Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Scholars often point to the 1990s as the ideological high-tide of neoliberal globalization. More recently, however, populism has brought back into politics – on both the left and right - a consideration that the economy should be a moral realm, that is, a realm wherein purely transactional relationships of the neoliberal kind must give way to broader social obligations and reciprocities. If there is any economy that deserves the label “popular” – in terms of its widespread and global use and its association with the masses as opposed to the elites – it is surely the Cannabis economy. In contrast to the principles of neoliberal economy, Cannabis culture comprises a dense weave of collective norms, reciprocities, and obligations that govern not only how the plant is cultivated but how it is used and even sold. Rastafari are the exemplars of this culture, promoting a transnational moral economy of black self-determination. But the Rastafari use of Cannabis has been criminalized as part of a war on drugs with racist predicates. Professor Robbie Shilliam will historically track the war across Caribbean and North American spaces, and via spiritual, cultural, economic and political dimensions, in order to examine a moral economy that might help us think differently about alternatives to neoliberalism in a populist era.