Building Zion

Description

Building Zion documents the resourcefulness of informal land occupiers or so-called ‘squatters’ in Zion, who have built a new community on the plantation backlands and swamplands of Trelawny’s Holland Estate. The story of the builders of Zion highlights their significance in global and Caribbean land development and Jamaican nation-building in its case study of a resilient ‘squatter-peasantry’ within the paradoxical contexts of decolonisation and persisting social inequality. Based on a combination of historical research and long-term social anthropological fieldwork among the informal occupiers, including Revival-Zionists and Rastafarians, the case of Zion also offers a unique opportunity for understanding the entire process of this strategy of land settlement. This book is the third in a trilogy of ethnographies by the author highlighting maroon communities on common land, post-slavery ‘free villages’ on family land and ‘squatter settlements’ on ‘captured land’ as variants of Caribbean creative customary land tenures and transformative peasantisation.