Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

by W. David Marx

Founded in 1940, Pinnacle was a rural Jamaican commune providing its Black residents a “socialistic life” removed from the oppression of British colonialism. Its founder, Leonard Howell, preached an unorthodox mix of Christianity and Eastern spiritualism: Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie was considered divine, the Pope was the devil, and marijuana was a holy plant. Taking instructions from Leviticus 21:5, the men grew out their hair in a matted style that caused apprehension among outsiders, which was later called “dreadlocks.” Jamaican authorities frowned upon the sect, frequently raiding Pinnacle and eventually locking up Howell in a psychiatric hospital. The crackdown drove Howell’s followers—who became known as Rastafarians—all throughout Jamaica, where they became regarded as folk devils. Parents told children that the Rastafarians lived in drainage ditches and carried around hacked-off human limbs. In 1960 the Jamaican prime minister warned the nation, “These people—and I am glad that it is only a small number of them—are the wicked enemies of our country.” If Rastafarianism had disappeared at this particular juncture, we would remember it no more than other obscure modern spiritual sects, such as theosophy, the Church of Light, and Huna. But the tenets of Rastafarianism lived on, thanks to one extremely important believer: the Jamaican musician Bob Marley. He