein’s book (and other work on identity in Cyprus during the Roman period) make it possibility.

Book the Second

I spent a slow Sunday recovering from a cold and reading Leonard E. Barrett’s classic book The Rastafarians. This book had a bit of an interesting publication history. It was originally published in 1977 in Jamaica (by a bookstore called Sangster’s) and by Beacon Books in Boston. It then went through a series of reprints culminating in a 20th anniversary edition in 1997 which was reprinted in 2018. Over that time, it’s title changed a bit from The Rastafarians: Sounds of Cultural Dissonance to The Rastafarians: The Dreadlocks of Jamaica to simply The Rastafarians. It’s all a bit confusing really.

I picked this book up to see how and whether the Rastafarian movement drew upon and contributed to mid-20th century Afrocentric views in the Americas. What I got from Barrett’s treatment was something a bit different. He located the emergence of Rastafarian beliefs and attitudes in the long tradition of colonial resistance in Jamaica. He located the emergence of Rastafarian communities at the intersection of Garveyite thought (particularly his views on African nationalism) and the rise of Ras Tafari (Haile Selassie I) of Ethiopia. Thus, Rastafarians adopted Afrocentric views, called for a return to Africa, and saw their current life in Jamaica as Babylon (with Africa or even Ethiopia as Zion). Distinctively, they recognized Haile Selassie I as divine.

Barrett’s work situates Rastafarian beliefs and communities in the same space as mid-century Black Muslim movements in the Americas. Both sets of beliefs anchored new forms of Black religious life in traditional narratives: Islam and, in the case of Rastafarian beliefs, Christianity. As a result, both of these movements sought to transform these narratives and the conventional historical contexts that produced them. This, in turn, involved a reimagining of the past and its redeployment in the name of decolonizing narratives.

At the same time, many members of the establishment regarded these new narratives and the life ways, beliefs, and practices that they produced as destabilizing and threatening. Barrett’s book considers the processes that led to the recognition of Rastafarian communities and their beliefs in Jamaica even after the death of Haile Selassie I and Bob Marley. Once again, set against the turbulent backdrop of Jamaica’s post-colonial politics, the institutionalization of the Rastafarian movement created not only a globally recognized art and music, but also the basis for domestic political action as well.

To my mind, this book offers a useful case study for how new historical narratives produce the foundations for new political, religious, and social expression. The authority of these narratives, however, is not independent from the contexts in which they arise. Arguments that Rastafarian views of the past are not grounded in “good history” misunderstands the basis for their authority, which as Barrett argues comes from the experience of Jamaican society during the colonial period. 

Three Things Thursday: Fragments of the Future

An old friend of mine once told me that he wasn’t writing so much any more because writing with an act that assumed a future and he no long assumed that there was a future. At around the time he said this, he left academia and he and his partner left town. The entire sequence of events was not only depressing, but also convinced me that he was much smarter than I and academia (and our community) was going to be much the poorer for his and his partner’s departure. I really don’t know whether he writes any more and I’ve been a bit too nervous to ask.

Over the last few years I’ve found myself thinking more and more about the future. This summer, for example, I read (well, ok, I listened to) Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future (2020) and wrote about it here. I’ve been thinking a bit, on and off, about Afrofuturism and about how archaeology of the present exists in the space between a recognizable past and an anticipated future.

In the spirit of this musing, I offer three little fragments of the archaeology of the future here:

Fragment the First

One of the most interesting things about Sun Ra is his willingness to conflate the past and the future. For Ra this was a response to the excitement of the post-War moment when the potential of new forms of social and economic mobility met the dawning of the Space Age. At the same time, Ra understood that traditional forces in American society would continuously undermine and challenge whether Black people would have access to this new future.

This ambivalent attitude toward the future required Ra to both break with the traditional view of the Black past anchored as it was in their experiences of enslavement and legal, social, political, and economic marginalization. In the place of these experiences Ra imagined new pasts for Black people. He embrace of a wide range of Afrocentrist perspectives on the past allowed him to imagine Africa, and Egypt in particular, as the new foundation for both contemporary and future Black unity and power. His willingness to construct a new past that would allow Black people full access to a Space Age future may well represent an early and significant example of Laurent Olivier’s notion of presentism. For Olivier, presentism represents a view of the present that is no longer linear and is, therefore, no longer the product of the past. The break between the present and the past likewise allowed for the future to drift untethered from current existence. For Sun Ra this makes the future the domain of the impossible. Rationality, progress, and modes of change anchored in evolutionary or developmental ways of thinking no longer point toward a better reality in the future. This required a rewriting of the past and a reimagining of the present in ways that would support a future that could operate either outside the conventional limits of historical causality or despite these limits. The future because the space of the impossible.

Fragment the Second  

This week, while waiting for an evening meeting to start, I read a bit of Rebecca Bryant’s and Daniel M. Knight’s The Anthropology of the Future (2019) which has one fo the most accessible and compelling introductions to the growing interest in the future in the humanities and social sciences. Plus, both scholars have done work in the Mediterranean (Bryant on Cyprus and in Turkey and Knight in Greece). 

The motivation to explore an anthropology (history, archaeology, or sociology) of the future stems largely from the tensions between two attitudes toward the future. On the one hand, we hope that we are in a “late stage” of capitalism, nationalism, or modernism and that the next stage will somehow redeem the horrors that the main stage wrought (massive, global inequality, wars, and technologies with almost infinite capacity to destroy). On the other hand, we are increasingly come to realize that the paradigms established to take care of the future have made it difficult to imagine our way out of the looming existential crises fired by climate change, catastrophic inequality, and a limitless capacity for apocalyptic violence. In this context, there is a growing feeling that the future is foreclosed and that humanity or at least human society will invariably continue to amble toward its ultimate demise. 

It is hard to know what this means for disciplines like history and archaeology which perhaps emphasize the present as a lens through which to view the past more than the future. The 2019 issue of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology offers a few visions of what an archaeology of the future could be, and as much as I like the articles there, I wonder whether we are open enough to new intellectual or discursive tools necessary to imagine a future that is increasingly impossible?

Fragment the Third

Yesterday on a boring treadmill run, I started the read Joy Williams’ latest novel, Harrow (2021). I’ve made it through the first chapter and it’s beautiful and haunting. I will resist the temptation to try to talk about the book already (especially since Williams has a seemingly limitless capacity to surprise), but I will say that there is something profoundly archaeological about the book. Williams interest in things, places, and landscapes, her attention to entropy and site formation, and her ability to think about how the present will appear from the vantage point of a dystopian, but more or less banal near future. 

At this point, I’m not sure whether the richly drawn setting for the story is merely a backdrop or whether it will serve as a character, but I’m intrigued and excited enough to move this book, delicately, from the “read for fun” to the “read for work” list. 

In short, stay tuned and I look forward to blogging about this book (and others) in the future.