Opposed to the repressive socio-economic political climate that resulted in the impoverishment of masses of Jamaicans, the Jamaican Rastafarians developed a language to resist societal oppression. This study examines that language--Dread Talk--as resistive language. Having determined that the other variations spoken in their community--Standard Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole--were inadequate to express their dispossessed circumstances, the Rastafarians forged an identity through their language that represents a resistant philosophy, music and religion. This resistance not only articulates their socio-political state, but also commands global attention. This study scrutinizes the lexical, phonological, and syntactical structures of the poetic music discourse of Dread Talk, the conscious deliberate fashioning of a language that purposefully expresses resistance to the political and social ideology of their native land, Jamaica.

Ce travail explore la culture rastafarie au travers de sa structuration symbolique abordée depuis trois manifestations culturelles significatives : les assemblées Nyabinghi, les chants cérémoniels et le langage Iyaric. J’ai cherché à étudier la manière dont s’était constitué le complexe symbolique rastafari à travers l’Histoire jamaïcaine et ses multiples cultures de résistances. J’avais pour objectif d’aborder le symbolisme depuis un cadre matérialiste, c’est- à-dire d’attester que le symbolisme est à la fois déterminé et déterminant, que l’Histoire le façonne tout comme il façonne l’Histoire à son tour. La culture rastafarie, se positionnant en rupture avec l’ordre établi, fut un lieu de recherche et d’analyse fertile à une anthropologie du matérialisme symbolique. J’ai appuyé ma démarche sur un séjour de recherche en Jamaïque au cours duquel j’ai fréquenté diverses communautés rastafaries, tant au sein de lieux rituels qu’aux carrefours d’interactions entre les adhérants rastafaris et des non-rastafaris. Ma recherche est guidée par un cadre d’analyse abordant la culture depuis l’idéologie, les contres-hégémonies et l’hétérotopie de même que sur la dialectique de la reconnaissance. Ces théories offrent des éléments d’analyse permettant de discuter plus en profondeur des données collectées autour de trois lieux symboliques : assemblées rituelles, chants cérémoniels et construction d’un langage. / This work explores Rastafari culture through its symbolic structuration, focusing on three cultural manifestations of significance: Nyabinghi Assembly, Ceremonial Chants and Iyaric language. I have sought to study the way Rastafari’s symbolic order establishes itself through Jamaican History and through multiple cultures of resistance. My objective is to study symbolism from a materialist perspective, namely showing that symbolism is both determined and determinant, that History shapes just as it is shaped by History. Rastafari culture, making a break with the established order, proved to be a fertile context for the research and analysis of a symbolic materialist approach in anthropology. I have grounded my approach in a yearlong Jamaican research residency where I socialized with various Rastafari communities, both in rituals spaces and at the crossroads of interaction between Rastafari adepts and ordinary Jamaicans. This stay reasserted to me the importance of guiding this research with a theoretical framework allowing to grasp particularities in the cultural dynamics involved while at the same time enabling bridges with other cultures of resistance through a given universalism. A framework addressing culture through ideology, counter-hegemony and heterotopia as much as recognition’s dialectic had guided this research. These theories allow deeper analysis and discussion concerning the collected data of three symbolic spaces; ritual assembly, ceremonial chants and the construction of a language.