A large group of men, women, and children in colorful traditional dress and head wraps pose together on a rooftop terrace, with two babies held in the front row and a building under construction visible in the background.


Blood, Milk and Water: Rastafari Women’s Reproductive Health and Wellness

This study, tentatively entitled, Blood, Milk, and Water: Rastafari Women’s Reproductive Health and Wellness is a transnational ethnographic exploration of Rastafari women’s reproductive health in Ghana, Jamaica, and United States. Specifically, this project analyzes Rastafari women’s reproductive health as an important milestone for reflecting upon their spiritual and physical wellness practices. With increasing emphasis on Black maternal health due to high rates of maternal and infant mortality, my work analyzes ways spirituality provides another public health resource for healthcare providers and another resource for Rastafari women to care for themselves and their children. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated existing racial inequities in the medical industry and exposed disproportionate underlying conditions amongst Black people. Black Rastafari women exist at the intersection of multiple forms of race, gender, class, and religious discrimination.

This project highlights Rastafari women’s interactions with public health infrastructure in Ghana, Jamaica and United States and the ways they innovate their own ritualized healthcare systems as they age.

Rastafari women’s wellness practices predate contemporary trends in alternative medicine and are rooted in their spirituality, knowledge of herbal medicine, and their lived experiences. This means the wellness practices they innovate, like medicinal uses for cannabis, cannot be isolated from the broader context in which they live their lives.

I envision this project as providing alternative archives for thinking about Black women’s holistic spiritual and physical care from a Rastafari perspective. Fundamentally, I ask how does Rastafari women’s spirituality inform the ways they think about reproductive health? How do Rastafari women innovate spiritual and physical wellness practices as they age and how can these wellness practices inform holistic care practices in public health? What herbs, tonics and therapeutics have Rastafari women innovated to address common reproductive health issues, such as menstrual pain, menopause symptoms and pre and postnatal remedies?

In recent years, there is renewed national and international attention on the Rastafari movement due to decriminalization and legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana. But many Rastafari innovations around medicinal uses for cannabis and other herbs remain underexplored. Researching Rastafari women’s reproductive health in Ghana, Jamaica, and the United States contributes to archives of holistic medicinal strategies that center Africana Religious wellness practice as integral to public health. Rastafari women are omitted in Black women’s health studies and the medical humanities.

My work explores the unique horticultural techniques Rastafari women innovate transnationally to develop herbal remedies across geographic context and expands knowledge on the ways these communities practice environmental sustainability through their focus on regional plant culture and eco-friendly community infrastructure. Focusing on quotidian Black religious healing remedies and public health, this transnational study situates Rastafari women in traditions of Africana religious wellness praxis.


Image credit: Photo taken from Shamara Wyllie Alhassan research trip in 2017 at the All Africa Rastafari Gathering in Shashamane, Ethiopia.


People

A smiling woman with locs wears a yellow and green head wrap and floral earrings, photographed indoors against a softly blurred background.

Shamara Wyllie Alhassan

Shamara Wyllie Alhassan is a writer, documentary filmmaker and transdisciplinary Africana Studies scholar of religion and gender theory. Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled, Re-Membering the Maternal Goddess: Rastafari Women’s Intellectual History and Activism in the Pan-African World is winner of the National Women’s Association and University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. Alhassan is co-editor of the book, Black Women and Da Rona: Community, Consciousness, and Ethics of Care (University of Arizona Press, 2023). Currently, she is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles.