Spiritual hair: dreadlocks and the bodies multiple in Rastafari

Abstract

In anthropology, the body is theorized, manifested, and experienced in multiple ways that impact medical practice, social life, biopolitics, and spirituality. This article considers the role of 'dreadlocks' (matted hair) in the Rastafari spiritual body and, guided by the 'body multiple' concept, explores how the symbolic and performative nature of hair articulates with age and gender. Ethnographic data from the United Kingdom suggest the ways dreadlocks are groomed and/or covered vary widely, revealing diversity and changing meanings attributed to matted hair. By focusing on the spiritual aspects of hair, our work shows that dreadlocks and baldness are outward (visible) and inward (hidden) manifestations of a covenant with Jah (the Creator), rather than contrasting social or psychological statements. The hair symbolism debate in anthropology reveals limitations of universalist and reductionist approaches to understanding the human body. Our Rastafari material suggests the body multiple provides a better framework for interpreting (African-inspired) spiritual hair.In anthropology and other social sciences, the body is theorized, manifested, and experienced in multiple ways that impact medical practice (Mol 2002), social life, biopolitics (Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987), and so on. Building on Mary Douglas's (1970) distinction between the individual and social bodies, Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) propose a way of approaching the body as both naturally and culturally produced, by conceptualizing it as 'three bodies' . The individual body is understood in a phenomenological sense. However, the idea of a highly individuated self appears to be uniquely 'Western' , and in many societies the individual is fused with the social body: that is, the use of the body as a symbol to think about nature, society, and culture. The body politic refers to regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies. Scheper-Hughes and Lock also describe the mindful body as the overlap of the other three bodies (individual, social, and political). In contrast to the multiple bodies defined by Scheper-Hughes and Lock, Mol's (2002) concept of the 'body multiple' shows us how bodily phenomena (in this case, atherosclerosis) are manifest and enacted in manifold ways in a hospital setting. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that biomedicine is reductive, as it involves patients coming to know their bodies as they are affected by cells, organs, microbes, and so on (Latour 2004). Work on the body multiple has also