From Marxist Guerrillas To Rastafari Warriors: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of the National United Freedom Fighters

Abstract

In this dissertation I argue that individuals' definitions of social justice, and their strategies for pursuing it, are structured by material and discursive conditions produced by specific state practices. In this study, based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the United States and Trinidad and Tobago, I explore this argument by examining the process by which the members of the National United Freedom Fighters (NUFF) resorted to violent political tactics and later abandoned them to adopt a state-sanctioned, self-funded development approach to their ongoing pursuit of social justice. The two different phases of the NUFF's social movement were led by the same actors, in the same impoverished region, with the same material development goals. Through comparative analysis of these two phases, and the material and discursive conditions characteristic of the two different historical moments in which they emerged, this study teases out the specific contextual variables that provoked the NUFF's initial commitment to and subsequent renunciation of violent political action. I argue that the transformation of the NUFF from a guerrilla force inspired by the promise of Marxist revolution into an NGO founded on principles of neoliberal subjectivity- self-help, participation in civil society, community-based volunteerism, market-oriented social reform, and spirituality (Rastafari)- was largely a consequence of material and discursive shifts produced by specific neoliberal governing practices instituted during and after the Structural Adjustment Program mandated by the International Monetary Fund in the mid-1980s. This investigation seeks to produce insights into the future of grassroots political action in the developing world by advancing anthropological understandings of the connections between culture, state practices, material conditions, and marginalized citizens' strategies for social change.