This research monograph is about the power of the imagination to move persons from the Global South as they reinvent themselves. This case focuses on Caribbean Rastafarians who have undertaken a spiritual repatriation to Ethiopia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2008-2009 and subsequent visits between 2012-2015, Gomes traces the formation of a Rastafari community located in the Jamaica Safar or Jamaica neighbourhood in the Ethiopian city of Shashamane. Following a twentieth century grant of land from the former Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I, this community has developed from several migrations of Rastafarians (Rastafari) from the Caribbean, in particular from Jamaica, to Ethiopia. Through everyday behaviours and ritualised events, Gomes provides an ethnographic account of what she refers to as Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. As in many anthropological studies, history matters. Situated in the historical conditions of colonial West Indian plantations and the asymmetries of freedom and bondage within modernity, a recognition of global positionalities and local situatedness characterises this case of southern cosmopolitanism. As such, while this study of spiritual repatriation delves into the historical formation of global networks, models of citizenship, and community conceptions of belonging, the stakes are much greater. weiterlesen