The Rastafari began in the British colony of Jamaica during the tumultuous 1930s. Their contemporaries at first perceived them as an amusing cult and named them Ras Tafari after their culture hero, the Emperor Haile Ras Tafari Selassie I of Ethiopia. Their clowning, however, turned out to be serious. Their antics soon confounded the cultural logic that the elite of Jamaican society were constructing as the core identity of the emerging national state. The Rastas' entrance onto the stage of Jamaican history came at a critical juncture. That era of the 1930s was a watershed for Jamaican society which set apace its transformation from a land based peasantry to a wage earning class. The Rastas' disagreement with the capitalist directions of Jamaica was both humorous and disturbing, for they were incarnating a type of existential absurdity. Although they were never calamitous enough to prevent the almost fated ascendancy of capitalist relations, their ideology succeeded in weaning some of the waning peasantry from the lifestyle that the new economic structure was demanding of its conscripts. The material reproduction of capitalist society did not concern them, and this was evinced by their failure to establish labor union movements or political parties, both of which the national figures Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley were advocating. Their theological foundations on the newly crowned Emperor of Ethiopia defiled the sacred imaging of Jesus Christ as liberator in the established churches and also scorned the possession cults of the spiritistic churches. They rejected political involvement in society by calling for a repatriation to Ethiopia, a cry not heard since