Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the concept of body multiple contributes to an understanding of spiritual power and the body. Specifically, it examines Rastafari bodily practices that are aimed at achieving certain spiritual objectives, at times through collective embodiment with other beings.

Paper long abstract:

In Rastafari, there are a number of spiritual practices that effect forms of collective embodiment with other beings (e.g. Haile Selassie I, the lion, sacred herbs). Rastafari is a spiritual, social, political and environmental movement that began in 1930s Jamaica and has since spread throughout African diaspora communities around the world. In their struggle to achieve the main political aims of the movement (repatriation of diaspora peoples to the African continent and other reparations for the trans-Atlantic slave trade) Rastafari people generally follow a number of spiritual prescriptions related to the body. Much of my work with Rastafari in the United Kingdom over the past few years has been concerned with the question of whether Rastafari bodies can do things that other bodies cannot do and if so, how such spiritual bodies (cf. McPhee 2003) are cultivated. The most significant Rastafari bodily practices include smoking (especially Cannabis spp.), meditating, growing matted hair, eating an Afro-centric vegan diet and drumming/chanting. A person does not have to do all of these things to be Rastafari, rather they are a means to achieve specific spiritual objectives, namely immortality, intuition/divination and the manifestation of divine will on earth. This paper explores how the concept of body multiple contributes to an understanding of spiritual power and the body.