Tam Hat

A Jamaican Cap With Room for Dreadlocks

Size is the tam's defining generosity. The tam is a tall, round knitted cap, usually brightly colored, from Jamaica, and every part of that description does work. Knitted construction gives the cap stretch and softness, so it can expand to hold what is placed inside it and settle comfortably on the head. The tall, round form gives volume above and around the head rather than a close skim of fabric. Bright coloring makes the cap a visible, expressive part of dress rather than a purely functional covering, a cap meant to be seen as well as worn. Together those qualities produced a cap suited to a particular and important purpose in Jamaican cultural and religious life.

That purpose is the tam's best-known association. It is associated with the Rastafarian movement as a way for adherents to tuck away their dreadlocks. Dreadlocks carry deep significance for adherents, and they also require practical accommodation in daily life: a cap that gathers and holds them neatly keeps them together, protected and out of the way during work and movement. A small close cap cannot do that job. The tam's tall, large, knitted body can, enclosing the locks within its round form while the knitting stretches to accommodate them. Respect for that function is part of describing the tam accurately: it is not a novelty or a costume piece, but a practical and culturally meaningful cap whose size exists because the need it serves is real.

A Scottish Name Carried to Jamaica

The tam's name records a journey between cultures. The name doubtlessly derives from the British colonial era, after the Scottish national cap, the tam o'shanter. During that era, Scottish forms and names travelled widely through the structures of empire, and a Jamaican knitted cap took the shortened name tam from the famous Scottish bonnet. The two caps should not be confused, however, because the resemblance is mainly in the name and in a general softness of form. The Jamaican tam is its own garment: taller, rounder, knitted, usually brightly colored, and shaped by Jamaican use, in particular its association with the Rastafarian movement and the tucking away of dreadlocks, a purpose the Scottish bonnet never served.

The closest construction comparison points in yet another direction. In construction, the tam is similar to the tuque, but much larger. That single qualification, much larger, is the practical key to the whole garment, because it is the extra knitted room that lets the tam perform its role, while the tuque's closer fit serves simple warmth. For identification, then, hold three facts together: Jamaican origin, a tall round knitted body usually in bright colors, and dimensions well beyond a tuque, made to contain dreadlocks with room to spare. A cap meeting that description is a tam in the Jamaican sense, carrying a borrowed Scottish name that history delivered to it during the British colonial era, and worn today with a cultural meaning entirely its own.