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One index for everything published: records, stories, watchable media, community memories and places. 31 records match.

cultural practice · Well supportedAnansi stories

The Akan-derived cycle of trickster tales about Anansi the spider, foundational to Jamaican oral culture and children's storytelling, and a recurring source for pantomime, folk performance and lyric imagery.

cultural practice · Well supportedBurru drumming

Burru, an African-derived Kingston hand-drumming tradition carried in yards and at Christmas masquerade, which fed directly into Rastafari Nyabinghi drumming through Count Ossie's Wareika Hills camp and shaped the pulse of later Jamaican music.

cultural practice · Well supportedClean-and-slack double cut

The dancehall industry practice of recording two versions of a song, a 'clean' cut for radio and a 'slack' or 'raw' cut for the dance and sound systems, a pragmatic response to airplay standards that itself fuels debates about hypocrisy and censorship.

cultural practice · Well supportedCombination tune

The dancehall format pairing a deejay with a singer (or two deejays) trading verses on one record, popularised by acts like Michigan & Smiley and later hit-makers such as Chaka Demus & Pliers.

cultural practice · Well supportedDinki Mini

The song-and-dance tradition of the nine-night wake, strongest in St Mary and Jamaica's east: up-tempo, defiantly lively music in the face of death, danced through the nights after a passing, with the benta — a bamboo zither — among its distinctive instruments.

cultural practice · Well supportedDouble-entendre lyricism

The dancehall and older mento tradition of double-entendre, coded double-meaning wordplay that signifies sexual or pointed content while evading literal censorship, a craft skill at the centre of the 'clever versus crude' slackness debate.

cultural practice · Well supportedDuppy

Jamaican word and folk belief for a ghost or restless spirit, rooted in African-Caribbean cosmology and threaded through countless songs — from 'Duppy Conqueror' onward — as image of danger, mischief and the dead.

cultural practice · ProbableEttu

Afro-Jamaican ceremony and song-dance tradition of Hanover parish, associated with families tracing Yoruba descent: feasting, drumming and dance at memorial and family occasions. Less widely documented than Kumina or Revival, it is one of the parish-level traditions that kept African practice specific rather than general.

cultural practice · Well supportedGrounation Day

Rastafari holy day observed on 21 April marking Haile Selassie's 1966 visit to Jamaica, when crowds greeted him at Kingston's airport; considered the second most important Rastafari holiday after 2 November (Selassie's coronation), it is celebrated with Nyabinghi drumming, chanting and reasoning.

cultural practice · ProbableGun-finger salute and 'forward'

The 'gun finger' salute and vocal 'forward', the raised-finger gesture and gun-sound approval used by dancehall crowds and selectors to demand a rewind, a ritual of the dance that also figures in debates over gun symbolism in the culture.

cultural practice · Well supportedItal

The Rastafari dietary and lifestyle ideal ('Ital', from 'vital' with the sacred 'I') of natural, mostly vegetarian, largely salt-free and unprocessed food intended to raise 'livity'; practice varies from strict (no meat, fish, dairy, salt or processed food) to moderate, and expresses the wider Rastafari principle of natural living.

cultural practice · Well supportedJamaican proverbs

The dense oral tradition of Jamaican sayings — from 'every hoe have dem stick a bush' to 'wanti wanti cyaan get it' — collected and performed by Louise Bennett and woven through mento, folk song and lyric.

cultural practice · Well supportedJonkonnu

The masked street masquerade of the Jamaican Christmas: costumed characters — Horsehead, Pitchy-Patchy, the Devil among them — processing behind fife and drum, in a tradition documented since the plantation era that blends African masquerade with European mumming. Parish troupes and Festival stagings keep it alive.

cultural practice · Well supportedKumina

Afro-Jamaican ceremonial practice rooted in the Kongo heritage of post-emancipation Central African arrivals, strongest in St Thomas: kbandu and playing-cyas drums, call-and-response song and Kongo-derived ritual language in ceremonies for ancestors. Its drumming fed the Rastafari nyabinghi tradition and, through it, reggae.

cultural practice · Well supportedLabel scratching

Sound-system practice of scratching or soaking the labels off exclusive US rhythm-and-blues 78s so rivals could not identify and duplicate a set's biggest tunes, an early form of the exclusivity that later produced the dubplate.

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