Tag: Jamaica
Patwa and Rastafari in Jamaican Law and Society
Murray Powell is the Director of Federal Affairs under Commissioner Nikki Fried at the Florida Department Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. She is currently the President of the cannabis consulting firm Green Sustainable Strong, LLC and Managing Partner at Scheril Murray Powell, P.A. She is also General Counsel for Minorities for Medical Marijuana and General Counsel for Patience with Patients. She is In House Counsel for the EOP Foundations Medical Cannabinoid Research and Policy Institute. She is a graduate of Florida International University College of Law. She is a member of the Florida Bar, Dade County Bar Association, Broward County Bar Association, Palm Beach County Bar Association, and National Bar Association, and was selected by her peers to speak at the FIU Law Commencement Ceremony. As a Cannapreneur, Scheril is the President of Canna Headhunters, a staffing agency in the Cannabis Industry that connects Cannabis talent to opportunities. She has been selected to present at a number of Cannabis Conferences including the South East Cannabis Conference, Canex Jamaica Conference, South East Cannabis Conference, Cannaday, Detroit's Canna Con, Florida Medical Marijuana Conference, and Canna-Ed Conference hosted by the Florida Cannabis Coalition. She is on the Advisory Board for CannaGather Florida and has been asked to speak at Jamaica's Pharmacological Board Mandatory Meetings and Jamaica Bureau of Standards meetings based on her international reputation as a Cannabis Expert.
Tameka Samuels-Jones
Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology and Criminology & Law
2018-2019 Rothman Doctoral Fellow
Tameka Samuels-Jones addressed questions about conflicting state regulations and indigenous cultural beliefs in the Blue and John Crow Mountains of Jamaica in her talk. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015 the site is still threatened by illegal deforestation, water pollution, and poaching. Focusing on three groups — the maroons, Rastafarians, and local coffee farmers — Samuels-Jones' work provided insight into the cultural and legal factors that determine how to govern natural resources successfully. Read More "Tameka Samuels-Jones"
Tameka Samuels-Jones, Department of Sociology and Crimonology & Law
"Regulatory Law and Local Stakeholder influences on Green Crime in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica."
Rothman Doctoral Fellow
Samuels-Jones with one of the farmers in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica (PHOTO: Tameka Samuels-Jones)
Tameka Samuels-Jones addressed questions about conflicting state regulations and indigenous cultural beliefs in the Blue and John Crow Mountains of Jamaica in her talk. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015 the site is still threatened by illegal deforestation, water pollution, and poaching. Focusing on three groups — the maroons, Rastafarians, and local coffee farmers — Samuels-Jones' work provided insight into the cultural and legal factors that determine how to govern natural resources successfully.
Specifically, her dissertation research examines how beliefs and cultural identities impact peoples' compliance with state environmental regulations, and how non-compliance is managed.
With funds from her fellowship, Samuels-Jones traveled to the Blue and John Crow Mountains where there is ongoing environmental degradation from river contamination, deforestation, soil erosion, and solid waste dumping. She spent time with communities around Moore Town (a maroon community descended from escaped enslaved persons) and went on patrol with park rangers in Blue Mountains to get their perspective on groups engaged in environmentally damaging behavior. She also conducted document analysis to examine legislative documents and enforcement data.
She found that managing the area's environmental health involved complex negotiations and combinations of state and NGO-co-management with individual local communities and their own socio-political and religious systems. Each group — the maroons, the Rastafarians, and the local farmers — all had their own political systems and engaged in different kinds of environmentally threatening behavior: maroons hunted protected coneys and were concerned about river poisoning, Rastafarians were concerned about habitat loss and encroachment, and local farmers used pesticides and slash/burn clearing. Furthermore, different religious laws produced varying perspectives on what kind of behavior is acceptable — or not — from an environmental point of view.
Samuels-Jones shared, "Trust, religion, and access to information all mediate how people decide to obey environmental law in complex ways." She said, "as a result, each group may need a different incentive in order to obey environmental laws."
Above all, Samuels-Jones advocated for a cultural sociological approach to environmental criminology/policy to help authorities understand the role of dialogue and stakeholder engagement in policy-making and to avoid situations of non-compliance by considering the cultural dynamics and belief systems of the various constituencies they have to work with.
"Black Man Time Now!" Race, Class and Culture in 1970s Jamaica
Kim Robinson-Walcott, University of the West Indies, Mona Jamaica.
4:00 pm, Tuesday 9 October, Scott Nygren Studio, Library West
Open to the public and Co-sponsored by the Department of English, George A. Smathers libraries, and Center for Latin American Studies
Kim Robinson-Walcott, Ph.D., is editor/head of Caribbean Quarterly, University of the West Indies, Mona. She is also the editor of Jamaica Journal, published by the Institute of Jamaica. She worked as a fiction and general trade editor for many years and worked closely with the Jamaican author Anthony C. Winkler on most of his novels. Her publications include the scholarly work Out of Order! Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing (University of the West Indies Press, 2006), Jamaican Art (Kingston Publishers, 1989, 2011) which she co-authored, The How to Be Jamaican Handbook (Jamrite Publications, 1988) which she co-authored and illustrated, and the children's book Dale's Mango Tree (Kingston Publishers, 1992), which she also illustrated. Her scholarly articles, book chapters, short stories and poems have been published in a number of journals and anthologies. A second illustrated children's book and a short story collection are forthcoming.
Co-sponsored by the Department of English, George A. Smathers libraries, and Center for Latin American Studies
Kim Robinson-Walcott
Slavery ended in Jamaica in 1838, but true emancipation, from mental slavery, is still a work in progress. In the 179 years since 1838 there has been a slow and (un)steady evolution of black pride and self-esteem, but there have been a number of pivotal moments in Jamaica's history where there has been a jolt in awareness – for example, 1865; 1938; the mid-1960s. The 1970s in Jamaica offered one such moment. Riding on the wave of the Black Is Beautiful, Black Power, Back-to-Africa movements of the 1960s, the PNP swept into power in 1972 with an agenda of social and economic empowerment for the poor majority – an agenda which, given the conflation of race and class in Jamaica, equates to black empowerment. A corollary to that agenda was a valorisation of the African-originated folk culture lived by the black majority as opposed to the European-derived culture promoted by the colonial rulers.
That agenda, however, was not perfect in its execution. Considering a selection of literary works written by Jamaicans in or about the 1970s such as Anthony C. Winkler's Going Home to Teach, Brian Meeks's Paint the Town Red and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's The True History of Paradise, and drawing on as well as Colin A. Palmer's insightful analysis of the divided Afrocentric/Eurocentric Jamaican identity as expressed in his Inward Yearnings (as well as Rex Nettleford's Caribbean Cultural Identity), in this paper I examine some of the complications and shortcomings of the PNP's execution of its vision, and more critically the shortcomings and contradictions of the Jamaican population itself, from the perspectives of these writers. Finally, I suggest that with the ouster of the PNP from power in 1980, Jamaican race/class relations quickly reverted to the status quo position of white economic power/black subservience, white exclusivity, and externally as well as internally imposed black denigration. 1980, indeed, would prove to be another pivotal moment, signifying not only the end of the socialist experiment in Jamaica and the abortion of "black man time now", but also a loss of idealism and a growth of cynicism and a self-serving pragmatism, disturbing features which have continued to mushroom and to scar the Jamaican psycho-social landscape up to the present day.