SUSPECT OTHERS

Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race

in Multiethnic Suriname

Suspect Others explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity

arise from a unique set of rituals in Suriname, a post-colonial Carib-
bean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competi-
tion for belonging, political power, and control over natural resources,
Surinamese Hindus and Ndyuka Maroons look to spirit mediums to
understand the causes of their successes and sufferings and to know
the hidden minds of relatives and rivals alike. Although mediumship
promises knowledge of others, devotees also engage with mediums to
learn about their own identities, thereby turning interpersonal suspi-
cion into doubts about the self.
Through a rich ethnographic comparison of the different ways in
which spirit mediums and their devotees navigate suspicion, Suspect
Others shows how present-day Caribbean peoples come to experience
selves that defy concepts of personhood inflicted by the colonial past.
Stuart Earle Strange investigates key questions about the nature of self-
knowledge, religious revelation, and racial discourse in a hyper-diverse
society. At a moment when exclusionary suspicions dominate global
politics, Suspect Others elucidates self-identity as a social process that
emerges from the paradoxical ways in which people must look to others
to know themselves.

(Anthropological Horizons)

stuart earle strange is an assistant professor of anthropology at

Yale-NUS College.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL HORIZONS

Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

This series, begun in 1991, focuses on theoretically informed ethno-

graphic works addressing issues of mind and body, knowledge and
power, equality and inequality, the individual and the collective. Inter-
disciplinary in its perspective, the series makes a unique contribution in
several other academic disciplines: women’s studies, history, philoso-
phy, psychology, political science, and sociology.

For a list of the books published in this series see p. 283.

Suspect Others
Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and
Race in Multiethnic Suriname

STUART EARLE STRANGE

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2021
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN 978-1-4875-0970-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-0972-9 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-4875-4026-5 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4875-0971-2 (PDF)

Anthropological Horizons

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Suspect others : spirit mediums, self-knowledge, and race in

multiethnic Suriname / Stuart Earle Strange.
Other titles: Spirit mediums, self-knowledge, and race in multiethnic
Suriname.
Names: Strange, Stuart Earle, author.
Series: Anthropological horizons.
Description: Series statement: Anthropological horizons | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210171278 | Canadiana (ebook)
20210171545 | ISBN 9781487509705 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487540265 (paper) |
ISBN 9781487509712 (PDF) | ISBN 9781487509729 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Channeling (Spiritualism) – Social aspects – Suriname. |
LCSH: Mediums – Suriname. | LCSH: Self-perception – Suriname. |
LCSH: Suspicion – Suriname. | LCSH: Suriname – Religious life and
customs. | LCSH: Suriname – Ethnic relations. | LCSH: Suriname – Race
relations.
Classification: LCC BF1242.S75 S87 2021 | DDC 133.9/109883 – dc23

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le

Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
Dedicated to Sa Emma Losa, Da Sudeng African, and
Kissoondial Sewpersad
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3
1 Settlement and Self-Doubt 30
2 A Fragmented Unity: Hindu Selves, Doubt, and Shakti Ritual 59
3 Mediated Selves: Ndyuka Knowledge, Suspicion, and
Revelation 91
4 Painful Interactions 125
5 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 160
6 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 188
Conclusion 217

Notes 227
Bibliography 243
Index 269
This page intentionally left blank
Figures

1 Map of Suriname 2
2 The Ndyuka homeland on the Tapanahoni River 32
3 Guru Kissoondial performing a puja 61
4 Durga image at the centre of the Sri Shakti Mandir 72
5 A manifesting deity takes the oath 75
6 Da John prepares obiya 98
7 Da Ekspidisi’s altar for an Ampuku spirit 115
8 Da Sako purifying Ba Markus 120
9 Da Sako 128
10 Ma Tres 129
11 Sanganni Baba 147
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

To begin with, credit has to be given where credit is most due. None
of this could have been written without the extensive help and sagac-
ity of all of my Surinamese friends and family. Da John Willems, my
matchless teacher of all things Okanisi, stands out for the most profuse
recognition. Without his help this book would have been impossible.
Rosita “Sharda” and Sieukram “Djin” Chinkoe, and the late Kissoon-
dial Sewprasad, my “Guru” in Shakti practice, whose loss is mourned
by everyone who had the honour of knowing him, must also be singled
out for particular appreciation. The same goes for the dearly missed Ma
Emma Losa as well as her children – Ba Giermo, Ba Ween, Sa Anguena,
Ba Paki, Ba Rafa, Sa Shanta, and Ba Oko – and Djin and Sharda’s chil-
dren – Renoush, Radha, and Manisha – along with their uncle “Djinka”
Chinkoe, his wife, Sharda, and their children, Rishi and Roshni. Da
Sako and Ma Tres were immensely accommodating and generous with
their time and wisdom and played a pivotal role in making this book
what it is. I must also express my sincerest thanks to my many other
Surinamese friends who made this work possible: the late Da Tony Afri-
can and Ma Sibena; Da Robby; Ma Domi; the late Da Mangwa and Ma
Bobo; Ba Michael; Ba Url; Ba Reggie; Ma Dudu; Da Tano; Sa Agnes; Sa
Eleanor; Ba Ewal and Sa Antonia; Lafernia; Valentino; Pascal; Baayah;
Kaju; Ba Brian; Ba Benko; Da Henny; Sa Irma; Da Thomas; Da Yomoi;
Anand; Chiney; Derik; Rajeesh; Aunty Dharo; Aunty Sita; Subhas and
Mami; and Sa Marlena, among many others.
Generous financial support from Yale-NUS College made this book
possible. A workshop funded by Yale-NUS College was decisive for
my rethinking of the manuscript and making it into a proper book. I
cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to Kristina Wirtz and Stephan
Palmié for their unparalleled advice and theoretical acumen. Neena
Mahadev, Cecilia Van Hollen, and Christine Walker, are likewise owed
xii Acknowledgments

my appreciation for holding the book up against their peerless stan-

dards. I am indebted for the help of my superb Yale-NUS colleagues
Nienke Boer; Jean and John Comaroff; Joshua Comaroff; Wannes
Dupont; Erik Harms; Zachery Howlett; Andrew Hui; Kevin Gold-
stein; Parashar Kulkarni; Lau Ting Hui; Anju Paul; Matthew Schneider-
Mayerson; and Robin Zheng. Also at Yale-NUS, John Driffill, Steve
Ferzacca, Jeanette Ickovics, Jane Jacobs, Terry Nardin, Joanne Roberts,
and Naoko Shimazu gave me unwavering support during all stages of
writing. Marcia Inhorn warrants special credit for her unerringly accu-
rate advice. Robin, Brian, Zoe, and Neena MacAdoo are similarly owed
special appreciation for their help. At National University of Singapore,
Indira Arumugam, Danzeng Jimba, Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Bart van
Wassenhove, and Chitra Venkataramani have all offered me much val-
ued encouragement.
In the United States, this book could never have materialized without
Webb Keane or Paul C. Johnson, both of whom provided time that they
did not have to help me conceive and complete a decade-long undertak-
ing. The same goes for Aisha Khan, Matthew Hull, and Michael Lem-
pert, who all extended me irreplaceable help. At Michigan, Jatin Dua,
Judith Irvine, Stuart Kirsch, Alaina Lemon, Bruce Mannheim, Barbra
Meek, Erik Mueggler, Damani Patridge, and Andrew Shryock were con-
sistent sources of outstanding guidance. The “Ling” and “Ethno” labs
at the University of Michigan and the Harvard Anthropology writing
group led by Jean and John Comaroff permitted me much-appreciated
structure and feedback. In Brazil, a seminar and a conference organized
by Olívia Gomes da Cunha at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Fed-
eral do Rio de Janeiro, were critical for the development of this project;
Olívia stands out for her expertise and commitment to keeping Suri-
namese Maroons at the forefront of anthropological scholarship. In
the United Kingdom, a workshop on “Envy and Greed” organized by
Geoffrey Hughes and Megnaa Mehtta at the London School of Econom-
ics was crucial to the genesis of chapter 6, and I’d like to thank both of
the organizers for their kind invitation and helpful critiques.
Rogerio Brittes Pires has been an especially important contributor to
my thinking about Suriname; I want to thank him for his hospitality and
intellectual generosity. Joshua Shapero has been a nonpareil sounding
board for my ideas; I thank him for his friendship. Thanks are equally
owed to the many, many others who read chapters or provided insights
at every stage of writing: David Akin, Ismail Alatas; Saul Allen, Liana
Chua, Jacob Doherty, Elina Hartikainen, Geoffrey Hughes, Jieun Kim,
Sinah Kloss, Julienne Obadia, Scott MacLochlainn, James Meador, Mar-
celo Moura Mello, Louis Römer, Perry Sherouse, Linda Takamine, and
 Acknowledgments xiii

the late Roy Wagner. Terre Fisher deserves my fullest commendation for
her critical editorial assistance when I needed it the most.
Recognition is owed to all those responsible for shaping my intel-
lectual trajectory, especially Karen Richman, but also Ken Bilby, Eric
Gable, Margaret Huber, John Kelly, and Stephan Palmié.The late
H.U.E Thoden van Velzen deserves particular recognition for making
this fieldwork possible and providing the best possible model of eth-
nographic and theoretical rigour. I also want to heartily acknowledge
the genuinely esteemed kindness shown to me by Nicole Constable,
Joseph Alter, and Peter van der Veer. At the National University of
Singapore’s Asia Research Institute (ARI), Kenneth Dean has pro-
vided me with an intellectual home and been a source of much-valued
encouragement.
Money, of course, is needed to make things happen. The National
Science Foundation (NSF), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC),
the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Michigan Department of Anthropol-
ogy, and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation graciously gave me
the financial backing for my research and writing. Likewise, my start-
up fund from Yale-NUS College made possible follow-up fieldwork in
2018 and enabled me to finish my writing.
Parts of this book have previously appeared in the Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute as “The Dialogical Collective: Mediumship,
Pain, and the Interactive Creation of Ndyuka Maroon Subjectivity”
22(3):516–33, and in Ethnos as “Indigenous Spirits, Pluralist Sovereignty,
and the Aporia of Surinamese Hindu Belonging” 84(4):642–59. I want
to thank Matei Candea and Nils Bubandt for their creative suggestions
and advice on these articles, as well as all the reviewers for both publi-
cations for their generative comments.
A number of other friends deserve recognition: Rola Abimorched;
Blaire Andres; Sasikumar Balasundaram; Dale Battistoli; Dan Bir-
chok; Janet, Joshua, Noah, and the late Vade Bolton; Andrew Bourne;
Archange and Michelle Calixte; Lorne Darnell; Isaac Kofi Dzedzeanu;
Katharina Erbe; Matthew Hall; Cathy Herrmann; Anura and Sujeewa
Jayatilake; Ujin Kim; Lamia Moghnie; Tim Morris; Prash Naidu; Drew
Norton; Purnima Raghunathan; David Regis; Achim Rühl; Angelica
Serna; Valence Sim Chong Yew; Greg Storms; Nick Thng and all the
members of Bao De Gong; Leoni Yogaraj; Vincent Zompa; Charles
Zuckerman. I’d also like to acknowledge my sincere debt to Consuelo
Maralit for her tireless patience and assistance.
At University of Toronto Press, Jodi Lewchuk is owed my vociferous
thanks for her support and assistance, while Michael Lambek has been
a source of the best kind of scholarly vision. I also want to thank my two
xiv Acknowledgments

anonymous reviewers for the deeply considered comments and recom-

mendations that have done so much to enrich this book.
My parents, Anne and Keith Strange, deserve everything for their
tireless support through all stages of this process, riding out numer-
ous moments of perplexity and frustration to throw the full weight
of their reassurance behind what must often have seemed a quixotic
quest. Edith Koch, Christof Koch, Alex and Malou Koch, and Ingrid and
Michael Koch all merit fulsome thanks for putting up with me.
And, of course, Gabriele Koch, Ulysses, and Tosca. Gabriele has my
greatest appreciation of all. This book would have been impossible
without her incisive critiques and unfailingly accurate editorial advice.
She deserves the most unreserved and heartfelt gratitude for provid-
ing me with every kind of support required for bringing this book to a
truly meaningful completion. She has been the touchstone for all that I
do and the source of my happiness. Nothing brings me greater joy than
looking forward to the rest of our lives together! I am forever grateful
for her love.
SUSPECT OTHERS

Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race

in Multiethnic Suriname
2 Suspect Others

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Paramaribo

FRENCH
GUIANA
SURINAME

GUYANA

Suriname

South
America

BRAZIL

Figure 1 Map of Suriname.

Introduction

In June 2009 I moved into an unfinished concrete house in Sunny

Point, a majority Afro-Surinamese Maroon squatter settlement on the
outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname’s capital and only city.1 Located on
the main road to town, the house was being built piecemeal to match
two others that belonged to different branches of the same extended
Indo-Surinamese Hindu family. Soon after I took up residence in one
sawdust-scented room, Sharmila,2 the owner’s niece, dropped by. In the
course of her inquiries about how I was settling in and what my plans
were, Sharmila told me that I should really visit her astrologer. Having
recently finished a jail sentence for drug trafficking, Sharmila told me
that she had sought out a spiritual guide to explain why she encountered
so much difficulty in her life. The astrologer revealed that Sharmila had
landed in prison because she failed to appreciate the existential prereq-
uisite of suspicion and mistrust. According to the astrologer, Sharmila’s
inadequate suspicion of the so-called friends who had taken advantage
of her was evidence that she lacked understanding, not only of others,
but also of her own true nature. Her astrologer’s revelations, Sharmila
concluded, allowed her to know herself more clearly, sever the deceiv-
ing relationships that had trapped her, and restart her life.
My curiosity piqued, I asked for details, and it soon became clear
that Sharmila’s astrologer was, in fact, a spirit medium. A few days
later, Sharmila and I went for a consultation, joined by her uncle Sieuw
and his wife, Priya. We arrived in the early evening at the medium’s
home in a south Paramaribo neighbourhood and found half a dozen
people waiting to be admitted. Some were visibly sick or anxious. Oth-
ers looked unsure but hopeful about visiting the medium or strained to
avoid eye contact, something I later learned stemmed from fear of expo-
sure to friends and family who might belittle their credulity or be the
very source of their sufferings. As we waited, we had a chance to chat
4 Suspect Others

with the medium’s parents. I learned that the medium was in her early
twenties, which is unusually young. Her mother explained that since
childhood it had been clear that her daughter had close contact with
the invisible but significant world of gods and spirits.3 While still a tod-
dler, the future medium had disconcerted her parents by asking why
they could not see the infant Hindu deities with whom she tumbled,
giggling, about the house.
After a half-hour wait, Sharmila went in to consult with the
medium alone about a private problem. Priya and I went next. Upon
entering, we found the medium in a corner, sitting cross-legged on a
chair. Despite her youthfulness and slight build, she had an undeni-
ably regal bearing that comported with her possession by the beatific
demon-slaying goddess Durga. Greeting us with the outstretched
open palm that symbolizes the dispelling of fear, the medium
declared her divine name and waited for us to state our problems.
I looked to Priya for guidance, but she had become visibly appre-
hensive. Although Priya at times seemed to accept that mediums
truly embody deities, on other occasions she voiced her suspicion
that they were nothing but duplicitous charlatans. Now, face to face
with her doubts but unwilling to risk offending a deity, she preferred
to stay silent. Finally, pressured to say something, Priya asked about
the health of her daughters, which the goddess straightforwardly
answered. We then quickly left.
With a desire to recoup the rest of the night, Sieuw drove us to visit
Priya’s mother, Anjali. We found her and the families of two of Priya’s
brothers gathered in the zinc-walled yard they all shared, enjoying
the evening cool. Anjali sat at the centre of activity, holding forth to
her daughters-in-law and many grandchildren. When Anjali inquired
where we had been, she chuckled as Priya recounted our visit. Waving
one hand, she said how dangerously irresponsible it was to “believe”
(Sarnami: biswas kare) or “trust” (Sarnami: bharosa kare; Dutch/Sranan:
vertrouw/fertrow) such a person, disdainfully referring to the medium.
At the time, I took Anjali’s contempt to be a condemnation of all
mediums in favour of the orthodox Sanatan Dharm Hinduism recog-
nized by the Surinamese state. I did not yet know that Anjali was a
medium herself. A few weeks later, however, when I came down with
an illness, Anjali sat by my bedside and offered healing through the
beneficence of her own possessing spirits. What I had initially taken as
Anjali’s derision of superstition had actually been an assertion of her
own deities’ superiority at revealing both the deceptions of others and
the ways deceivers deceive themselves about their true spiritual iden-
tity. I eventually realized that by voicing such scepticism despite her
 Introduction 5

own mediumship, Anjali was also shielding Hinduism from association

with ritual practices stereotyped as Afro-Surinamese.
Mediumship is the act of inviting a spirit or deity to occupy a per-
son’s body and communicate with human audiences (Boddy 1994;
Johnson 2014; Lambek 1981; F.M. Smith 2006). In many contexts around
the world, visiting a medium is a common and accepted way of access-
ing extra-human knowledge about one’s success, misfortune, and the
hidden minds of relatives and rivals. In contemporary Suriname, as
elsewhere, the methods that mediums use and the solutions that they
provide are subject to intense mistrust. Competing mediums, the clergy
of organized religions, and conventions of social respectability that
treat such practices as superstition and connect them with disreputable
racialized differences all combine to challenge the legitimacy of medi-
umship. While many Surinamese affirm that genuine spiritual power
exists just beyond everyday human awareness, ritual practices that
promise hidden knowledge are entangled in pervasive suspicions and
doubts about how or through whom this spiritual power might actually
appear and who can be trusted to verify it.
Suspicion is a feeling “that decidedly undermines mutual under-
standing and cooperation” (Harr 2013, 317). The engagement of
Sharmila, Priya, and Anjali with ritual mediumship brings differ-
ent kinds of suspicion to the fore. More broadly, however, across my
two years of fieldwork in Suriname between 2007 and 2013,4 I repeat-
edly received warnings to “Trust no one!” Whenever I said my good-
byes, Hindus and Ndyuka Maroons earnestly instructed me to “take
care” (Dutch: voorzichtig). Their neighbours and kin, they murmured,
used spells, poisons, and deceit. On first meeting people, I would be
bluntly advised not to accept food from their neighbours or vaguely
cautioned to avoid members of other ethno-racial groups. As was true
for Sharmila, suspicion might even implicate oneself. Desi, a middle-
aged Ndyuka Maroon man, summarized this way of thinking when he
explained that his father had always told him “not to trust anyone, not
even yourself. Because when you want to go to the city in the morn-
ing, by afternoon your thoughts have already changed.” Though who
is deemed trustworthy expands or contracts in reference to family or
friends, suspicion forms an elemental part of daily existence for Hindu
and Maroon Surinamese.
This book explores what the practices of Hindu and Afro-Surinamese
mediumship disclose about the suspicions and doubts that pervade
Surinamese social life. Suspicion, doubt, and mistrust are epistemic affects
that reveal and are transformed by the problems of self-knowledge,
responsibility, and belonging that are addressed by Hindu and Maroon
6 Suspect Others

mediums. Feelings like suspicion are affects because they denote the
physical intensity with which interpersonal relations register in the
body and epistemic because they percolate up from basic apprehensions
about what it is possible to know. Arguing that the self is always a rev-
elation of the social relations that compose it, the chapters that follow
describe how contemporary Hindu and Maroon mediums engage these
epistemic affects to shatter the unreflective self-awareness of those who
consult with them and introduce distinctive objectifications of the self
as a spirit being (or beings) that eludes everyday awareness. Medium-
ship, I contend, confronts the uncertainties of memory, thought, and
feeling with which self-consciousness swarms to turn suspicions about
others into doubts about what unaided human beings can really know
about themselves. This book shows how Surinamese Maroons and Hin-
dus attempt to resolve insistent apprehensions about self-knowledge,
belonging, and responsibility, yet remain unsettled by what their
solutions mean for how they should live in a rapidly changing multi-
ethno-racial and religious nation.

Diversity, Land, and the Politics of Mistrust

In Suriname, epistemic affects like suspicion, doubt, and mistrust are

indelibly stamped by the nation’s tragic legacy of plantation colonial-
ism. A small nation on the Atlantic coast of northeastern South America,
Suriname is the most ethno-racially and linguistically diverse country
in the Caribbean, and its society remains deeply marked by the after-
math of its violent plantation past. A former Dutch colony, it has also
been repeatedly transformed by new waves of immigrants over three
centuries of documented history.
Suriname’s colonial history is disproportionately a story of the eco-
nomic productivity European plantation owners coerced from, first,
enslaved Africans from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth
centuries and, later, Asian indentured labourers from the 1870s until
the 1930s (van Lier 1971; van Stripiaan 1993). When the English first
occupied Suriname in 1650, they quickly made it into a slave society.
Like the “sugar islands” being organized elsewhere in the Caribbean,
the new colony was chartered with the singular purpose of gratifying
insatiable mercantilist appetites for sugar, cocoa, and coffee (Price and
Price 1992; van Lier 1971). When the Dutch conquered the colony in
1667, they either violently defeated or co-opted the Indigenous Carib
and Arawakan peoples and expanded slave plantations until, by the
mid-eighteenth century, Suriname had become the Netherlands’ larg-
est and wealthiest slave colony (Price and Price 1992; van Lier 1971).
 Introduction 7

By the early nineteenth century, however, the colony’s economy was in

decline. The introduction of indentured labourers from India, Java, and
China following the abolition of slavery in 1863 failed to mitigate the
colony’s economic deterioration, and it was only with the discovery of
bauxite in the early twentieth century that it regained some degree of
commercial importance. Following the Second World War, Suriname
assumed home rule, and then became an independent republic in 1975.
Today, Suriname’s population of approximately 600,000 includes
Indigenous Amerindians; the offspring of Indo-Surinamese (generally
known as Hindustanis), Javanese, and Chinese indentured labourers;
Maroons, the descendants of self-emancipated enslaved Africans who
fled to the rainforests and forced the eighteenth-century Dutch colonial
state to recognize their freedom; Afro-Surinamese Creoles, the progeny
of enslaved Africans who remained on coastal plantations until aboli-
tion; and individuals of “mixed race,” the category created by the gov-
ernment to designate those with parents from two or more ethno-racial
groups. While the Surinamese state has historically recognized these
populations, these groups now increasingly live among more recent,
and often undocumented, immigrants from Guyana, Haiti, Brazil, and
China (Hoogbergen and Kruijt 2004; Suriname Census 2012).5
Suriname’s ethno-racial pluralism is matched by significant diversity
in language and religion. Alongside the official Dutch of the Surinam-
ese state, each of Suriname’s ethno-racial identities speaks one or more
languages, of which English and English-Portuguese Creoles (such
as Sranan, Sáamaka, and Ndyuka), Sarnami (an eastern Hindi koiné),
Javanese, and Mandarin are the most common (Damsteegt 2002).
Though language separates Surinamese from one another far more than
in comparably multiethnic but effectively monolingual neighbouring
countries like Guyana and Trinidad, most Surinamese share at least one
language and a generic feeling of Surinamese national identity (Carlin
and Arends 2002). Religion in Suriname is equally diverse, with most
Surinamese professing to be Hindus, Muslims, Catholics, Pentecostals,
or Moravians (Suriname Census 2012).6 These official categories, how-
ever, conceal substantial sectarian quarrels7 and allegiances to multiple
ritual systems. Many Creole and Maroon Afro-Surinamese, for exam-
ple, nominally identify as Christians but maintain ritual obligations to
ancestral “winti”8 spirits.
Suriname’s pluralism creates a complex ritual and moral economy
in which individuals must measure ethno-racial and religious respect-
ability against commonly held but publicly stigmatized fears of witch-
craft and other spiritual afflictions (Jap-a-Joe, Sjak Shie, and Vernooij
2001). Though freely professing pride in their ethno-racial and religious
8 Suspect Others

identities, Surinamese experience a pronounced undertow of suspicion,

which can, in moments of personal and familial crisis, lead people to
consult multiple and often conflicting sources of ritual knowledge.
Such consultations offset the pervasive conflation of ethno-racial and
religious difference with the occult dangers of black magic. Mistrust is
thus two-sided, since individuals may both accuse ethno-racial others
of creating widespread socio-spiritual adversity and yet look to their
spiritual authorities for possible relief.

Histories of Dispossession and Belonging

Belonging – defined here as a deeply felt sense of identification with a

place – is key to understanding the suspicion and doubt that manifest in
and through mediumship, the central theme of this book. But what does
it mean to belong in a context of “racial capitalism” (Robinson 1983)
historically premised on unfree labour, dispossession, and the selective
concession or seizure of rights and privileges? The question of belong-
ing arose as a problem in the colonial period, when enforced racial
hierarchy created ethno-racial differences and divided newly racialized
populations from one another, and it remains critical to everyday inter-
actions in Suriname’s hyper-plural society today.
Throughout most of the colonial period, a white-supremacist regime
run by European planters and merchants effectively barred non-whites
from any legal rights, including land ownership. As unfree labourers
working a stolen Indigenous territory for a small European minority,
enslaved Africans and indentured Asians found themselves with no
recourse to protection from systemic abuse (Hoefte 1998; Oostindie
2011, 2006; van Stripiaan 1993). Institutionalized exclusion made the
very possibility of belonging difficult – how could enslaved or inden-
tured populations belong to the soil that sustained them but which they
could not officially possess?
Despite attempts by the plantation owners who controlled the colo-
nial state to dispossess them, Afro-Surinamese and Asians neverthe-
less claimed territory through both outright rebellion and squatting.
In 1760, after six decades of guerrilla war, Ndyuka Maroons became
the first of Suriname’s six Maroon nations to have their liberty and ter-
ritorial rights formally recognized by the Dutch. The crippling costs of
ineffective military expeditions against Maroon guerrillas led the Dutch
colonial government to affirm the territorial and political autonomy of
Suriname’s most populous Maroon peoples in exchange for their aid in
suppressing future insurrections (Bilby 1997; Green 1974; Lenoir 1975;
Price 1983). These treaties granted Maroons “tribal” self-government
 Introduction 9

and collective ownership of what was, in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, remote and marginal land covered in thick rainforest. Rene-
gotiations in the 1830s forced treaty-bound Maroons to accede to gov-
ernment supervision over internal Maroon politics and kept Maroons
and their settlements away from the plantation zone around Paramar-
ibo (De Groot 1963; Lenoir 1975).
Colonial plantation owners similarly employed indentured labour-
ers from Asia as a check on the political and economic aspirations of
coastal Afro-Surinamese Creoles after their emancipation from slavery
(Klinker 1997). Within the first few decades of their arrival in 1873, “Brit-
ish Indian” Hindu and Muslim agricultural labourers had established
themselves as a self-employed “Hindustani” peasantry. Though Indian
workers were initially treated as temporary labourers who would soon
return home, it quickly became clear that a majority intended to stay.
Growing crops on abandoned plantations and marketing the produce
in Suriname’s towns, Hindustanis were able to carve out a significant
niche in Surinamese society and establish the joint families – patriarchal
households in which sons establish their own families while remain-
ing in their father’s home or building new houses on his land – that
remain the ideal, if often unachievable, goal of Hindu kinship. In the
first decades of the twentieth century, in an attempt to rectify Surina-
me’s economic and demographic decline, Dutch administrators began
to officially sanction Asian immigrants’ stubborn industriousness (Fok-
ken 2018). The colonial state affirmed Hindustanis’ legal title to the land
that they occupied and made new plots available at little to no cost.
These policies ensured that by the mid-twentieth century Hindustanis
had become the largest non-European holders of private acreage and,
along with Dutch-educated Creoles, major players in Surinamese poli-
tics (Hoefte 1998, 2014a, 2014b).
Gradually, and at different historical moments, the Dutch acceded to
non-European resistance and granted variable kinds of legal recogni-
tion. The colonial state was forced to do so because it was incapable
of indefinitely suppressing non-European self-determination. Colonial
administrators nevertheless discovered strategic value in the piece-
meal granting of access to land because it affirmed the state’s sovereign
authority as the sole arbiter of belonging – an authority that remains
critical to the legitimacy of Suriname’s post-colonial government. This
ad hoc approach to conceding different types of land rights to the
colony’s African and Asian populations enabled colonial Suriname’s
numerically small white elite to underwrite their domination of the col-
ony’s overwhelmingly non-European majority. To that end, the colonial
state ensured that granting land rights to non-Europeans maintained a
10 Suspect Others

racial hierarchy in which Asian and African ethno-racial identities were

contingent on the different ways in which the state had co-opted their
claims to belong.
The situation of Ndyukas and Hindus in contemporary Suriname is
in many respects an outcome of the Dutch colonial state’s reluctant rec-
ognition of their ancestors’ rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies. With the national GDP still almost completely reliant on environ-
mental exploitation, land today remains at the centre of contemporary
Surinamese ethno-racial suspicion and political competition. Enjoying
the world’s highest ratio of virgin rainforest to population, Suriname is
an extraction-based economy dominated by the oil, gold, lumber, and,
in the past, bauxite industries.9 While the Surinamese government – a
fractious multiparty parliamentary democracy – asserts that its legiti-
macy derives from its impartial administration of the national territory,
property rights are, in fact, decided by competition among business
interests, political patronage, and legislative power (Ramsoedh 2001).
Historically based on ethno-racial factionalism and organized around
the political charisma of their leaders, Surinamese political parties vie
to control the country’s natural wealth, even as this wealth is sold off to
foreign corporations (Dew 1978, 1994; Hoefte 2014b; Ramsoedh 2001).
Despite contemporary Suriname’s immense natural resources and
small population, poverty afflicts nearly half of the population.10 This
reality makes questions about who deserves the proceeds of the nation’s
natural resources a key preoccupation. Just as Brackette Williams (1991)
incisively detailed for Suriname’s neighbour and close social ana-
logue, Guyana, the interpenetration of land, capital, and governance
in Suriname permits racial ideologies constructed under colonial white
supremacy to retain the force of common sense in post-colonial social
life. In this way, colonial policies of divide and rule through land have
endured and continue to shape Surinamese ethno-racial self-awareness.
Even as Surinamese from every ethno-racial background are careful to
acknowledge that “All people are one,” ethno-racial differences con-
tinue to be assessed according to a hierarchy of deservingness, the ori-
gins of which stretch back to European rationalizations of slavery and
the supposed virtue of extractive capitalist toil.
Ironically, this history has meant that exploitive labour remains a
touchstone in arguments about ethno-racial self-worth made by all of
Suriname’s diasporic populations. Colonial plantation owners mea-
sured the value of non-Europeans with reference to the price of sugar.
Now ethno-racial deservingness is weighed according to a group’s per-
ceived contribution to an ideal of national “development” (ontwikkeling)
that pegs success to the achievement of western European standards of
 Introduction 11

living even though the reality of contemporary capitalism ensures that

such prosperity remains largely unachievable for most Surinamese.
Deservedness is therefore still assessed against a Dutch-derived imagi-
nary of a “proper” (netjes) cultural commitment to work that assumes
that some degree of conformity to European-derived values is neces-
sary for people to be included in the nation. As Shona Jackson has char-
acterized a similar situation in Guyana, “The method in which each
[ethno-racial] group was established as a labouring population or failed
to be fully identified with teleologically oriented labour had specific
consequences for later social rejection or integration” (2012, 68).
Though ethno-racial competition has declined as the major predic-
tor of Surinamese politics, many Surinamese nonetheless imagine
Surinamese social life as a battle for ascendency among ethno-racial
groups with irreconcilable ideas about what entitles them to belong in
Suriname (Hoefte 2014b; Marchand 2012; Ramsoedh 2001). Hindus and
Maroons, Suriname’s largest and fastest-growing populations, there-
fore both assert that they merit primacy in an imagined yet functionally
impossible Surinamese ethno-racial hierarchy.
Forged under slavery and indenture, this ideology of ethno-racial
struggle was both ingrained and transformed by the economic and
political changes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Asian
immigrants were establishing themselves on the coast, Suriname’s
economy began to transition from agro-industrial slavery and inden-
ture to wage-based mining, rubber tapping, and logging. Maroons were
at the leading edge of this transformation. Maroons went from being
a co-opted threat to a pool of forest-specialist wage labourers who cut
timber and provided river transport (Groot 1977; Thoden van Velzen
and van Wetering 2004, 2013). The long-term absorption of Maroons
into the wider economy has enabled the Surinamese state to actively
intervene in traditional Maroon politics even as it refuses to fully recog-
nize Maroon self-rule (Price 2012).11 Maroons find themselves subject to
the economic pressures of coastal capitalism, with a rapidly dwindling
ability to resist a central government that includes ever more Maroon
politicians and parties but little sense of Maroon solidarity.
Since the end of a seven-year civil war in 1992, during which pre-
dominantly Ndyuka Maroon guerrillas fought Dési Bouterse’s multira-
cial military government, Suriname’s Maroon population has exploded
(Campbell 2020; Hoogbergen and Kruijt 2005; Guicherit 2004; Price
2002). Maroon homelands previously barely accessible to outsiders
have been opened to artisanal and corporate mining and logging. In
search of education, medical care, and economic opportunity, a major-
ity from each of Suriname’s Maroon nations12 has moved to Paramaribo
12 Suspect Others

and other coastal towns, and they are now totally reliant on employ-
ment by the state or in construction and mining.
Desperate for urban housing, Maroon migrants have been forced to squat
in marginal places like Sunny Point – an at first illegally occupied govern-
ment housing project an hour’s bus ride from downtown Paramaribo that is
imagined by other Surinamese to be a hotbed of Maroon crime and sorcery.
In many such settlements around Suriname’s urban core, Maroon migrants
find themselves surrounded by Indo-Surinamese landowners who are
deeply suspicious of them (de Bruijne and Schalkwijk 2008). In such urban
settings, Indo-Surinamese have moved away from farming and increas-
ingly work alongside Maroons, often as unequal partners, in construction
and natural resource extraction as well as in government offices.
Even as Maroons do what they can to gain the benefits of politi-
cal inclusion, they continue to face discrimination that exposes their
oppression by a cultural ideology that regards them as unassimilable
to European-derived norms of respectability. Maroons counter these
stereotypes with deep-seated suspicions about other Surinamese, espe-
cially Indo-Surinamese, whom they accuse of using any and every
political and magical means to unfairly dominate Surinamese society.
Such contestation over who deserves to belong is at the foundation of
much interpersonal and interracial mistrust. The Dutch colonial state, to
preserve its position as the final arbiter of belonging in Suriname, relied on
the ethno-racial animosities they themselves fomented. Colonial officials
made belonging a problem of formal legal recognition to be settled by
judges and magistrates – something which remains central to Suriname’s
post-colonial governance. But Suriname’s non-European populations
have also pursued alternative ways to claim belonging to the land – prac-
tices that continue to emphasize distinct traditions of kinship and ritual
relatedness and that often contradict the legal logics of European-derived
state institutions. These differences make any shared account of Surinam-
ese belonging difficult and further aggravate the suspicions and doubts
underlying relations, both between groups and with the spirit world.

Mediumship in Suriname

The Surinamese state defines belonging as acceptance of its sovereignty

over the land and thereby reduces its people’s many ritual practices to
tokens of cultural diversity. The Surinamese ritual economy, however,
inverts this sovereign logic. It depicts the state as an institution ulti-
mately controlled by the invisible agencies that mediums and compet-
ing ritual specialists like Hindu pandits, Muslim imams, and Christian
pastors work to keep apparent in people’s everyday lives.
 Introduction 13

Of these specialists, it is mediums who most directly participate in the

suspicions and doubts that crisscross present-day Surinamese society.
At the heart of a consultation is the patient’s coming face to face with
the possessed medium. Though visibly human, the medium speaks
as an otherwise imperceptible spirit entity who exposes the patient’s
invisible relations with the humans, spirits, and deities that enable or
afflict them. For mediums, reality is never what it appears to be, and no
one is ever impervious to the influence of others.
Mediumship has long had an influential if controversial place in the
Surinamese imagination as both a solution to, and a source of, ubiqui-
tous intergroup and interpersonal suspicion. Colonial officials and mis-
sionaries placed mediumship among the prohibited practices labelled
“superstition” (afgoderij, literally, idol worship) that were officially
punishable by forced labour until the mid-twentieth century (Jap-a-
Joe 2001; Samson 1946). Because of its enduring associations with
immoral “black magic” (Dutch: hekserij) and Suriname’s uneducated
lower classes and “primitive” peoples, mediumship remains stigma-
tized today as opposed to the moral respectability (Dutch: netheid) of
organized Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Among the Surinamese I
got to know during my fieldwork, many Hindus and Pentecostal con-
verts took pains to avoid talking about mediumship, or did so only
in reluctant whispers or condemning asides. Whatever their religious
or racial identities, contemporary mediums are simultaneously widely
consulted and shunned, and many of the people who visit them will
publicly deny that they do so or refer to them as some other kind of
ritual specialist, as we already saw with Sharmila and her astrologer.
The most common Afro-Surinamese appellations for mediums – bonu-
man, obiyaman, and lukuman – refer to the medium’s role as a diviner
and clairvoyant healer. For Indo-Surinamese, among whom mediums
are more controversial, there is no morally neutral word for medium-
ship. Ojha is commonly used but has negative connotations of sorcery,
and no one described themselves to me using this term. No matter what
their ethno-racial origins, mediums do not show up on the national cen-
sus; they tend to operate privately from home or forest camps, and only
advertise by word of mouth. This makes it difficult to know exactly
how many there are in Suriname. In the course of my fieldwork, I met
or heard about dozens of mediums scattered throughout Paramaribo
and outlying settlements.
With Surinamese society divided among so many competing sources
of ritual authority, mediums are far from alone in providing ritual advice
and often are the last resort in a person’s attempt to find answers after
they feel that their options have otherwise been exhausted. Still, based
14 Suspect Others

on my observations, people from all ethno-racial backgrounds consult

them. Mediums are most frequently visited by members of their own
ethno-racial group, but it is not uncommon to see at least a few repre-
sentatives from each of Suriname’s main ethno-racial populations at the
shrines of well-known mediums. While the default image of a medium
is that of an Afro-Surinamese man, I also encountered numerous Hindu
mediums, and heard about at least one deceased Muslim practitioner.
Mediumship must likewise be distinguished from the many other forms
of spirit possession practised in Suriname. Unlike speaking in tongues
during charismatic church services, the spectacle of the Javanese horse
dance (Jaran Kepang), or inspired dancing at public celebrations (pée) for
Afro-Surinamese spirits (Ndyuka: gadu, Sranan: winti), mediums have
stable relations with their tutelary deities or spirits that certify them to
routinely dispense suprahuman healing and advice.
The problems that bring people to mediums show how they are posi-
tioned within the wider Surinamese economy of the ritual and the occult.
Mediums offer to resolve a range of difficult personal or familial adver-
sities as intimate and varied as legal problems, financial predicaments,
lost property, and workplace jealousy. More broadly, mediums treat all
manner of illness and incapacity, from minor pains to unemployment,
as symptoms of their patients’ battles with others who ensorcell out of
aggression and greed. Without a medium’s intervention, mediums say,
such rapacious relations will consume their patients until they succumb
to premature deaths. The search for gold and other material resources
similarly brings many patients to mediums. But successful gold strikes
or comparable economic windfalls also drive the suspicion, sorcery, and
sickness for which many people come to mediums looking for relief.13
While mediums may be maligned as “heathens” (Dutch: heiden) and
are often suspected of fraud, the hidden reality they describe in consulta-
tions does seep through the respectable facade of Surinamese public life.
Party alliances are rumoured to result from secret sacrifices, and at least
one prominent politician engages in strategic displays of ritual posses-
sion. More than this, mediums make sense of suffering using the same
interpersonal and interethnic suspicions that are the tacit, if publicly dis-
avowed, subtext of Surinamese political and social rivalries (see Thoden
van Velzen and van Wetering 2004; Parris 2011; van der Pijl 2010, 2016).

Opacity and Transparency

When Surinamese consult mediums to render their lives and interper-

sonal relations transparent, they often come away feeling opaque to
themselves. Most frequently, mediums diagnose the malign, though
 Introduction 15

perhaps unconscious, intentions of other people as the source of a

patient’s suffering. But when patients are compelled to consider what
they really know about their relations with those who harm them, they
are also confronted with what they are actually capable of knowing
about who they themselves are. A client may be implicated in their own
misfortune because they have failed to be aware of the many ways in
which their own mental states and future prospects are themselves rela-
tional. While others are often the problem, the self can itself be a semi-
alien agency and an agglomeration of multiple interrelated spirit identi-
ties whose otherness must be acknowledged if the person is to thrive.
How does a revelatory practice like mediumship shift what is opaque
and what is transparent in how people think and feel about themselves
and others? I will argue that mediums interact with patients in ways
that transform patients’ suspicions about others into doubts about their
own self-knowledge. Even doubts about the self are irreducibly social,
concerned as they are with how the knowledge of self emerges from the
evaluations of others (Bakhtin 1981; Mead 1934).14 To put it bluntly, in
Suriname, the self is actually an other.
To explain this idea, I draw on the concept of the opacity claim, which
has been used in anthropology to describe what is unknowable about
other people, to explore self-knowledge. Opacity claims arise from the
inherent unknowability of other minds. They postulate “that it is impos-
sible or at least extremely difficult to know what other people think
or feel” (Robbins and Rumsey 2008, 407–8). The Surinamese warning
“Trust no one!” is one instance of such a claim. The variety of assertions
across cultural contexts about the relative opacity or transparency of
other people’s thoughts and feelings suggests that such claims mirror
the methods available in a given society for objectifying who someone
else is and how they should be expected to behave – in other words,
the nature of the self (Danziger and Rumsey 2013). Drawing on the phi-
losopher Richard Moran (2001), Rupert Stasch (2008) and Webb Keane
(2008, 2015) have observed that ideas about the opacity of others largely
pivot on the kinds of authority that are granted to persons over them-
selves in a particular social context. As may be readily observed with
children, the mentally ill, or the senile elderly, the degree to which we
accept or suspect others’ declarations about their own dispositions and
intentions determines the social standing they are allowed. Defining
who another person really is despite their self-avowals to the contrary
is consequently among the most straightforward forms of social power
(Carey 2017; Foucault 1990).
Similarly, attempts to make one’s own self an object of socially lucid
reflection prompt doubts about what exactly these reflections are
16 Suspect Others

reflecting on. David Hume (1978 [1738]) famously portrayed how, the
moment we try to glimpse a crystalline core of selfhood, it vanishes
amidst a peal of rowdy perception (252). William James described it as
being “like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion or trying to turn
up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness” (1890, 244). Contempo-
rary philosophers remain engrossed by the same intransigent tendency
of self-reflection to render consciousness alternately transparent and
impenetrable (Moran 2001; Schwitzgebel 2011; Shoemaker 1963). These
debates tend to hinge on whether a first-person perspective imbues a
person with “translucent” knowledge of what they feel and believe or
rather makes what they are experiencing significantly opaque to their
conscious awareness. If a person’s self is appreciably hidden from their
moment-to-moment understanding, does this make their first-person
self-knowledge of a piece with others’ third-person knowledge? And
if that is so, what would then distinguish the epistemic authority that
a person feels over themselves from the authority others claim over
knowing them?
This controversy derives from the question of just how people know
what the self is. The issue is at once simple and profound: if we merely
are ourselves, why do we require additional knowledge of what we
cannot but be? As Quassim Cassam (1994, 1) explains, “A good theory
of self-knowledge may be expected to concern itself with (a) our knowl-
edge of the kind of thing that we are, and (b) the nature and extent of
our knowledge of our particular thoughts, sensations, perceptual expe-
riences, physical properties and actions.” As this definition suggests,
questions of self-knowledge are interesting because they use the pro-
pensity to reflect on self-awareness to call self-awareness into question.
Linguists call this process reflexivity – the capacity of human thought to
“presuppose, structure, represent, and characterize its own nature and
functioning” (Lucy 1999, 212).
Reflexivity is elemental to human consciousness and communication.
It combines the ability to become aware of awareness and to general-
ize both about how it works and what its workings mean (Keane 2015;
Luhrmann 2012; Silverstein 2001). In all the self’s varied significances,
reflexivity is what empowers the social presupposition that the self is
a definite thing with clearly discernible characteristics. But, because
such self-recognition is always circumscribed by socially contingent
roles, responsibilities, ontologies, and ambitions, reflexivity also sup-
ports very different objectifications of what the self is, how it should be
known over time, and who has control over this knowledge.
The doubts that reflexivity raises about the self in turn invite an
additional, socially vital complication regarding the degree to which
 Introduction 17

real self-knowledge is possible and the extent to which a person’s self-

awareness or lack thereof can be known by others. People do not unilat-
erally impose definitions on others, but also have definitions imposed
upon themselves (see Butler 1997; Foucault 1988, 1990; Hacking 1999).
To the extent that ideologies about the meanings of self-reflection define
the self, the self is always potentially subject to the same objectifica-
tions that are used to describe others. In this way, dominant conceptions
of the nature and limits of first-person reflexive authority fold back on
the self. The recursiveness of self-knowledge opens reflection on per-
sonal experience as a phenomenological crossroads where the author-
ity of any particular objectification of the self encounters the political,
epistemological, and ontological premises from which this view of the
self emerges. A third element should therefore be added to Cassam’s
definition above: self-knowledge involves ideological commitments to
self-knowledge as an epistemic ideal, one that attempts to distinguish
those with self-knowledge from those lacking it. This self-knowledge
assumes a right way and a wrong way to be aware of a self or selves
and presupposes that this knowledge and its limits are known to some
but not to others.
European philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and later
Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, who lived and wrote during the
rising tide of imperialism or at the economic zenith of racial slavery,
used self-knowledge as a supreme measure of historical agency and
confined it entirely to Europe.15 Just as Europeans claimed superior self-
knowledge to rationalize expanding colonial violence, self-knowledge
remains invested in directing attention to the accomplishment of spe-
cific paradigms of selfhood while stoking suspicions against alternative
ways of being self-aware (Johnson 2014). This self-knowledge overlaps
with the authority to describe it in ways that attribute or deflect respon-
sibility (Laidlaw 2014). A known self, for instance, can be declared a
locus of transparently free will or absolved of the same, so that it is
seen to determinately carry out the edicts of an opaque and impersonal
hereditary destiny.
Pushing against Eurocentrism, anthropologists have definitively
dethroned European self-awareness from its position of self-proclaimed
superiority, universality, and exceptionalism. Beginning with Marcel
Mauss (1985), anthropological attempts to theorize the self have started
from empirical problems with the self-aware possessive individual,
the default unit of Euro-American philosophy and social science (see
Battaglia 1995; Boddy 1988; Csordas 1994; Espirito Santo 2015; Hal-
lowell 1955; Mauss 1985; Munn 1992; Nabokov 2000; Rosaldo 1980;
Strathern 1988). In opposition to this socially autonomous “modern”
18 Suspect Others

subject, anthropologists have proposed a diversity of models in which

the self is interdependent, permeable, divisible, and multiple (Geertz
1973; Marriott 1990; Palmié 2006; Strathern 1988; Wagner 1991; Walker
2013). Because anthropologists have been largely invested in culture
or society as competing meta-explanations of these different kinds of
self, however, “the question of awareness of self” (Fortes 1987, 250) –
how people know that they are any of these sorts of self – has too
often skirted anthropological consideration (Bloch 2011; Duranti 2008;
Keane 2015).
For the people I engaged with in Suriname, the self (Ndyuka: seefi;
Sarnami: āpan) assumes a range of mundane meanings depending
on context; it is also a paradigmatically “spiritual” (Dutch: geestelijk)
being (or beings) and the principle that accounts for the integral vital-
ity of each living organism. These notions descend either from Indic
debates over the nature of identity and consciousness that anticipated
Euro-American philosophical quandaries about self-knowledge by
more than 2,000 years or from sophisticated West and Central Afri-
can ritual reflections on the sources of personal capacity and ethical
fulfilment (Dasti and Bryant 2014; Fortes 1987; Matory 2018). As it is
revealed by both Hindu and Maroon mediums, the self is different
from the person possessed of it. For mediums, the self is a what, an
ontological fact, rather than a who, an ever-shifting social identity
(Ricœur 1992). As Gloria Wekker (2006) has described for working-
class Afro-Surinamese Creoles and Diane Vernon (1992) has shown for
Tapanahoni Ndyukas, “multiplicitous” selves represent an alternative
tradition of reflecting on what the experiences of thinking and feeling
mean, and what those meanings imply for the social authority of first-
person reflexivity (see also Herskovits and Herskovits 1936; van der
Pijl 2003; Wooding 2013).16
When called into question by others, reflexivity can prompt people to
re-conceptualize what they think the self is and thus how they under-
stand their own experiences of self-awareness. Self-knowledge is, in
this way, grounded in “intersubjectivity” – the tendency for people to
imagine themselves from another’s perspective (Duranti 2010; Husserl
1989). The basis for social understanding and communication, this reci-
procity of perspectives is also unavoidably pregnant with uncertainty
and doubt. Reflexivity entails that doubts about knowledge of others
can be equally turned “inward” to force reflection on one’s own actions,
identity, and ontological coherence. In the words of Nils Bubandt, “The
fundamental unknowability of the other is … uncomfortably related
to the unknowability of oneself” (2014, 62). Surinamese mediums use
these unstable properties of intersubjectivity to challenge their patients’
 Introduction 19

reflexive self-awareness and reveal paradigms of the self that explode

the apparent privacy of personal self-consciousness.
Stripped to its rudiments, the basis of mediums’ revelations is the
power to test people’s capacity to avow knowledge of themselves.
Once knowledge of the self comes into question, so does the wider
framework of the reality in which people live. Like Socrates’ univer-
sal forms or Freud’s unconscious, what resists understanding in the
self can be construed to give access to reality beyond human ruses or
delusions. Surinamese mediums rely on ontological pronouncements
about the nature of the self and its relationships to destabilize reflexive
first-person authority. Performed as epistemic “asymmetries of rela-
tions between relations to oneself and relations to others” (Moran 2001,
xxix), mediumistic revelations transform discrepancies of perspective
between people into ontological differences separating those who are
adept at knowing what reality is really like from those who are not. For
Surinamese mediums, the self is never directly experienced but always
described from the position of spirits and deities beyond first-person
awareness.
The capacity to consolidate a specific account of the self and give it
collective standing determines the experience of self-knowledge and
its social implications. People struggle with the self because it is both
a slipstream of inchoate sensations beyond fully conscious control and
the focus of moral accountability to others. Whoever sets the actionable
boundaries of the self in social situations, such as mediumistic consul-
tations, courtrooms, or psychiatric hospitals, can define the limits of
awareness, who has awareness of these limits, and what this awareness
means for how a person is or should be responsible to those with whom
they live (Battaglia 1995; Cook 2018; Keane 2015; Munn 1992).

Epistemic Affects

Self-knowledge denotes how people become reflexively aware of who

they are or should be. Reflexivity, however, also prompts personal and
collective epistemic affects like doubt and suspicion that call into ques-
tion who is doing the reflecting and how. As “presubjective” somatic
intensities that are “nonetheless not presocial” (Lutz 2017,186; see also
Deleuze 2007; K. Stewart 2007), epistemic affects point to how knowl-
edge or ignorance makes people feel. Gnawing sensations of insecurity
regarding the legitimacy of one’s own or another’s knowledge, doubt,
suspicion, scepticism, and aporia are possibilities inherent in intersub-
jective attunement to others. A subset of epistemic affects, these feelings
bubble up to alter the conditions of trust and mistrust, confidence and
20 Suspect Others

duplicity, from which relationships are made and remade. Register-

ing in physical symptoms such as a fluttering heart, sweaty palms, or
bodily agitation, epistemic affects seep out from the failure of present
convictions about who others are to guarantee expectations about what
they actually intend and do. Such disconnections force attention to the
many ways in which awareness stumbles in the face of the communica-
tive opacity that pervades interpersonal relationships.
In Suriname, the terms “trust,” “belief,” “doubt,” and “suspicion”17
are all commonly used to indicate a range of epistemic affects. “Belief”
and “trust” have provoked considerable anthropological debate around
their transcultural fungibility (see Bubandt 2014; Carey 2017; Holbraad
2008; Keane 2007; Needham 1972). In Suriname, belief and trust do not
so much denote adherence to dogmas or doctrines as attitudes about
the risks of relatedness. To trust or believe someone is to put oneself at
peril of, for better or worse, being changed by an ongoing relationship
with them. Both words imply the desire for an outcome in which dif-
ferent persons’ perspectives converge in a single shared reality. Because
a spirit or deity cannot be evaluated by inadequate human minds, for
example, I was repeatedly told that the success of mediumistic rituals
hinged on believing in them – but only until that confidence was con-
firmed or betrayed by the ritual’s success or failure.
While trust and belief are important terms for Surinamese, this book
concentrates instead on doubt, suspicion, and similar adjacent feelings
of uncertainty in order to get at the particular ways these epistemic
affects inform Surinamese experiences of self-knowledge.18 Doubt is an
inwardly directed attempt to fathom the feelings of mismatch between
what one thinks one knows – about oneself, for instance – and evidence
that the reality is possibly different. Suspicion, in contrast, consolidates
what one thinks one knows to envision the thoughts of others, how-
ever guardedly. If suspicion can be imagined as an epistemic wall that
secures against invasive relations, doubt is what happens when these
defences have been breached and the relations exposed as deceptive and
even dangerous. Both feelings express a tension between the assump-
tion that we can effortlessly know who someone else is and what they
intend and the reality that we might be perilously misled or mistaken.
This makes them rudimentary to the process by which the self becomes
an object of social concern.
Surinamese spirit mediumship is, like Nils Bubandt’s (2014) portrayal
of witchcraft in Maluku, “the object of an explicit and self-conscious
philosophy of uncertainty that seeks to grapple with epistemological,
ontological, and reflexive aporia” (42). In Suriname, spirits are powerful
because people cannot be certain whether they exist. Balanced on the
 Introduction 21

edge of suspicion, mediumship adjusts the parameters of a medium’s

own ontological state to reveal limits to human knowledge. Mediums
assume the voices of spirits and deities to turn an observer’s suspicions
about the reality of the spirit within a possessed medium back onto
the observer’s own fragile self-certainties. Because many Surinamese
accept the possibility that spirits are present, this confrontation between
suspicion and self-doubt produces potentially irresolvable perplexi-
ties. If a spirit were truly present, how would the observer know? If
the observer fails to discern a genuine spirit, what does this say about
what they indisputably know about themselves? This is the work of
epistemic affect in mediumship – to change self into other by turning
suspicions about mediums as untrustworthy others into doubts about
the self.
In a context like that of Surinamese mediumship where spirits and
deities are “not just … external agents that control and produce changes
in the identities of persons” but also “the very essence of human iden-
tity” (Honwana 2002, 14, quoted in Espirito Santo 2015, 210), doubt and
suspicion provide epistemic gaps that allow spirit agency to proliferate
(Espirito Santo 2015; Wirtz 2014). Spirits and deities accordingly offer an
extra-human perspective from which people can reflect on and objectify
the ontology of subjectivity, agency, and contingency (Luhrmann 2012;
Wirtz 2014). Rather than simply describing mediumship as a way of
explaining “unfortunate events” (Evans-Pritchard 1937, 63), this book
illustrates how mediums make the invisible visceral in the minutiae of
everyday life and interaction. Like Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1963, 169–73)
depiction of Quesalid, who became a celebrated Kwakwaka’wakw sha-
man precisely because of his suspicion of shamans, Surinamese medi-
ums channel the unresolvable suspicion that surrounds them to reveal
the unseen and unforeseeable.
Following Judith Irvine’s (1982), Edward Schieffelin’s (1985), and
Kristina Wirtz’s (2007) analyses of mediumistic performances, in the
chapters that follow I describe how mediums engage epistemic affects
to make spirits “co-present” in the minds and bodies of their patients
(Beliso-De Jesús 2016). In contrast to recurrent scholarly fascination
with the “ecstatic” experience of possession, the focus here is on the
irreducibly interactive character of spirit mediumship (Richman 2014).
Spirits and deities do not simply manifest in their mediums but work
to reveal the many ways in which they are already present in the self-
awareness of the apparently unpossessed people who consult with
them. In realizing that they have been populated by spirits all along,
patients come to reflect on the opacity of their own self-knowledge and
control, and learn to identify their thoughts, feelings, and desires with
22 Suspect Others

the spirits whom spirit mediums embody in their ritual consultations

(Boddy 1989; Irvine 1982; Lambek 1993; Nabokov 2000).

Intersubjectivity, Spirit Possession, and Racecraft

This book re-establishes the revelatory power of suspicion and doubt –

often seen as the unique preserve of the deflationary modernity of the
“school of suspicion” (Ricœur 1970) – in non-European ritual traditions
(see also Bubandt 2014; Palmié 2002). Struggles with self-knowledge
and scepticism are not the privileged preserve of putatively “modern”
European subjects like René Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant,
and David Hume or “radical” nineteenth-century European thinkers
like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche.19 The capac-
ity to find the unknown in oneself and make it evident in others is, I
argue, elementary to the ever-occurring emergence of self-knowledge
in all human interaction. Whether conducted by Hindus or Maroons,
performances by Surinamese spirit mediums make spirits evident in
peoples’ lives by confronting the intuitions of intersubjectivity. Despite
enjoinders to “Trust no one!,” Surinamese routinely assume that they
have some insight into what those around them think and feel. Disrupt-
ing assumptions about who others are rouses uncertainties so basic that
they can become existential openings for new or expanded appercep-
tions of the self.
The sensations of suspicion that trigger such ontological commo-
tion are heavily tinted by Suriname’s colonial history of strategically
obstructed intersubjective empathy between Europeans and those they
exploited. As part of the wider Caribbean, Suriname was among the
staging grounds for global European conquest and the spread of racial
capitalism (V. Brown 2010; Robinson 1983; Mintz 1985). Plantation own-
ers, working from the model of monocropped sugar and coffee, strove to
reduce the Africans they forced to work their fields and factories to the
barest financial utility by refusing them any human dignity that Euro-
peans would be bound to respect. Such cruelty inspired the enslaved to
continuous defiance through sabotage, escape, poisoning, suicide, and
rebellion, all of which further intensified planters’ attempts to surveille
and control those they exploited through vicious penal codes, the active
cultivation of distrust among the enslaved through informers, and the
militarization of everyday life. Augmented by high mortality rates and
institutionalized brutality, suspicion was thus part of a paranoid Euro-
pean recognition of the fact that, however much they wanted to deny
them equivalent humanity, those they enslaved were fellow humans
capable of rational resistance. Under such conditions, it is therefore no
 Introduction 23

surprise that suspicion infiltrated nearly every facet of Caribbean slave

societies (V. Brown 2010; Browne 2011; Davis 2011; Paton 2012; Price
1983, 1992; Rodney 1981; Wilson 1973).
Though unsuccessful in creating a docile workforce, the planters’
regime of terror was immensely lucrative for Europeans and financed
the industrial foundations of nineteenth-century European global
imperialism (E. Williams 1944). Race was at the core of both the profit-
ability of, and endemic suspicion within, plantation colonies because
it separated people into supposedly natural hierarchies that, paradoxi-
cally, had to be endlessly enforced with violence.20 In post-colonial Suri-
name, as elsewhere in the Americas, race is “a double standard based
on ancestry” (Fields and Fields 2012, 17) inherited from this colonial
past. Rather than affirm the race concept’s ontological durability, I fol-
low the historians Barbara and Karen Fields to instead theorize race
as “racecraft” – an ideological sleight of hand that “transforms racism,
something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is” (Fields
and Fields 2012, 17; see also Palmié 2007). Treating race as a weaponized
attribution demystifies dogmas that are in fact techniques of domina-
tion and not accurate accounts of phenotypic differences in skin pig-
mentation or hair texture.
Although diverse in practice, all racecraft inflicts on racially marked
people the tortured awareness that they are liable to arbitrary judgments
potentially backed by punitive violence. Based on allegedly “inborn
traits” (Fields and Fields 2012, 16), racialized verdicts are imposed by
descent rather than the ideals of personal merit conventionally held up
as the signal accomplishment of the European Enlightenment (W.E.B.
Du Bois 1987; Fanon 1986; Mills 1999, 2017; Trouillot 1997). Immanuel
Kant’s dismissal of an African’s criticism of Europeans on the grounds
that he “was very black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he
said was stupid” or his judgment that “the Negroes of Africa have by
nature no feeling that rises above the trifling” (1974, 298, cited in Judy
1991, 10) and can “be educated but only as servants (slaves)” (1902, 353,
cited in Eze 1997, 116) are all telling examples of racecraft.
As Kant’s remarks show, race represents a permanent state of excep-
tion to liberal ideas that humans are naturally endowed with the dig-
nity of a free will that grants them authority over themselves (Hesse
2011; Wynter 2003). Racecraft, a twinned act of revelation and suppres-
sion, is wielded by those interested in enforcing racial hierarchies to
claim that the racialized are opaque to themselves but transparent to the
agents of the domination worked against them. Race turns policies of
oppression into expressions of innate discrepancies in genetic character,
and by decreeing their suspicions to be based in the ontological essence
24 Suspect Others

of others, those who wield racialization seek to deny members of racial-

ized populations their due moral equivalence.
Historically, European colonists conflated racial differences with
“superstitious” practices like spirit possession to legitimate the dehu-
manization of colonialized peoples. According to Paul C. Johnson, the
European idea of spirit possession, as “the ownership or occupation of
the body by unseen agents, emerged out of an analogical relation with
material possessions and lands, even as perceived possession by spirits
also complicated the lawful exchange of possessions and lands” (2014,
35). If Johnson is correct, race and spirit possession are products of the
same colonial history of “enslavement and the questions of humanness
and will” (2014, 26) that gave birth to modern paradigms of sovereignty,
agency, and possessive individualism. Philosophies of individual rea-
son gathered racializing force over the course of early modern Euro-
pean conquests in the Americas and Asia. Premised on an “elitism of
doubt” (Fields and Fields 2012, 222) that mistook European prejudices
for rational suspicions, the presumed uniqueness of European reflex-
ivity soon became the sine qua non for imperial schemes that sought
to restrict legal ownership of land and enslaved peoples to European
states and their individual subjects.
Whether in Europe or conquered colonies, spirits and those associ-
ated with them were unsettlingly outside the respectable legal regimes
of nation-states, their churches, and their empires (Chakrabarty 2000;
Jones 2017). Against the “buffered subject” (Taylor 2007) who possessed
himself by virtue of being aware of his own autonomy, those who spoke
for or responded to the voices of spirits were seen to be guilty of “self-
contradictory … lawless inventions” that had “no place in any world
at all” (Kant 1974, cited in Judy 1991, 51). Unaware that they were seen
to be individually responsible for deceiving themselves, such people
were understood by elite Europeans as the frenzied playthings of the
“affect and passion” (1902, 353, cited in Eze 1997, 116) that fed fanati-
cal “whimsy” (Hume 2006, 75, cited in Johnson 2014, 38). Apparently
immune to introspective reason, such people were judged undeserving
of their otherwise manifest humanity.
In this regard, the introspective and rational modern self is appre-
ciably a legal and philosophical contrivance invented by Europeans
to reject the inclusion of colonized peoples into universal truths about
humanity that were, ironically, only known to select European men.
Not only is such an implausibly buffered self an idealized apology for
European colonial violence, it also – as Sidney Mintz (1974, 1985, 1996),
Stephan Palmié (2002), and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) have argued –
distracts from the many ways in which Caribbean subjectivities were
 Introduction 25

formed under social conditions that anticipated much of what would

become emblematic of modernity and the modern self, including omni-
present social suspicion and doubt.21 Rather than cede rational suspicion
and doubt to exceptionally self-conscious European philosophers and
enslavers, this book argues that these epistemic affects are also intrinsic
to the tenacious social power of Surinamese spirit mediumship.
Approaching doubt and suspicion as inevitable features of sociality
from which “true” belief is never quite fully distilled, Surinamese medi-
ums mould interpersonal communication to heighten these epistemic
affects. The suspicions and doubts with which mediums grapple are, in
turn, significantly inflected by the pervasive racecraft that Surinamese
society has inherited from its colonial past – especially in the multieth-
nic urban contexts where most mediums now practise. Based on this
complex interplay of epistemic affects, this book argues for understand-
ing both racecraft and spirit mediumship as contrasting methods for
defining intersubjective opacity and transparency that reveal analo-
gous, but nonetheless highly distinctive, ways of conceptualizing what
the self is and how it is to be known.
Revelation here is continuous with suspicion and doubt because
it intercedes in how people reflect on the limitations of what can be
known and who has the authority to impose those limits. Reconcil-
ing the restrictions that prevent access to others’ minds with ideolo-
gies about what those epistemic barriers mean, revelation illuminates
just how people should relate to each other. Though spirit mediumship
and racecraft both claim to cut through intersubjective opacity to make
the minds of others transparent, spirit possession disowns self-mastery
whereas racecraft asserts it. While racecraft is the product of the self-
certainty that comes when ignorance is weaponized to dominate others,
spirit possession presents an ontological equivocation – a “compound
of disparate identities that do not always blend very well” (Nabokov
2000, 15) – that undermines many of the self-certainties on which race-
craft is founded. If spirit possession forefronts the ontological complexi-
ties of human ignorance to show that people are substantially unaware
of themselves, racecraft asserts comprehensive knowledge over racial-
ized others in ways that, in fact, make racists more ignorant of who they
and others empirically are.
As the direct outcome of a history of hierarchizing racialized vio-
lence, Surinamese racecraft is one of the social forces that diminishes the
authority of mediumship. The tension between the revelations of spirit
mediumship and the presumptions of racecraft is nevertheless critical
to the persistent yet contested influence of both. Racecraft and spirit
possession are neither irreconcilably opposed nor transformations of
26 Suspect Others

the same substrate phenomenon but rather examples of how different

kinds of self-knowledge emerge from divergent practices of creating
and interpreting suspicion and doubt.

Field Site and Methods

My own fieldwork bears more than a passing resemblance to the mys-

terious relational webs that Surinamese mediums weave out of the
facts of everyday social existence. As a young, white, North American
man who lived with Hindus but spent the larger part of each day with
Ndyuka Maroons and who speaks Sarnami Hindustani and Ndyuka
in addition to Sranan and Dutch, I was often caught up in people’s
apprehensions over the opacity or transparency of my own intentions
and of those who might take advantage of me. Despite making occa-
sional accusations of espionage, people seemed to largely approach me
as a sympathetic foreigner and often regarded my presence as some-
how connected to the deities and spirits with whom they share their
lives. The Ndyuka family I collaborated most closely with, for example,
saw me as in some way related to the ghost of an eighteenth-century
European ally unjustly murdered by their ancestors, and Hindus at the
temple where I was most actively involved interpreted my presence as
a mark of the universal efficacy of Hindu devotion.
The majority of the research for this book was undertaken, on and off,
between July 2007 and August 2013, with the most intensive fieldwork
being done over twelve months in 2012 and 2013. Spurred on by hope-
ful rumours of inspired coexistence, I began my fieldwork eager to find
inter-ethnic ritual collaborations between Hindus and Afro-Surinamese
like those that are attested to elsewhere in the Caribbean (Case 2000;
Crosson 2020b; McNeal 2011; Rocklin 2016). I eventually concluded,
however, that understanding Surinamese life required documenting
the many ethno-racial and religious suspicions to which I was routinely,
if reluctantly, made privy. My initial stay with Ndyuka Maroon friends
in Sunny Point, a subsequent move to live with a nearby Hindu family,
and extensive time spent with mediums practising throughout Para-
maribo, its outskirts, and adjacent forests dramatized these suspicions
and doubts in unique ways.
Sunny Point’s own history is replete with suspicion and doubt, and
therefore substantially influenced how I approached my research. In the
late 1990s, a dispute between the Surinamese state and Chinese contrac-
tors allowed homeless Surinamese of all ethnicities to occupy a govern-
ment housing project. Although then without running water or electric-
ity, Sunny Point provided people struggling to find adequate housing
 Introduction 27

with nearly complete concrete homes. After the government failed in its
attempts to drive the squatters off, Sunny Point became almost exclu-
sively Maroon, and soon expanded to include all the available unused
land in its immediate vicinity. Despite the influx of Maroons, the sur-
rounding area remains predominantly Hindustani. Though separated
by often no more than a dozen metres, Maroons and Hindus live their
lives almost completely apart, with the nearby public school and Chi-
nese supermarkets providing the only places where members of the
two communities routinely encounter each other.
The suspicions that divide Hindus and Maroons obliged me to try
and split my time equally between the two populations. The quality
of my Ndyuka research is unquestionably thanks to my field assistant,
John Willems, who, in addition to being enormously knowledgeable
about all aspects of Ndyuka life, introduced me to mediums and helped
me record,22 understand, and transcribe what we collected. My tremen-
dously kind Surinamese Hindu host, who is given the alias Priya in this
book, also did her utmost to aid my work, but I had to record and tran-
scribe Hindu accounts and events on my own – something made easier
by the fact that a majority of Hindu mediums are Indo-Guyanese and
therefore conversed with me in Guyanese English Creole or Sranan.
I undertook several prolonged stays in the Ndyuka homeland on the
Tapanahoni River, but almost all of the intensive recording and observa-
tion included in this book was conducted in Paramaribo or Wanica, the
administrative district where Sunny Point is located. In Sunny Point, I
involved myself actively in neighbourhood life, visiting people daily
and attending all the funerals, rituals, church services, weddings, and
football matches to which I was invited. Though I was friendly with
many people, most of my time was spent with families from Godo Olo,
the Tapanahoni Ndyuka village where I stayed in the summer of 2008,
and with the Hindu family of Priya, Sieuw, and Sharmila with whom I
lived. Though Sunny Point is home to a number of mediums, all those
with whom I developed strong connections resided elsewhere. Most of
what is recounted here comes from my last year of fieldwork in 2012–
2013. During that time, I attended weekly consultations at six different
Ndyuka mediums’ shrines and observed fortnightly Hindu possession
rituals and healings at four Hindu Shakti temples.
This book represents my best attempt at integrating the methods of
sociocultural and linguistic anthropology. My analysis of mediumistic
interactions thus draws rather promiscuously from both the linguistic
anthropological canon and contiguous fields like conversation analy-
sis. Despite my ready acknowledgment of the many ways in which
transcription “is theory” (Ochs 1979), for the sake of readability, I have
28 Suspect Others

mainly dispensed with transcripts in favour of more reader-friendly

ethnographic narratives.

Chapter Outline

Suriname’s history, first as a plantation colony and then as a nation-

state founded on natural resource extraction, makes land central to
Surinamese self-knowledge. Chapter 1 lays out the history that cre-
ated rival systems of Ndyuka Maroon and Hindu land ownership and
describes the ritual means through which these two peoples attempt
to negotiate belonging to places and their spirits. Each ritual paradigm
generates doubts that express key uncertainties in Ndyuka and Hindu
self-knowledge that have important implications for how each group
understands its position in Surinamese society.
In chapter 2, I examine Hindu selfhood through a description of
Hindu mediumship and the afflictions it addresses. Hindu conceptions
of the self are marked by commitments to both egalitarianism and hier-
archy that resonate with popular Hindu metaphysics of divine unity
in multiplicity. Hindus in Suriname concurrently fight to assert self-
respect based on personal autonomy and equivalent social worth and
strive to reproduce an impossible ideal of uniform ethno-racial respect-
ability. This chapter describes how these tensions influence Hindu
Shakti mediumship and shows how Shakti rituals attempt to transform
Hindu self-doubts into warrants for a distinctively Shakti devotional
paradigm of the self.
Chapter 3 presents the rituals of urban Ndyuka mediums to illus-
trate how mediums instil characteristically Ndyuka forms of self-
knowledge. Ndyuka models of the self are rooted in controversies over
gerontocratic authority and lineal obligation that have been exacerbated
by recent mass migration from rainforest villages into impoverished
urban neighbourhoods. Ndyuka conceptions of selfhood correspond-
ingly stress that personal thoughts and feelings express a multiplicity of
kin-mediated spirit identities from which persons are composed. This
chapter surveys portrayals of this polyphonic self and the connections
between these conceptions and the misfortunes, doubts, and suspicions
that lead Ndyukas to visit mediums.
In chapter 4, I explain how Ndyuka Maroon and Hindu spirit
mediumship engages doubts inflamed by pain to challenge patients’
self-understanding. Perhaps more than any other feature of human
existence, pain fuels doubts about self-knowledge by undermining the
perception that people control their bodies. For Ndyukas and Hindus
alike, the doubts pain causes create an existential equivalence between
 Introduction 29

possessed mediums and their patients that is vital to the effectiveness of

mediumship. This chapter describes how this equivalence establishes
possession as intrinsic to human self-awareness and reveals personal
consciousness to be a palimpsest of relations with other humans and
spirits.
Beginning with the ways Hindu mediums use dreams to incite self-
doubt in their patients, chapter 5 presents Hindu and Ndyuka under-
standings of dreams to capture how each tradition conceptualizes the
limits of human knowledge. I argue that while Hindu mediums directly
annex the unsettling properties of dreams to assert the reality of divine
control, the Ndyuka view that the self is a collection of spirit agen-
cies gives dreams a less emphatic, but still ubiquitous, role in framing
self-knowledge.
Having described how Hindu and Ndyuka mediums reveal and
transform knowledge of the self, chapter 6 applies these insights to
racecraft. Rather than enforcing self-doubt, ethno-racial prejudices insti-
gate irremediable suspicion between people. If self-ignorance permits
mediums’ suffering patients to know themselves as passive victims of
more powerful invisible agents who work beyond human awareness,
racecraft defines targeted populations as the intrinsically guilty causes
of others’ misfortunes. Hindus and Ndyukas consequently find them-
selves forever in the breach of dissonant accounts of self and account-
ability that are tied to the colonial past and rendered incommensurate
in the present by the legal premises of the post-colonial Surinamese
state.
Chapter One

Settlement and Self-Doubt

A nation is not formed by taking over the language, or religion, of others; that’s
not necessary to form a nation. A nation is formed by the feeling that Suriname
is the soil on which we all fnd our existence and that this ground is dear to us;
that is solidarity. No one can impose this feeling on you, no one can force it, you
acquire this feeling from your creator. Therefore Mr. Speaker, let us do every-
thing we can to allow this feeling to come to fuller expression.
– Jaganath Lachmon (Staten van Suriname 1959,
321, quoted in Dew 1978, 102)

Looking at Surinamese money you will notice a fascinating omission:

people. Instead of representing Suriname’s ethno-racial and religious
diversity, Surinamese currency displays the façade of the Central Bank
and different images of undeveloped locations in the vast rainforest
interior. Banknotes proclaim that the success of Suriname’s plural soci-
ety is a by-product of supposedly equal legal access to the nation’s natu-
ral resources. With each exchange at the market and every pay cheque,
Surinamese dollars remind people that the state has achieved racial
and religious inclusivity by providing title to the land and its future
development – a legal-tender inscription of Jaganath Lachmon’s theory
of nationalism quoted above.1 By portraying the landscape on its cur-
rency as both its property and undeveloped potential, the Surinamese
government asserts that it has created a functioning multiethnic society
out of its capacity to ensure its citizens’ shared economic belonging on
the land. This strategic invocation of pluralism serves to declare that
the state has an absolute economic right to freely exploit the nation’s
immense territory and environment (Munneke 1991).
This right, however, has limits. While the state presses its secular sov-
ereignty over an allegedly undifferentiated national territory, Surinamese
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 31

people of all ethnicities – including, it is rumoured, many in the govern-

ment’s upper echelons – recognize that powerful spirits control the Suri-
namese landscape. Hindus and Ndyukas both told me that every place
has its “boss” (Sranan: basi). A place’s permission must be sought before
any work can be commenced. For Ndyukas, this often involves setting up
cloth flags where libations can be offered. Romeo, a gold miner, explained
that mining requires stringent ethical decorum. If a miner lies or cheats,
the claim’s tutelary spirit “mother” (goonmama) will become enraged and
withhold its minerals or even kill the offender for the breach of respect.
Hindu hunters and lumber transporters likewise told of accidents that
occurred when they failed to show deference at Maroon shrines that
mediate with the spirits that crowd Suriname’s forests.
Such autochthonous spirits enforce a logic of settlement in which the
land itself can contest humans’ ability to fully comprehend and allocate
it. If the state reduces the land to a homogeneously divisible and own-
able national territory, spirits make property rights opaque and contin-
gent on ritual negotiations with particular places. Spirits have many
means of exerting their sovereignty over human lives, from possessing
bodies to restricting access to the land’s wealth and fecundity. These
practices shadow state sovereignty, throwing into doubt the state’s
entitlement to the land and the viability of the pluralism that sustains
the state’s legitimacy. Of course, the Surinamese state cannot recognize
alternative conceptualizations of belonging grounded in ritual relations
with spirits, and instead demands the full secularization of territory so
that its regulation is the only force shaping the political economy of the
nation.
Much like doubts about who controls the self, doubt about who really
belongs to the land is a basic source of suspicion in contemporary Suri-
name. Any understanding of the epistemic affects that suffuse Hindu
and Ndyuka mediumship therefore must begin with uncertainties over
belonging on the land.

Ndyuka Territory, Spirits, and the Tragedy of Ownership

Ndyukas are organized into twelve matrilineal clans (bée), each of

which claims at least one village along the Tapanahoni River (figure 2),
as well as others along the Maroni and Cottica rivers. A thirteenth clan,
the Otoo, provides the paramount chief (gáanman) who adjudicates all
matters of pan-Ndyuka importance. Organized on gerontocratic prin-
ciples, every village is administered by men holding titles like kabiten
and basiya who arbitrate and enforce decisions made collectively by a
council (kuutu) of senior village or lineage members (lanti).
32 Suspect Others

Figure 2 The Ndyuka homeland on the Tapanahoni River.

The Ndyuka ancestors who forced the colonial state to agree to the
1760 peace treaty had already adapted to the Surinamese environment.
Many of the victorious Maroons had been born in Suriname, and their
success demonstrated their familiarity with the diverse rainforest,
swamp, river, and savannah ecologies in which they lived (Thoden van
Velzen and Hoogbergen 2011). They could plant and process native cas-
sava, track Surinamese animals such as tapirs, and forage forest foods
such as awáa palm fruits. For Ndyukas, this familiarity with the land-
scape was proof that their ancestors belonged to the land thanks to their
inclusion into pre-existing social relations with spirits (gadu/wenti), ani-
mals (meti), plants (uwíi/bon), and places (péesi).
As Olívia Gomes da Cunha (2018, 188) has explained, for Ndyukas
“place” (péesi) “is a spatial category commonly associated with certain
practices. This means that the idea of a péesi as a merely geographic or
spatial register in the Western sense does not exist. Each and every péesi
is occupied by agency, limited by rules and subject to serious sanctions.”
This is the meaning of the much-cited Ndyuka proverb (odoo) that “Every
headland in the river has its tukanai” (a very large predatory fish). The
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 33

multitude of willful beings who dwell in places in the landscape have

needs and desires similar to those of humans.2 Even bodies – human, animal,
or plant – can be perceived as just another sort of occupied place, fields
of intersecting relations enlivened by souls (yeye) that must be properly
regulated to achieve the healthy associations that vitalize them.
Their history of maroonage means that Ndyukas approach the land
as being simultaneously alien and a refuge. As Ndyukas tell it, when
their ancestors first arrived, Amerindians like the Trio did not inhabit
the area on the lower Tapanahoni that would become the Ndyuka
homeland. As their ancestors moved up the unknown valley that they
had come to settle, giant anacondas and harpy eagles voluntarily sur-
rendered them the territory. The seeming effortlessness with which the
Ndyuka ancestors took possession of the land belies the fact that these
rights were acquired at great risk and came at a steep price. Here is how
Da Asabieng, the kabiten (village leader) of one upriver (opose) Tapana-
honi village, described the situation:

We, as forest people (busikondée sama, an idiom denominating all Maroon

peoples), met the things [spirits] of the Ndyuka River in the forest and in
the earth; things that you can see like animals, fsh, trees and other things,
and things you can’t see at all times like forest spirits, river spirits, and
earth spirit owners (goonmama). It was very diffcult to make peace with
these beings because, at frst, we didn’t know their prohibitions (téefu).
Because we didn’t know these prohibitions, and where we should and
should not go, or what offended a place’s spirit, we were punished, and
these beings would kill us. Then, after this [period of punishment], we
began to learn what we could and couldn’t do in the river and on the
land. So, the ancestors made peace (fìi) with the spirits. As descendants of
the frst ancestors who settled Ndyuka territory, we are required to keep
our promises to these beings so that we can live together peacefully in
the forest. The spirits that the ancestors met have more right to the land.
Because after we trespassed or violated their prohibitions then we came
to know that they were the true owners of the land because they were
there frst – that’s what gave them the power to kill those who broke their
laws. Because they were there frst. We have secondary rights to the land
because it was us who met them frst and learned to make peace with
them and followed all of the regulations they required of us.

The principle of Ndyuka corporate ownership, then, is connected

to the collective, hereditary transmission of avenging spirits (kunu)
angered by acts of aggression and disrespect. In traditional Ndyuka
territory, matrilineages and clans (lô) are the only legitimate human
34 Suspect Others

possessors of land and its usufruct (Köbben 1979; see also Price 1975
for Sáamaka). Persons and families are granted portions of clan terri-
tory near their villages for farming, hunting, fishing, and mining with
the awareness that it will revert to the lineage when the person dies.3
Because spirits remain co-resident at places, Ndyukas connect corporate
title to the sentient land with collective histories of normally unwanted
encounters with spirits that nonetheless endow them with both propri-
etary and epistemological priority over human interlopers.
These sentient places are highly sensitive about the respect they are
owed and will do whatever is necessary to preserve their autonomy.
When I inquired why he asks spirits for permission before cutting a
new garden, my Ndyuka teacher John explained the principle like this:

After all the problems (fuka, literally curses) we forest people have had
to cope with, we have become accustomed to the entities (sani, literally
things) of the forest, what they don’t like, and the ways they should be
respected (lesipeki). Similarly, we have come to know what we need to do
to be at peace with them, and also what they need in order to accept peace-
ful coexistence (libi makandii) with us. For those others [spirits] who can-
not stand to live with humans, we have learned what we need to do to
respectfully remove them from a place and fnd somewhere else for them
to live. It is critical to know how to purify the land you want to clear for a
garden in the forest that hasn’t been previously cut. Every place on earth is
occupied by the beings (sani) that the creator placed there. When you come
from where you have been to a new place where something else lives, then
you need to proceed with respect. Because the beings that live there don’t
want others to come and force them from where they have been living.

People and spirits must find ways to “coexist” (libi makandii) “respect-
fully” (anga lesipeki). Spirits want to live freely and amiably with humans
who subsist on the resources that the spirits control. This interdepen-
dent freedom is perhaps the key trope of Ndyuka morality, concomi-
tantly invoking the colonial treaty that recognized their ancestors’ lib-
erty and the ideal condition of collective life. Just as in a parliamentary
coalition, humans and spirits agree to coordinate their differences to
pursue a common goal of mutually assured autonomy. Future garden
or house sites are accordingly washed with prophylactic medicinal mix-
tures, and libations are poured to request that the spirits either permit
the work and enable shared prosperity or graciously vacate without
turning into revengeful kunu.
Such concessions are attainable because Ndyukas perceive the forest
to be the spirits’ invisible village, organized in near-identical ways to
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 35

Ndyuka settlements. This makes spirits subject to the same procedures

of authority and agreement that govern Ndyuka political kinship.4
Though these parallels establish communication between humans and
spirits, they also create the conditions in which reciprocal moral recog-
nition is easily violated by affronts that transform indifferent ambient
spirits into wrathful avengers. Such trespass is not only habitual but
anchors basic concepts of history, personhood, and self that define how
Ndyukas understand territorial rights and the abundance that such
rights provide.

Poverty, Need, and the Consequences of Human Nature

There are many prominent and affluent Ndyuka people, but the Ndyu-
kas I know best tend to regard themselves as “poor” (pina, which also
implies affliction and suffering). Ndyukas commonly describe escap-
ing poverty as one of life’s basic ends (see also Köbben 1969a; Thoden
van Velzen and van Wetering 2004, 2013). Whether it involves hunting,
gardening, foraging, or wage labour, economic action to satisfy human
needs always threatens to multiply collective suffering by inviting new
retaliating spirits to wreak havoc upon a person’s family and lineage.
In a world saturated with frequently undetectable demands for respect,
however, others are often offended. Returning as kunu, aggrieved spirits
of insulted places, plants, animals, and dead humans demand a portion
of living people’s wealth in persons and goods, ritually appropriating
bodies and property from the lineage as a “fine” (buta) to compensate
for the collective guilt born by all its members.
Though my Ndyuka interlocutors made a point of professing their
own moral integrity, they routinely asserted that humans – especially
fellow Ndyukas, but also members of other ethnic groups – were essen-
tially bad (ogíi). Just as the general invisibility of spirits allows their
agency to be recognized only after their anger affects the world vis-
ible to humans, so the hidden thoughts of other humans who harbour
revenant grief, resentment, and anger can equally threaten the well-
being that people feel they have justly earned. Whether among humans,
or between humans and spirits, human ignorance and greed rapidly
intensify ethical affronts. Insults inevitably balloon from interpersonal
enmities into collective moral debts genetically imprinted on subse-
quent generations. Here is one typical upriver Tapanahoni Ndyuka
story that illustrates this:

Ma Fugweya and her little sister, Maamai, went fshing for waawaa
(armoured catfsh of the genus Hypostomus) in the river near their upriver
36 Suspect Others

village. Ma Fugweya put her head underwater to look for waawaa holes.
Below the surface she saw a white stone that looked like a person sitting
on the riverbed. She laughed when she saw it. She thought it was so funny
that she called to her sister to look. Both of them laughed as hard as if the
stone was a very funny joke. Suddenly, they were overcome by fear and
didn’t want to continue fshing. When they arrived back home, they told
everybody what they had seen. One day soon after, a spirit possessed one
of their relatives and called Ma Fugweya and her sister. It warned them
to never return to the place where they saw the stone; the stone they had
laughed at was that place’s spirit. It had shown itself to alert them to leave
that part of the river. The day soon came when the sisters became preg-
nant. Ma Fugweya birthed a child with entirely bleached hair. When the
time arrived for Maamai to give birth, the child’s legs were white from
the knees to the bottom of the feet. That’s why, to this very day, you see
that some of Ma Fugweya’s descendants have white hair, while a few of
Ma Maamai’s offspring have legs covered in white spots. That’s how the
stone spirit of the place they call Wetiede came to be part of the lineage. It
happened because the sisters did wrong when they went fshing there.
[The stone’s presence forewarned them that] something bad would have
to happen. And they laughed at it. So now, when you look at the sisters’
offspring, you know they have their origins in that place.

Try as kin groups might to free themselves, culpability for even small
acts like Ma Fugweya and Ma Maamai’s laughter holds the groups in an
intergenerational stranglehold, but also imbues them with distinctive
characteristics and capacities that include exclusive privileges to use
certain places for their everyday subsistence. The symbiosis that results
guarantees that lineages and clans belong to their ancestral territory by
right of the painful consequences they have endured as the result of
having had to live together with the land’s spirits.

Mutual Recognition and the Evasiveness of Ownership

Ma Fugweya’s and Ma Maamai’s story communicates that Ndyuka per-

sons never fully own their embodied selves. Persons emerge from many
intersecting relations with lineally mediated human and spirit others,
of which the ego is merely an outgrowth. The historical specificity of
each person’s kin and spirit relations accounts for their discrete body
and unique personality. This specificity means that human persons can
only be conceived at specific locations as parts of those places and the
“rules” (weiti) that regulate them. Failure to treat places with the respect
owed to sentient others results in the spirits of those places binding
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 37

themselves to people’s genealogical destinies through affliction. Since

human bodies are aggregates of their lineage’s history, they are analo-
gous to places and are owed similar respect. As will be expanded on
in subsequent chapters, these concepts are the basic framework for the
Ndyuka self as it is revealed in Ndyuka mediumistic rituals.
Whether with humans, animals, plants, or spirits, relations are only
beneficial when the rules and prohibitions that maintain others’ due
autonomy are followed. Paying attention to these protocols is central to
the principle of reciprocal respect that constitutes Ndyuka practices of
moral relatedness. A story illustrates this:

One taboo (kina) day (this refers to Thursday when people should cease
forest activities to respect Ampuku forest spirits), Da Yeenen went to hunt
in the forest. He was accustomed to hunting tamanuwa (the great anteater,
Myrmecophaga tridactyla) with a machete. But on this taboo day, Da Yeenen
was in for bad luck, because while hunting he encountered an anteater
that fought back when he attacked it. The anteater grabbed him and threw
him to the ground; his gun and machete were fung some distance from
where the anteater had him pinned. Da Yeenen fought that anteater the
whole day, without it letting go. Da Yeenen struggled to escape until he
was exhausted. He began to implore the “things of the forest” (spirits)
to help him. When he called to them, they heard: the anteater then lost
its advantage, and Da Yeenen grabbed his machete and cut off the foot
with which the anteater held him to the ground. Da Yeenen only arrived
back home late at night, having battled the anteater for the entire day.
As he walked through the door of his house, he immediately collapsed
“gwolow!” (idiophone that describes the fall of something heavy). And so,
from that day to the present, the forest spirits possess him.

This account is representative of how spirits become involved in

Ndyuka life. A variety of encroachments on the protocols that pro-
tect the sovereignty of spirits and the places they live culminate in Da
Yeenen’s life-threatening encounter. As a result, he finds that he has
inadvertently ceded his body to the spirits whose rules he disrespected
yet who nevertheless saved him. Both his bad luck in being assaulted by
the anteater and his good fortune in being rescued through spirit inter-
vention were retribution for his disregard of the prohibition on hunting
on Thursdays. His plea for help was answered, but only to teach Da
Yeenen and his family about the repercussions of failing to respect spir-
its’ territorial dominion.
As in most such stories, Da Yeenen’s intentions in violating the hunt-
ing ban go unmentioned. Whether he meant to or not, his negligence
38 Suspect Others

was disrespectful. This was sufficient to provoke the anteater attack

that necessitated that he beseech the spirits for rescue. Da Yeenen’s
irresponsible indifference, followed by his desperate entreaty for spirit
support, made him doubly culpable. By benefiting from their influ-
ence even in transgression, Da Yeenen was involuntarily merged with
the spirits, and from then on had to share his body with the beings he
had implored for help, becoming a physical breach in the ontological
boundary between his lineage and the forest spirits. From the moment
of the infraction, his self was compromised by the spirits’ countervail-
ing purposes; by embodying spirit anger, Da Yeenen communicated this
new human-spirit codependence to his fellow lineage members. Once
established within a lineage, this spirit-human hybridity is potentially
transmissible to future generations as a “curse” (fuka). Da Yeenen’s pos-
sessing spirit (or its relatives) would thenceforth enjoy control over the
bodies of his children, and perhaps those of his matrilateral nieces and
nephews (sisa pikin) (Köbben 1969b).
Such stories lay out a world saturated with an elemental moral of
tragic interdependence. Social life with people and places is a rela-
tional minefield where transgenerational wounds are easily inflicted.
Claims of human ownership like the unrestricted right to hunt repre-
sent a human failure to recognize the myriad relations that are always
already co-present in people’s pasts and futures. Ndyuka conceptions
of respect imply that personal and collective flourishing depends on
how effectively people and lineages can maintain an ethics of mutual
recognition across these many fields of relatedness. The inescapable
presence of so many self-conscious spirit others makes respect obliga-
tory but also gives rise to persistent doubt and suspicion about the
fitness of humans to fulfil their moral obligations. Any infringement
on another’s dignity is an opportunity for the offended spirit to cap-
ture “moral power” (Stroeken 2012) over the collective prospects of
the malefactor and their lineage. This permits affronted spirit oth-
ers to intrude on the autonomy that Ndyuka persons and kin groups
otherwise work so diligently to maintain (Strange 2021). No matter
what ameliorative steps they take, collectively guilty kin remain vul-
nerable to those that they or their kinfolk have wronged and live in
fear of potential retaliation. Ndyukas are thus forever on the lookout
for affronts that might multiply into new sufferings while attempt-
ing to shield themselves from blame. By continuously exposing the
many illnesses or accidents that beset life as the outcome of careless
ancestral acts or vaguely remembered personal indiscretions, medi-
ums and diviners simultaneously resolve and complicate Ndyuka
efforts to retain their health and independence. Such revelations do
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 39

little to reassure Ndyukas of either others’ ethics or their own personal

autonomy.
For the Ndyukas I lived with, the cursed interrelatedness of humans,
spirits, and territory is a paradoxically generative strain on human
life.5 Like Da Yeenen’s rash decision to hunt on a Thursday,6 whenever
humans seek personal advantage, they do so as parts of pre-established
collectivities constrained by kin-mediated misfortune. Diane Vernon
(1993, 22) describes how – as in the story of Ma Fugweya told in the
previous section – her neighbours in the lower Tapananoni village of
Tabiki understood violations against spirits as being responsible for
nearly every human birth:

Each human conceived is the result of the intervention of such an entity

and of it alone. Disturbed by the intrusion of a woman in its territory,
or similarly by the pollution of its residence by a woman, or another of
her offenses, [the spirit] turns on her and “goes in her belly” visiting its
vengeance in the form of sickness/death and the generative relation of
life. Uniquely, these nature spirits fnd themselves at the two ends of the
cycle of human incarnation; all of a person’s metamorphoses refer to one
ultimate cause: the intervention of a spirit provoked by a blunder, a fault,
or an act of human meanness.

Here, Vernon pointedly encapsulates both the tragedy of Ndyuka

personhood and the matrilineal thrust of its ontology of collective
belonging. Desire and ignorance – the fundamental imperfections of
unaided human beings – lead to destructive encroachments on others.
These trespasses also regenerate human existence. In this picture, each
Ndyuka person is an accidental aggregate of human and spirit action,
the result of ruptures between separate human and spirit domains that
would have been preserved had their parents or ancestors related to the
landscape with genuine respect.
If the person, the foundation of most systems of ownership, is a
composite outcome of routine moral failure, then personal property is
always suspect.7 Transgressions in pursuit of selfish desires are what
finally account for the tragic joining of a lineage to its land. Though
lineages are sustained by subsistence agriculture and labour in the cash
economy, all forms of livelihood potentially entail violence that may
infect everyone in a kin group with misfortune. Whether personal or
collective, Ndyuka territorial rights and the wealth that these rights
produce are never simply the result of entering terra nullius and min-
gling one’s labour with its resources, as imagined in the liberal tradition
(Locke 1986). Instead, property is an affliction felt by all, a repercussion
40 Suspect Others

of ignorant encounters with other beings that enjoy precedent rights

over the land and its productivity. For Ndyukas, the land possesses its
human owners more than they can ever possess the land.
The invisible co-presence of spirits in Ndyuka social life renders dec-
larations of personal ownership precarious and invites contrary asser-
tions from spirits. Within this schema, spirits are the only social actors
capable of conclusively substantiating the legitimacy of human territo-
rial belonging. Improper attempts to take resources from the sentient
land result in the territory’s rightful spirit owners’ seizing human bod-
ies that already owe them their existence. This vulnerability to invisible
relations can make Ndyukas feel that they are doomed to live at the
mercy of human and spirit others and are lacking in personal control
over their multiplex selves. Every act that sustains Ndyuka lineal conti-
nuity is at the same time attributable to the ways in which the inevitable
misfortunes of social life fuse culpable people to offended places. Mal-
feasance therefore engenders the collective “sin” (sondu) and “respon-
sibility” (fantiwowtu) that enable offended human and spirit others to
exercise power over the offending lineage and its members. This cumu-
lative responsibility is what weaves land, people, and spirits into a com-
pound of suffering whose pain is the ultimate proof that Ndyukas truly
belong to the Surinamese land.

The Impasse of Ndyuka Territorial Rights

To the degree that Ndyukas have a synoptic theory of property relations,

it appears to be based in ambivalence and tragedy. Ndyukas struggle
between needing to take advantage of all available sources of prosper-
ity and avoiding the inevitable adversities that these pursuits invite. A
Ndyuka proverb says it well: “Knowledge is expensive” (sabi díi).
Ndyuka conceptions of legitimate belonging stem from the frequent
failure of humans to respectfully recognize either the sentient land or
each other. Corporate kin groups own territory because the petty igno-
rance of human nature continually deepens their collective liability to
affronted places. Many Ndyukas therefore believe that only the ances-
tors have the authority to bestow legitimate territorial rights:

Originally the ancestors of the bée [lineage] would decide together how the
land should be distributed, for whom, and to which bée the land would
be given. That way of working was better. Because then everyone had
respect for the land and the process [by which it was distributed]. But
now the government has come and obstructed the traditional authori-
ties. Land laws must come from the lineage: the kabiten and the gáanman
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 41

should decide how the land is to be used. After that, the government can
recognize it, and then certify that this is the way that the land must be
apportioned.

The state’s refusal to sanction Maroon territorial sovereignty means

that Ndyuka land rights are suspended between two dissonant legal
ontologies. For many contemporary Ndyukas, the state’s power to
juridically protect access to resources for all citizens competes with
ancestrally conferred relations with sentient places that have been
granted by long histories of matrilineal suffering. According to kabiten
Asabieng, these relations should be the basis for state and international
legal recognition:

The laws the government makes must respect all those things we encoun-
tered when we frst came to the forest. Laws must be made for the beneft
of all the people and all the spirits that we met in the forest. Because it’s
only us who know the prohibitions for the trees, for all the different things.

Since the suffering that spirits cause is the ultimate proof of genuine
territorial belonging, spirits have a complex and mercurial influence
on debates about land rights. Their association with misfortune makes
Ndyukas reticent to talk openly about the spirits’ names and identities.
With a sentiment echoed by many of my Ndyuka interlocutors, Natasia,
a Cottica Ndyuka woman employed as a government official, explained
that state recognition of Ndyuka territorial sovereignty should comple-
ment that of territorial spirits:

Spirit places in the forest, the rivers, and the earth must be part [of the
legal recognition of Ndyuka land rights]. Trees like nkatu (Ficus maxima)
and kankantii (Ceiba pentandra); ponds where spirits live; all places inter-
dicted by spirits must be part of the law. There are places in the forest
where people can’t work because those places have been reserved for spir-
its to live, places that don’t want to hear human chatter; places where you
can’t eat pepper; places where you can’t wash things with soap; places
where you can’t build fres.

Ndyuka conceptions of belonging based on collective susceptibility to

spirit punishment exist in antagonism to the Surinamese state’s total
disregard for the territorial autonomy granted to Maroons under inter-
national law.8 Despite being party to treaties that recognize the auto-
determination of Maroon and Indigenous nations, the Surinamese state
declares that, in pursuit of the “total development of the country,” it has
42 Suspect Others

an exclusive prerogative to define property and grant individual owner-

ship of all land, even in traditional Maroon territories (Price 2012).9 In the
face of the state’s blatant disregard of their vulnerability to spirit anger,
many Ndyukas view legal affirmations of their sovereignty as unques-
tionably good and want spirits to be recognized by the state as part of
a wider acknowledgment of Maroons’ own exceptional right to belong.
Even so, as will be seen in chapter 3, secular law only admits the legal
validity of Maroon relations to the sentient places with whom they live
on a model of public knowledge and property rights that is decidedly at
variance with Ndyuka suspicions about both spirits and other people.10

Gáangá’s Rebellion

Gold has injected a new level of suspicion into Ndyuka relations with
spirits. The end of the Surinamese civil war in 1992 meant better access to
health care for interior villages and increased migration to urban areas.
The population boom that followed has deepened Ndyuka economic
dependence on artisanal gold mining in the interior of Suriname and
French Guiana. In response, the late Ndyuka gáanman Gazon Matodya
opened the Tapanahoni to mineral extraction. In addition to ecological
problems such as mercury poisoning and deforestation, gold mining
has strained the authority of Ndyuka gerontocracy and the principles
through which land rights have been customarily allotted. To be profit-
able, gold mining requires extensive land and heavy equipment. Tradi-
tional elders and titleholders with control over political arbitration and
access to goods and capital from the city have turned their authority
over land allocation and supply chains into personal affluence. This
has created intergenerational inequality and tensions between the large
numbers of young Ndyuka who rely on precarious informal labour in
the gold fields and the senior men and women from whom they procure
employment and mining concessions.
These tensions came to a head in 2006 when a Ndyuka prophet in his
early twenties led a violent campaign to extirpate witchcraft in Ndyuka
territory. Referred to as Gáangá, a title of Tata Ogíi, the rainforest’s pre-
eminent autochthonous deity, the prophet incited young Ndyukas to
attack the economically successful elders whom he blamed for their
poverty and political frustrations. Gáangá proclaimed to his followers
that their sufferings were caused by money-making demons (bakuu) that
their unscrupulous elders purchased in Paramaribo. In exchange for
personal wealth, these older men and women deeded over the lives of
their junior kinsmen to be consumed by insatiable bakuu. Elders accused
of being demon distributors had their property forcefully confiscated
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 43

and were submitted to a violent ordeal in which they were beaten until
they confessed and agreed to drink a noxious potion to purge them of
evil. Though the movement ended abruptly with Gáangá’s imprison-
ment on a trip to Paramaribo, it amounted to a revolutionary attempt by
young Ndyuka to subvert the traditional political order’s control over
land and wealth under the aegis of the leading Ndyuka territorial deity.
It also temporarily silenced the innumerable spirits who customarily
play a central role in negotiating traditional land rights. There have
been earlier prophetic movements, like that led by Gáangá’s kinsman,
Akalali, in the early 1970s, but Gáangá went the furthest in challeng-
ing the authority of traditional Ndyuka political kinship (Thoden van
Velzen and van Wetering 2007). Though it eventually stalled, and the
generational inequality that it attacked has only intensified, Gáangá’s
rebellion disclosed the volatile role of suspicion in Ndyuka politics and
land rights.

Disavowed Belonging: Spirit Consumption and

Christian Conversion

Gáangá’s attempted revolution exposed the political complications that

arise from the fact that Ndyuka relations with spirits have long been
mediated by local capitalism and the price fluctuations of gold in global
commodity markets. More than merely the original owners of the land’s
wealth, spirits are the source of the generative “capacity” (kakiti) that
produces material abundance (Vernon 1985, see also Pires 2015, 2017,
for Sáamaka). Since money is mainly pried from the earth through natu-
ral resources, Ndyuka reliance on it concentrates connections between
material wealth and ritual knowledge to give spirits authority over
how Ndyukas understand the volatile demands of international capital
and the nature of social inequity (Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering
2004, 2013).11
One way this plays out is through racecraft. In an economy defined
by hazardous labour in remote mines, money is heavily associated with
physical risk. Differences in who is exposed to such dangers highlight
social inequalities among Ndyukas and between Ndyukas and other
Surinamese ethno-racial groups. Ethno-racial others like the Hindustani
and Chinese merchants who act as intermediaries between Maroons
and the imported commodities that they depend on for survival are
especially suspect. These differences in economic access motivate
Ndyukas to blame Hindustanis for distributing the wholly commodi-
fied mercenary demons (bakuu) that they hold responsible for the cor-
ruption of Ndyuka society.
44 Suspect Others

Though bakuu are abnormally rapacious, all spirits demand what-

ever is to their advantage – particularly when it is a share of imported
merchandise. In return for their largess, spirits charge people for their
knowledge and assess fines in cash, alcohol, and cloth. Even in the
larger economy, spirits therefore assert an ambivalent influence. By
imbuing the landscape with sentience, they directly challenge (even in
international law!) the Surinamese government’s conceit of absolute
control over an undifferentiated secular territory. As agents operating
within the tragic matrix of the Ndyuka concept of property, however,
spirits’ pursuit of material recognition for their authority can also sanc-
tion more intensive natural resource exploitation. Attempts to fix rela-
tions with spirits through ritual exchanges of commodities have thus
paradoxically made Ndyukas more reliant on the destruction of spirits’
habitats even as they work to appease them.12
Alongside ever-present fears of witchcraft epitomized by bakuu,
apprehensions about spirits who demand costly intergenerational com-
pensation have encouraged many Ndyukas to convert to Christianity,
principally Pentecostalism (Dutch: Volle Evengelie). With large-scale
immigration to urban areas, Ndyukas, and especially women – who are
traditionally the most subject to possession and punishment by spirits –
have flocked to Pentecostal and other churches.13 These churches are
many things: icons of literacy, a source of magical wealth, and a refuge
from kin obligations and domestic disputes. But, in keeping with Pente-
costalism’s global obsessions, it is as exorcists that the churches exercise
their most muscular appeal (Robbins 2004; Meyer 1999; De Boek 2012;
McAlister 2014). Pastors promise that, in return for submitting to Jesus,
people can be freed from the many spirits who afflict them. Church
services I attended in Sunny Point (which hosts at least six different
churches, three of which are Pentecostal) are held weekly. The expul-
sion of spirits through the intervention of the Holy Ghost (Bun Yeye)
was the invariable climax of these often eight-hour-long rites. In exor-
cising spirits, Ndyuka churches enact a doctrine of divine sovereignty
that, even as at it professes to transcend the powers of the secular state,
reproduces the Surinamese state’s claim to supersede the moral obliga-
tions of traditional Ndyuka political kinship and ritual in the interest
of capitalist-led development and private property (see also Pires 2015
for Sáamaka).
Even under assault by church and state, Ndyuka spirits have by no
means lost their uncanny social power or the capacity to define self-
knowledge. Despite the hegemonic pull of Christianity, urban Ndyuka
mediums continue to attract patients. As will be seen in chapter 3,
Ndyuka mediums address all manner of spirit-inflicted misfortune and
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 45

reveal the relations from which Ndyukas themselves are inescapably

assembled.

Hindus, Secular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Settlement

Maroon narratives of tragic kinship with the sentient land resonate with
broader Afro-Guianese and Surinamese Creole discourses that assert
that their ancestors’ long suffering under enslavement entitles them to
govern the post-colonial state (Dew 1978; B.F. Williams 1990, 1991; Jack-
son 2012). This validation remains central to Afro-Guianese resentments
against the descendants of Asian immigrants. While Indo-Surinamese
vehemently dismiss Afro-Surinamese claims, doubts remain about the
extent to which Hindus themselves feel that they have truly achieved
unquestioned belonging on Surinamese soil.
These problems are especially acute for followers of Brahmini-
cal Sanatan Dharm Hinduism. Recent settlers and the largest official
landowners, Hindus must navigate how to participate in the legal and
moral regimes of secular territory and “universal religion” (Asad 1993)
enjoined by the Surinamese state and assert ritual belonging against
Afro-Surinamese and Amerindian claimants. The Surinamese state
insists that both Indigenous and colonial land titles were legally extin-
guished at Surinamese independence (Munneke 1991; Price 2012), but
popular Hindu sacrifices express decided uncertainty about whether
these rights can ever be fully eliminated.
By describing heterodox Hindu rituals for propitiating autochtho-
nous spirits, in this section I show the aporia that Surinamese Hin-
dus experience in the face of state ideologies of secularized territory
and universalized religion, ethno-racial competition, and the inter-
ventions of the sentient land. Aporia “refers to the feeling of being at
a loss, of being perplexed, or of being embarrassed when confront-
ing such problems” (Bubandt 2014, 35); it is the puzzled impasse
that arises from the “inherent instability of any system of meaning”
(Bubandt 2014, 36). For Surinamese Hindus, doubts around belong-
ing are evidence not of “the ways in which convictions gain and
lose their force” (Pelkmans 2013, 1) but of how, despite hegemonic
institutional pressures, the persistence of doubts about how they
should belong produces unresolvable paradoxes in discourse and
practice (Bubandt 2014). Hindu attempts to ritually resolve these
contradictions reveal how their doubts about the legitimacy of their
belonging trouble what they otherwise take for granted about both
state sovereignty and their self-professed Hindu ethno-religious
exceptionalism.
46 Suspect Others

The problem of how Hindus can truly make the Surinamese land
their own has resulted in a sustained equivocation. As much as Hindu
ethno-religious exceptionalism promises to secure Hindu social pre-
cedence by subordinating the principles of the secular state and local
ritual to Hindu self-understandings, sacrifices to propitiate Indigenous
spirits reveal that Hindus continue to suspect that their place in Suri-
name is insecure. In the face of rival ethno-racial histories of living with
the sentient landscape, many Hindus struggle to secure title to both
land and nation in ways that impel further doubts as to whether legally
owning the land ever really means belonging to it.14

Surinamese Land and the History of Hindu Belonging

The difference between officially owning the land and ritually belong-
ing to it has been a key concern in the history of Surinamese Hinduism.
Beginning in 1873, predominantly Hindu indentured labourers were
brought to Suriname from India to temporarily replace recently freed
Afro-Surinamese Creoles on the otherwise fading sugar plantations.
In the years that followed, Indian indentured migrants rapidly moved
from being transient plantation labourers to becoming permanent peas-
ant settlers independently farming the land around Paramaribo and
Nieuw Nickerie (Heilbron 1982; Gowricharn 2013). Access to abundant
acreage and common commitments to the preservation of Hindu or
Muslim identity quickly led to the obsolescence of caste and its replace-
ment with Surinamese ideologies of race, completing a process of
ethno-racialization begun in plantation barracks where all Indians were
treated alike by European overseers and Afro-Surinamese workers
(Choenni 2014; Speckman 1965). By the mid-twentieth century, Hindu-
stanis were a plurality of the colony’s population and dominated Suri-
namese commercial agriculture (Gowricharn 2013). In the early 1940s,
the Dutch government officially committed to Suriname’s remaining a
pluralistic colony and gave Hinduism and Islam legal standing. Land
ownership and religious recognition soon brought Hindus into govern-
ment, first during home rule (1954), and later in the fully independent
Surinamese state (1975).
Surinamese Hinduism and Hindu perceptions of the Surinamese
land evolved from this entitled peasant pluralism (Gowricharn 2013).
Hinduism became an egalitarian ethno-racial religion focused on
household patronage of Brahminical priests (pandits) (van der Veer and
Vertovec 1991). Censure from and comparison to other religions – espe-
cially the Protestant Christianity that dominated colonial Suriname –
encouraged Hindus to reimagine Hinduism as the primal religion of
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 47

humanity whose truths encompass and transcend all religious differ-

ences. Just as pandits preach that individual souls are ultimately frag-
ments of the Hindu Godhead, other religious traditions are imagined
to derive from the originating purity of “eternal” (sanatan) Vedic Hin-
duism (Bakker 1999). This doctrine is safeguarded by careful rhetorical
stress on Hinduism’s monotheistic credentials, which enables Hindus
to acknowledge traditions like Christianity and Islam while subordi-
nating them to Hindu theology. As Surinamese pandits pared back the
Hindu pantheon to a core of respectable pan-Indic Vedic deities, they
also widened their ritual range. From weddings and funerals to sor-
cery, pandits assimilated previously distinct types of ritual expertise to
extend Brahminical orthopraxy to all areas of Hindu life (van der Burg
and van der Veer 1986; van der veer and Vertovec 1991).
Surinamese pandits worked with their newly egalitarian peasant
patrons (jajman) to encourage the ritual and economic reconstitution of
Hindu households and kinship. Through the endogamous reproduc-
tion of a supposedly primordial ethno-racial distinctiveness, Hindu-
ism was transformed into a genetic religion. Surinamese Hindus fre-
quently told me that they demonstrate “honour” (ijjat) by upholding
their ethno-racial (jāt) identity, especially through marriage (biyah) and
by venerating the Hindu gods (dewta). Hindu economic success is pre-
sented as a result of the preservation of Hindu traditions (nem). Concur-
rently, the colonial policy that promoted Asian agricultural settlement
also took for granted that the patriarchal Hindustani household should
be the primary unit of domestic production. Surinamese Hindus take
this conjunction of their communal ideals with official policy as incon-
trovertible proof that Hindus were expressly destined to develop Suri-
name (see Jackson 2012 for Guyana, and Crosson 2014 and Khan 2004
for Trinidad).
Hindu ethnic self-certainty rests on a cultivated Hindu distinctness
from the Surinamese land and the “wild” (jangli) and “dangerous”
(khatarnak) ethnic others associated with it. This prejudice is as much a
culmination of colonial policy as of ideologies of Hindu exceptionalism.
To justify their settlement of Suriname, Asian immigrants bought into
the tropes of colonial racecraft. Adapting the justifications that colonial
planters used to marginalize recently emancipated Afro-Surinamese,
Hindus continue to hold that their willingness to work and commit-
ment to reproducing Hindu distinctiveness make them naturally bet-
ter instruments of Surinamese progress than other ethno-racial groups.
Defending these claims is the central purpose of Hindu Surinamese race-
craft. For Hindus, Amerindians and Maroons – the two ethnic groups
with the strongest territorial claims and least assimilation to respectable
48 Suspect Others

Dutch-derived cultural standards – remain objects of special contempt.

With their small population, Amerindians are not feared like Maroons,
but both are lumped together as “peoples of the interior” (jangal ke jāt).
Though Hindus deny it, the sacrifices they perform to autochthonous
spirits are almost certainly influenced by Afro-Surinamese practices. As
described in the previous section, Afro-Surinamese rites emphasize the
primacy of ritual relations with a multitude of spirits who inhabit the
earth, or, in the case of Creoles, are the earth (Aisa) (Wooding 2013; Ver-
non 1992). By adapting Hindu rituals to mollify such Indigenous spir-
its, Hindus bypass Afro-Surinamese assertions of kinship with the land
even as they try to establish greater moral rights to extract the land’s
wealth.

Hinduism, Secularism, and the Sovereign Land

The boons that the colonial government granted to Hindu settlers came
at the cost of their having to submit to secularization. Secularization
involves a twofold disciplining of religion by the nation-state. While
religion is restricted to denominating the de-territorialized moral and
metaphysical beliefs of individuals and institutions, the public co-
existence of multiple such religions becomes further evidence of the
state’s exclusive ability to stipulate the genuine interests of civil soci-
ety (Asad 2003; Cannell 2010). The religious pluralism inherited by the
post-colonial Surinamese government necessitates that Hindus sub-
scribe to a limited conception of religion that ignores the possibility of
ritual relations based on the demands of sentient places (see Khan 2004
for similar issues in Trinidad).
In addition to secularization, the spatial and temporal distance
between India and Suriname also corresponds to the gap between
assurance and doubt about the ability of Hindu ritual to confer authen-
tic belonging to the historically alien South American land. Brahmini-
cal Hinduism’s encounter with British and Dutch colonial theories of
religion and politics inadvertently exposed the complex ways in which
ritual authority in South Asia is premised on place.15 As expressed in
historical upper-caste Hindu fears of losing their caste upon crossing
the ocean, throughout South Asia movement beyond carefully territo-
rialized socio-ritual identities called into question people’s privileges,
whether they relate to places or social positions (Gowricharn 2013;
Kelly 1991). The village sacrifices and major pilgrimages that sus-
tain identity in South Asia are enmeshed in the past deeds and pres-
ent power of sovereign spirits and deities that pervade the landscape
(Fuller 1992; Singh 2012; van der Veer 1988). Over the last 2,000 years,
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 49

these territorial deities have gradually been absorbed into a divine hier-
archy of pan-Indic importance (Biardeau 1981; Fuller 1992). While the
existence of native deities ritually substantiates kin and caste groups’
territorial rights, the assimilation of regionally sacred places to Brah-
minical deities has given socially dominant local devotees a patina of
universal prestige (Mines 2005; Raheja 1988).
The disruption of these dynamics by diaspora – the incongruity
between imported rites and local belonging – thus presents a source
of doubt in contemporary Surinamese Hindu life. Removed from the
mythic/political currents of the subcontinent, immigrant practitioners
of Brahminical Hinduism have been forced to reorient to a new geog-
raphy of authority, a task in which pandits were both challenged and
helped by colonial conceptions of religion.
For Dutch colonial administrators, and later for the Surinamese
state, religions are de-territorialized expressions of moral revela-
tions derived from transcendent scriptural sources (Leertouwer 1991;
Masuzawa 2005). The orthodox Hinduism practised by the major-
ity of Indo-Surinamese was only acknowledged by the colonial state
in the 1940s after a central council of pandits formally reorganized
their practices to accord with the state’s conception of religion (Bak-
ker 1999; De Klerk 1951, 1953; van der Veer 1991). The new ortho-
doxy was a compromise between pandit authority, popular practice,
and scathing criticism from both Christian missionaries and icono-
clastic neo-Hindu Arya Samaj reformers (van der Burg and van der
Veer 1986; van der Veer 1991). In the eyes of the colonial government,
Brahminical orthodoxy’s institutional consolidation finally made it a
reputable modern and fundable religion – a legal status that it retains
(Bakker 1999). The institutionalization of Brahminical Hinduism also
conveyed a diasporic commitment to India as the sole sacred place,
whose cosmogonic centrality is only accessible in Suriname via the
ritual ministrations of pandits.
And yet many Surinamese Hindus are existentially uncomfortable
with this denial of the Surinamese land’s power. If Hindus cannot claim
a ritual right to belong to the Surinamese soil, how are they supposed
to secure prosperity in the face of an agentive landscape formed by
Indigenous histories stubbornly beyond Brahminical authority? While
actively espousing the rhetoric of universalist Hinduism, Hindus con-
tinue to practice unorthodox apotropaic rites that affirm their belong-
ing on the land by sustaining sacrificial relations with it. These rituals,
however, threaten institutional Hinduism’s “respectable” emphasis on
belief in transcendent Indian gods and the state’s claim to enjoy exclu-
sive control over a secularized national territory.
50 Suspect Others

Rituals to the Sentient Land

Sacrifices to the land represent the collective performance of the var-

iegated doubts that Hindus have about their belonging in Suriname.
According to members of the extended Hindu family I lived with,
the typical ritual for placating the land is a yearly offering (puja) to an
autochthonous Amerindian spirit (Sranan: Ingii winti; Sarnami: bhut).
Anecdotal evidence suggests that these rituals are common among
Surinamese Hindus residing outside Paramaribo. Similar rites are
performed throughout India, and the first Surinamese Hindu settlers
sacrificed to Dih Baba, a village or territory’s sovereign deity (De Klerk
1951, 87). Contemporary Surinamese versions of these rites mirror
Hindu Guyanese practices of propitiating a property’s land and bound-
ary “masters” – often thought of as “Dutchmen,” the ghosts of dead
Dutch plantation owners from the eighteenth century when Guyana
was a Dutch colony (Mello 2014, 2020; B.F. Williams 1990). The ubiq-
uity of these practices speaks to a congruent sensibility among Indo-
Surinamese and Guyanese derived from their shared northern Indian
ancestry, as well as the cultural connections that tie Caribbean Hindus
together in the present (B.F. Williams 1990, see also McNeal 2011 and
Vertovec 1992 for Trinidad).
Surinamese Hindus are deeply reticent about these rituals to the spir-
its of the land, despite their apparent prevalence. Even when people
did disclose details, the sacrifices remained wreathed in apprehen-
sion. Rajesh and Naveen, the two youngest male members of the fam-
ily whose sacrifice I observed, were avowedly uncomfortable with me
documenting it. Although they assisted their eldest uncle, Sieuw, with
the sacrifice, they would tell me no more than that it placated a “bad”
(kharab) spirit and should not be spoken of.16 Their fear mixed unease
at the spirit’s power over them with more general anxieties about the
appropriateness of its appeasement. Notwithstanding their condemna-
tion of the rite, the same young men insisted on its necessity, which
the family performed as quickly and quietly as possible. In this they
echoed Sieuw, the ritual’s organizer. Sieuw’s greying hair, robust phy-
sique, and ease with command marked him as the family’s chief author-
ity. He maintained that the ceremony must be held for the benefit of the
“whole family” (sab palwar) – his household and those of three of his
siblings who shared the spirit’s territory – and pointed to his nephew’s
recent motorbike accident as a clear sign of the need for continued ritual
vigilance.
Family members said that they only knew three things about the
land’s spirit: that he had three fingers; that he was married with a wife,
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 51

children, and a dog; and that, whether they continued to farm or not, all
the Hindu households on this tract of land (about three hectares along a
single-lane paved road) made him offerings. When I asked Sieuw about
how his family came to perform the sacrifice, he told me that his father
had bought the property from another Hindu farmer who had been
granted it by the Dutch colonial government. Since the family’s liveli-
hood depended on planting and selling rice and vegetables, his father
desired to move to a farm on a road with better access to the markets
in Paramaribo. Upon settling on the newly acquired parcel, the family
found that nothing would grow. Neighbours instructed them to sacri-
fice to the spirit owner – a practice that they had performed on their
other property for a different spirit. Sure enough, after the first puja,
the soil became fertile and they could support themselves on the crops
they grew.
According to Sieuw’s wife, Priya, her father-in-law had instituted
the practice because the spirit had appeared in his dreams and insisted
that everyone in the family perform a yearly puja for him. When Sieuw
and his siblings built their own homes on the family land, they were
expected to continue to assist in the annual offerings. After Sieuw’s
father’s death, his older sister Sujata’s husband, Prakash, had refused
to participate. As a result, a car hit his youngest daughter, and his son
became ill, afflicted with nightmares of the spirit. According to Priya,
her mother, Anjali, who is a Hindu medium, had been instrumental
in convincing the family to uphold the offering. She had confronted
Prakash while his daughter was in the hospital and demanded to know
how he would feel if “his stomach remained empty while he watched
others eat.” Priya maintains that Prakash’s daughter was released from
the hospital the very day that he relented and performed the rite.17 In
spite of, or perhaps because of, these demonstrations of the spirit’s
vengeful influence, Sieuw’s sister Raghni remained wary of too directly
involving herself in the ritual. Her reluctance insured that Sieuw kept
ownership of the largest portion of their father’s property so that he
could take the lead in the family’s sacrificial duties.
The sacrifice was made every New Year’s Day. Even though the fam-
ily was riven by acrimony between the siblings’ spouses, almost every-
one contributed something. In the morning, the women of the different
households gathered two live roosters, candy, liquor, sodas, cigarettes,
candles, dried fish, and cheese sandwiches. They poured the drinks into
their best glasses and placed them on trays heaped with the assembled
offerings. The men and I took the offerings to the base of a gnarled tree
in an inconspicuous, overgrown corner of the property separated from
the family’s houses by a patch of pasture. The women followed but
52 Suspect Others

did not actively participate, preferring to watch from a respectful dis-

tance. At the base of the tree, we laid banana leaves and lit candles
and cigarettes. Sieuw and his brother then severed the roosters’ heads,
lined them up on the leaves, and poured libations of astringent rum
through their still twitching beaks. Making sure everything fitted on
the leaves, they covered the offerings with still more banana leaves and
washed away the blood with small glasses of cola.
The ritual was performed swiftly and in near silence. Talk was lim-
ited to Sieuw’s whispered instructions about the correct placement of
the offerings. No talk or prayers of any kind were audibly addressed
to the spirit. After the offerings were laid, Sieuw’s nephew Naveen
tied five strings of firecrackers to three remaining posts of a rotting
fence. He hurriedly ignited them; then, pursued by the staccato clatter
of the exploding fireworks, we all walked quickly back to our respec-
tive houses. Throughout the ritual, Sieuw and the others wore quietly
self-censorious expressions of hard work grudgingly done. This stern
look remained fixed on their faces until, safely back at home, everyone
melted back into their daily routines.
Sieuw’s family could neither neglect their ritual obligations to their
land’s spirit nor publicly acknowledge them. Other than hurriedly car-
rying out the sacrifice, which the family attempted to conclude with
a brief finale of fireworks, there was nothing that could resolve their
ambivalence about it. Confronted with either suffering the land’s ire or
jeopardizing their own respectability and that of Hindu orthodoxy, the
family preferred to remain silent.

Doubt, Spirits, and the Limits of the State

The doubts expressed by Sieuw’s family expose a problem with

anthropological treatments of sovereignty. As Singh (2012) has noted,
recent attention to sovereignty has been through Agamben’s post-
Foucauldian reworking of “political theology.” Reliant on the juridical
fiction of complete control and taking European history for granted,
Agamben’s (1998) approach borrows from the work of Carl Schmitt
to collapse the power of the totalitarian state and the Christian deity
into the absolute ability of sovereigns to define “states of exception.”
Despite their importance, Agamben-inflected theories map only
imperfectly on to the “unsettled sovereignty” (Hansen and Stepputat
2006, 305) and alternative experiences of power so often encountered
in post-colonial contexts (Crosson 2019; D.C. Scott 2014; Singh 2012).
In Suriname, a small, hyper-plural population and a vast rainforest
territory drastically limit the state’s supremacy. With the country’s
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 53

recent independence, tensions over ethnic competition, military rule,

and parliamentary democracy continue to smoulder in a multitude
of suspicions about the Surinamese state’s capacity to control the
nation’s thinly inhabited territory.
The reluctant propitiation of Indigenous spirits in Hindu rituals
discloses the frequently awkward ways in which state and spirit sov-
ereignty both arise from doubts about the effective limits of either’s
control (see Mitchell 1991). Even though Sieuw’s nephew Rajesh vehe-
mently censored the family’s sacrifice, as an independent trucker trans-
porting timber from interior logging concessions, he readily acknowl-
edged local spirits’ jurisdiction. The forest, he explained, was filled with
spirits. So long as you respected them, they would leave you alone.
To illustrate his point, he told about stumbling over the cloth flags
Maroons had hung to conciliate a place’s spirits in return for “permis-
sion” to work their land. Not knowing that he should apologize, Rajesh
simply tried to conceal his faux pas and quickly return to his truck. But
the truck, which he serviced himself, inexplicably refused to start. After
getting increasingly frustrated, he remembered the shrine and asked for
the forgiveness of whomever it was he had disrespected. This simple
act of contrition was all that was needed for the truck’s engine to imme-
diately roar into action.
As with Rajesh’s didactically malfunctioning truck, Surinamese peo-
ple seem most disconcerted by the unpredictability of possible enforce-
ment by spirits and the state. Like the invisible property boundaries that
the state enshrines in bureaucratic files, spirits exert control by always
being potentially involved in everyday happenings. Though usually not
cited together, spirits and the state can be invoked to explain accident,
illness, or family discord. Measured against the scale of the Surinamese
land and the sweep of unforeseen events, it is far more likely that it is
the post-colonial state, rather than spirits, that is exposed as impotent
in governing everyday life.18
Sieuw’s responses to my questions about the state ran appropriately
parallel to his answers to my inquiries about his property’s spirits: “If
I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me.” To both agencies, Sieuw
and other Surinamese felt that they only owed wary recognition of
the possibility that either might capriciously choose to exert control at
any time. With their invisible efficacy and compelling priority, spirits
do not so much contest the Surinamese state as expose the weakness
of its influence. The government may deed property, but it cannot
guarantee Hindus safety from either its spirits or the repercussions of
the colonial history that was responsible for granting Hindus land in
the first place.
54 Suspect Others

Spirits, Landholding, and the Impasse of Universalist Hinduism

In line with their land’s spirit’s major physical characteristic, Sieuw’s

family called him “Three Finger Amerindian” (Dri Finga Ingii) in Sranan.
Unlike the dead plantation owners supplicated by Indo-Guyanese,
Amerindians, Suriname’s smallest and most impoverished ethnicity,
would appear poor avatars of landed power. Despite their social mar-
ginality, as spirits Amerindians perpetually threaten Hindus with their
shadow sovereignty over the soil. Hindu sacrifices propitiating legally
banished Amerindian spirits disclose the extent of Hindu uncertainty
about state sovereignty and Brahminical authority. While neither is
rejected, real suspicions remain about either’s claims to final mastery
over a sentient landscape that is aware of its own independent history.
The Sranan appellation by which Sieuw’s family refers to the spirit
attests to his ethnic difference and moral ambiguity to strongly imply
that sacrifices to him fall outside of respectable Hindu orthodoxy.19
Amerindian spirits exist among a miscellany of other “shades”
(chāhin) associated with the landscape and its previous inhabitants.
In the hierarchy of “ethereal agents” (Khan 2004) described by Hindu
Guyanese living in Suriname, the ghosts (bhut-pret) of victims of pre-
mature deaths through accident, suicide, or murder are the lowest cate-
gory of spirits (Mello 2020). Ghosts roam the land, possessing people to
demand food offerings. There are also possessing serpent spirits (nag)
who cause those who settle in their territories to writhe snakelike on the
ground. Ghosts are subordinate to land masters – dead plantation own-
ers, who are themselves the minions of heterodox Hindu deities like
the fearsome Bhairo Baba. There are also diverse nature spirits (Sranan:
winti), and demons (Sranan: bakru), whom Hindus portray as hairy
black dwarves abandoned by their Afro-Surinamese owners. Sieuw’s
cousin Anand said that he owed an emergency hospitalization to such
a demon, which made him violently ill after he had neglected to pour a
libation when he was drinking with his friends by a forest stream.
Whether passing by or actively settling in a place, humans are vulner-
able to spirit anger, ardour, and even curiosity. While encounters with
spirits can strengthen into dramatic outbursts of full-blown posses-
sion, more ordinarily they manifest in humans as sicknesses and other
misfortunes. Hindus accordingly do their best to keep spirits at bay
through Brahminical rituals that erect metaphysical defences around
Hindu households and subordinate local spirits to Hindu gods.
Surinamese Hindus regard houses and land as alive and in need of
proper sacramental attention to sustain their “auspicious” (subh, man-
gan) receptiveness to their human inhabitants. To illustrate this, Priya
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 55

related an overnight family visit to Nickerie in western Suriname. The

night they arrived, they found that they all suffered from collective
insomnia. Priya’s mother urged them to address the house and apolo-
gize to it for having forgotten to ask its permission to stay there. Once
everyone expressed the appropriate remorse, they returned to their
beds and immediately fell sound asleep.
Surinamese Brahminical ritual attempts to colonize the Surinam-
ese land by making the reproduction of the notionally ethno-racially
endogamous household the core purpose of Hindu life. The pandit’s
well-compensated ritual efforts confirm a household’s Hindu identity
in fulfilment of the moral order maintained by Hindu deities and tradi-
tions. Each step of establishing an orthodox Hindu household is accord-
ingly delineated by Brahminical rites. The family’s pandit supervises
the building of the house (ghar) and the lives of the family members
who live there to fix both within Hindu cosmology (van der Burg and
van der Veer 1986). Pandits astrologically determine when a house’s
construction should start and how the house should be oriented, and
consecrate the site by sprinkling milk at the property’s four corners.
Upon moving into a new home, Hindu families host a griha pravesh
jag – a Vedic fire-sacrifice for the pandit and the household’s favoured
gods (istadewta). These rituals invoke the gods for protection and ensure
the house’s lasting auspiciousness by setting out the ritual flags (jhandi)
that mark the yards (Sarnami: jagaha; Sranan: prasi) of nearly all ortho-
dox Caribbean Hindus.
In contrast to the intentionally public Brahminical ceremonies that
ensure the cosmological and moral encompassment of human beings
by transcendent Indic gods, sacrifices to Indigenous spirit owners stress
the difference between the land and its Hindu residents. Even when
Hindus are sure of their presence, pandits do not actively propitiate
non-Hindu deities or spirits. This is especially so because such rituals
are understood to involve blood sacrifices repugnant to pandits and the
Puranic deities they worship. Rituals involving local spirits are often
dismissed as “not modern” (na modern) and immoral (van der Veer 1991;
Bakker 1999), something expressed by the hidden location of Sieuw’s
family’s offering. Along with alcohol, “life” (jiw) sacrifice is seen as the
antithesis of pure (safa, shud) religious practice, and is strongly associ-
ated with malicious magic. This is widely attested to throughout India
(Fuller 1992; Parry 1994), but in Suriname such conceptions of purity
take on specific ethno-racial coordinates, as seen in the Amerindian
identity of Sieuw’s family’s spirit.
The ethno-racial particularity of these spirits disbars them from the
devotional (bhakti) ethos propounded by pandits, which sees the unity
56 Suspect Others

of the Hindu household as exclusively secured by Brahminical ritual

and doctrine. Pandits may prescribe ritual remedies for spirit afflic-
tions, but they will not admit to formally propitiating those spirits (see
Parry 1994). This places autochthonous spirits troublingly outside of
Sanatan Dharm orthopraxy, leaving their appeasement to individual
households or extended families; this creates an opening for Hindu
mediums like those who will be discussed in the next chapter.
Separated from India’s mythic geography, Hindus struggle with the
disconcertingly anonymous and racialized landscape left by Surina-
me’s two-hundred-year colonial history of Indigenous displacement
and African enslavement. Seeking reprieve from crop failure, acci-
dents, and family strife, Hindus try to come to terms with the land’s
difference from them while still retaining the right to appropriate its
abundance. Much like Ndyukas, Hindus propitiate the land’s spirits
with mass-produced food and drink, and those who perform these
offerings hope to launder the wealth of the market economy to con-
vert local spirits into safeguards for Hindu ethno-racial reproduction.
Precisely because of the benefits of ritual relations with the land, these
sacrifices give rise to aporia over the fact that Hindu success is, in fact,
contingent on good relations with otherwise “undeserving” ethno-
racial others.
Yet, it is unthinkable for Hindus to admit that their comparatively
greater economic achievement could really be as dependent on Indig-
enous spirits as it is on Hindu deities. Ritually acknowledging the sov-
ereignty of Indigenous spirits comes perilously close to admitting that
Hindu-led economic development might be just another form of unjust
extraction from the land’s rightful owners. As with the state’s claim to
be the only means through which national prosperity can be attained,
or Brahminical claims of the universal authority of Hindu rituals, the
enduring power of Indigenous Surinamese spirits exposes cherished
Hindu convictions of ethno-racial exceptionalism to painful doubt.

Conclusion

Hindu sacrifices to the sentient land highlight the suspicion that has
emerged from Surinamese Hinduism’s transformation into both a uni-
versalist religion and a fragile ethno-racial identity contingent on a colo-
nially inherited hierarchy of cultural respectability. The persistence of
unorthodox Hindu rites points to the insufficiency of Brahminical ritu-
als and state sovereignty to fully validate either the presence of Hindus
in Surinamese society or their belonging to the Surinamese land. In the
face of this impasse, Hindus refuse to speak about sacrifices that they
 Settlement and Self-Doubt 57

perceive to threaten their respectability by exposing their reliance on

racialized spirit others. This is the only way that they can retain their
identity as members of a universalized religion of “belief” (biswās)
while performing obligatory sacrifices that practically acknowledge
that Amerindians retain spiritual sovereignty over the land. At the puja
I attended, anxiety over the propriety of the ritual was compensated
for by the keen sense of its efficacy. In the face of the spirit’s menacing
ethnic difference, the family’s collective ritual coordination reasserted
their “jointness” (Lalmohamed 1992) as a productive unity (ekta) and
thereby displayed Hindu fortitude in converting the land’s threatening
wildness into a resource for Hindu success.
Such rituals are an attempt to mitigate Surinamese ethno-racial
and religious pluralism as much as they are a means of admitting
the sentient land’s power and the inability of Brahminical rituals to
adequately address it. It is the Hindu household’s foundational oth-
erness from the land that both threatens and enables its endurance.
Unlike Ndyukas, for whom belonging means being painfully fused to
places in the Surinamese landscape, Hindu families can only belong
to where they live through ritually stressing their essential difference
from it. Brahminical rites and state-sanctioned development continu-
ously reaffirm this difference to transform land into the property that
is the economic basis for the public reproduction of Hindu ethno-
racial distinction. For Hindus and Ndyukas alike, sacrifices to native
spirits are made to appease the land by converting its wealth into the
manufactured commodities craved by both humans and spirits. The
Hindu transmutation of the land into family prosperity, and family
prosperity into ritually consecrated belonging, functions because it
reiterates Hindu claims to ethno-racial and religious distinction that
justify their industrious dominance over the domestic Surinamese
economy.
Equivocations about the morality of their own sacrifices show that,
even as Hindus seek to come to ritual terms with their dependence on
an intractably foreign land, they nevertheless recognize that these rites
threaten to make them just like their supposedly “primitive” neighbours.
The very sacrifices that Surinamese Hindus use to ensure their belong-
ing on the land are therefore also a vulnerability that other ethno-racial
and religious groups might exploit to contest Hindu ethnic distinction
and territorial rights. Condemnations of Hindu idolatry were a cen-
tral element of the initial hostility between Dutch-emulating Christian
Creole elites and Hindu newcomers, and they remain a potent source
of anti-Hindu sentiment (Jap-A-Joe, Sjak Shie, Vernooij 2001). Against
the background of a post-colonial pluralism that is still beholden to the
58 Suspect Others

hierarchical norms of Dutch race- and class-based propriety, Hindus

recognize that their ethno-racial exceptionalism is tenuous at best.
Hindus strive for an assured place at the apex of Suriname’s ethno-
racial hierarchy, but they also feel an unrelenting need to offer annual
sacrifices to protect their social position from the menace of their own
property. In the end, my Hindu interlocutors were unable to recon-
cile their imagined ethno-racial exceptionalism with their existential
self-doubts over whether the Surinamese land will ever fully condone
Hindu ethno-racial difference. Though Hindus are favoured poster
children for the Surinamese state’s ethno-racial pluralism, they still feel
that they cannot afford to relinquish their suspicions about the limits of
their belonging to Surinamese society or on Surinamese land.
Recent attempts by Ndyukas to live beyond tradition similarly testify
to some of the same dynamics that define Hindu aporia in the face of
Indigenous spirits. Ndyukas have become newly reticent about spirits
who ensnare them in traditions that many Ndyukas now blame for their
personal and collective misfortunes. Beset by doubts about their ulti-
mate security on the Surinamese land, Hindus and Ndyukas compara-
bly persist in the contradictory work of acknowledging both spirits and
the secular sovereignty of the Surinamese state, neither of which can
give them what they really crave – a feeling of uncontested belonging.
Chapter Two

A Fragmented Unity: Hindu Selves,

Doubt, and Shakti Ritual

Know the truth of yourself … As long as you take care of yourself frst, that is
the frst [thing that you must] take care of. Then everything will start coming
to you. Home problems. Work problems. Family problems. Friend problems.
Children problems. All will [be taken] care of. Just take care of the self, frst.
You have to build spiritual protection before [you] start [to] take steps [towards
achieving] anything else. When you can take care of yourself, get the protection
of [the deities], then you can take care of the evil around you.
– Lord Shiva, as spoken through Guru Kissoondial

In direct continuity with village rituals propitiating Kali and other

deities (devis and dewtas/deotas) found throughout India (Fuller 1992;
Nabokov 2000) and its Caribbean diaspora (McNeal 2011; Mello 2014,
2018; F.M. Smith 2006; Younger 2010; Willford 2006), accounts of pos-
session by and sacrifice to powerful Shakti goddesses appear in the
scholarly literature on Suriname from at least the 1940s (De Klerk 1951,
84; Bakker 1999, 122). Notwithstanding the enduring appeal of such
rituals, pressure from colonial Christian rulers encouraged the Brah-
minization of Surinamese and Guyanese Hinduism. As described in
chapter 1, over the course of the twentieth century, professional Brah-
minical priests acted as both stewards of a purified Hinduism in line
with European ideologies of religion and ritual specialists addressing
all manner of worldly concerns. In the latter role their expertise relies
on esoteric techniques that disregard or absorb popular apotropaic
rituals (van der Burg and van der Veer 1986; van der Veer 1991). As
a result, the practices of ritual healing, spirit possession, and magic
suppressed or appropriated by Sanatan Dharm pandits have gone
underground.
60 Suspect Others

However obscured, possession and magic remain powerful possi-

bilities that, along with ideologies of kinship and inter-ethnic competi-
tion, importantly define Hindu self-knowledge. During my fieldwork,
a number of Hindu Shakti mediums ministered to Surinamese and
Guyanese devotees in and around Paramaribo. Mediums promise
direct communication with Hindu deities about the causes of sickness,
interpersonal discord, and financial problems by inducting their sup-
plicants into sustained ritual relations that heal bodies and property by
cleansing them of sorcery, ghosts, and demons. In line with the strong
Guyanese influence induced by mass migration since the 1970s, medi-
ums most frequently embody popular gods of South Indian origin,
such as Sanganni Baba and Kateri Ma. Though unfamiliar to Surinam-
ese Hindus, these deities are held to be avatars of orthodox Puranic
deities who are themselves regarded as emanations of an ultimately
monistic divine reality.
The largest part of my fieldwork on mediumistic Hindu ritual in Suri-
name was conducted at the Sri Shakti Mandir. Located in a south Para-
maribo neighbourhood, the temple is only a couple of blocks from the
broad muddy Suriname River. Here, amid a multiethnic and religious
mix of residents, wooden shacks and beautiful but collapsing jewels
of Surinamese vernacular architecture rot in the shadow of the generic
concrete contemporary. Traditionally Creole, the neighbourhood long
ago ceased to be an ethnic enclave; Creoles, Indo-Surinamese, and
Maroons now live in close physical (if not social) proximity to recent
Indo-Guyanese and Chinese migrants.
As was the case for all mediumistic Hindu temples in Suriname, the
temple was in a private compound (yard, Sarnami: hak, Sranan: prasi). It
occupied the cinderblock-built first floor of a two-story wooden home
at the centre of a long and narrow property that it shared with the plank
houses of the temple’s founding medium (known as Guru), his sister,
and her family. With a light complexion, vibrant eyes, and an impres-
sive grey beard, until his death in early 2020, Guru Kissoondial cut a
dramatic presence (figure 3) as an ascetic (sadhu, sannyasin) in a dia-
sporic context where renunciation is unknown outside of old age and
Bollywood films.
Following his late mother, a brother, and a sister, Kissoondial came
to Suriname from Guyana in his early twenties. In his late middle age,
when I got to know him, Kissoondial was one of a number of Hindu
Shakti mediums whose ritual careers mapped out the changing, semi-
clandestine trajectory of Guyanese-style mediumship in Suriname.
“Kali Mai Puja,” as it is often called in the literature, enjoyed an explo-
sive resurgence in late-twentieth-century Guyana, where in many
 A Fragmented Unity 61

Figure 3 Guru Kissoondial performing a puja.

places Shakti temples outnumber those of the Sanatan Dharm. Despite

its popularity in Guyana and Trinidad, where it was revived under
Guyanese influence, Hindu Shakti mediumship remains marginal in
Suriname, and many Indo-Surinamese regard it as exclusively Guya-
nese (Guinee 1992; McNeal 2012; Mello 2014; Singer and Araneta 1967;
Singer, Araneta, and Naidoo 1973). Though derided as practitioners of
black magic, Shakti mediums are popular enough in Suriname to attract
steady numbers of supplicants.
Between 2011 and 2013, I visited five mediumistic house temples and
spoke and participated in rituals performed by fourteen different medi-
ums – four of whom where Indo-Surinamese. Most of these mediums
were previously affiliated with the first Guyanese-style Kali temple at
Marienberg, a former sugar plantation in Commewijne District, and had
also attended Kissoondial’s temple for some period in their lives. Promi-
nent among them was Vinod, who originally came to Suriname to assist
Kissoondial but broke with him to establish a competing temple, in
Wanica District, with an almost exclusively Indo-Surinamese clientele.
Suspicion among mediums, and especially between Kissoondial and
Vinod, was a persistent theme throughout my research. Nearly every
62 Suspect Others

medium I met warned me to regard the others with distrust. I was told
that mediums must first prove their legitimacy by accurately antici-
pating the problems that people sought help with. Unusually, even
among his rivals, Kissoondial was accorded greater respect because of
his incontestable piety. Nonetheless, he was still accused of exercising
insufficient control over his senior female devotees, whom disgruntled
former temple members characterized as malicious gossips or sancti-
monious bullies. Other mediums were even more mutually mistrustful
and perpetually suspected each other of being possessed by false spirits
(maya devi).
The visibility of Shakti mediumship in Guyana is attributed to
the sizeable minority of South Indians (Madrassi) among nineteenth-
century Indian indentured workers who settled there (very few of
whom migrated to Suriname). Hindu Shakti mediumship as it is cur-
rently practised in both countries is clearly a Caribbean synthesis of
diverse influences from sources as varied as Tamil village rites, Hindi
popular films, and Christian proselytizing (Crosson 2020b; McNeal
2011). The Sri Shakti Mandir strove to further perfect this integration in
the name of Hindu orthodoxy. Kissoondial identified completely with
Sanatan Dharm and regularly invited pandits to oversee the major fire
sacrifices (hawan) that accompany every Hindu festival. He prohibited
animal sacrifice, kept the offerings of cigarettes and alcohol considered
necessary in most Guyanese temples to a minimum, and urged mem-
bers to follow a strict vegetarian diet.
At the time of my research, Guru Kissoondial was being assisted in
his quest for ritual and doctrinal purity by a group of four or five older
Guyanese female ritual specialists/mediums (pujari), of whom Arti
and Lakshmi were the most reliable. Two Afro-Surinamese, Fabian and
Johan, also acted as pujaris – Fabian because of his marriage to one of
the regular Indo-Guyanese devotees, and Johan because of his identifi-
cation with an Indo-Guyanese ancestor. Along with the pujaris, the fam-
ily of Basdeo – his wife (also named Lakshmi), their son, Balram, and
his wife and two daughters – also played a prominent role. Prosper-
ous Guyanese construction contractors, Basdeo’s family had provided
financial support for the Guru and his temple since the late 1990s. These
founding members made up the committee overseeing the temple’s
finances and underwriting Kissoondial in his elaborate devotions.
A reliable site of organized Hindu ritual, the Sri Shakti Mandir was
commonly referred to by devotees as their “church.” This was an appro-
priate appellation even if only because it convened on Sundays and was
riven by internal frictions among its members. The temple’s core fol-
lowers had come together as the result of consulting Guru Kissoondial
 A Fragmented Unity 63

when he was still only an independent medium doing private “bottom

house work” (see Kloss 2016). With the exception of this core person-
nel, the temple’s congregation constantly fluctuated. Members came
and went, often leaving out of frustration over real and alleged slights
and unmet expectations. These controversies gave the temple a twofold
character. It was a proper site of Hindu devotion that accepted anyone
seeking the direct aid of “Mother and Baba” (the metonymic title for all
the deities as emanations of the absolute cosmic couple of Shiva and
the various forms of the goddess Parvati/Durga/Kali), and at the same
time, a venue for interpersonal struggles between strong personalities,
most of whom invoked divine sanction for their own claims about how
the temple should be run.
Most of the supplicants who came to the temple did not become
active members. Even if people undertook the many weeks or months
of the devotional regimens that the temples’ deities prescribed, suppli-
cants regularly lapsed in their observances, gave up in irritation over a
perceived lack of results, or drifted away after their problems abated.
This constant churn of visitors gave the temple an unsettled quality, and
some devotees felt it was too riddled with suspicion to achieve healthy
cohesion or future growth.

The Hindu Self between Egalitarianism and Transcendence

The conflicts and frustrations that buffeted the Sri Shakti Mandir
reveal the key discourses and practices through which Surinamese
Hindus reflect on and intervene in the self. Like other outposts of the
South Asian indentured diaspora, Surinamese and Guyanese Hin-
dus live in “occasionally egalitarian” communities (Brenneis 1987).
Despite pronounced social disparities, all Hindus are theoretically
equal and deserving of the same respect (Sidnell 2005). As one Suri-
namese Hindu neighbour never tired of reminding me, “If you cut
me, isn’t my blood the same as yours? All people are one (ek).” This
notional egalitarianism is reflected in Hindu theology. Here is Lak-
shmi’s summary:

God is in everyone. God gives people the shakti (divine energy/potency)

and power and life. He is the one who make[s] the body function; it is his
shakti and power that make this body function. This body is nothing. We
are not this body; we are the soul. This body houses the soul. Just one
soul … There is one great soul, and we are all sparks of that soul. But peo-
ple don’t realize our true self. Every one of us, we were one of the Devi or
Deotas. We were. But the things that we do, that we have to [do when we]
64 Suspect Others

come on this earth, [when] we have to meet so many things, the wrong
things that you do, you have [to pay the cost of by being reincarnated in
earthly bodies].

Lakshmi’s description speaks to South Asian bhakti1 devotional meta-

physics, and in particular the influence of the Bhagavad Gita – by far the
most popular Hindu sacred text since the nineteenth century (Kapila
and Devji 2013). Its doctrine declares that all beings are simultaneously
equivalent emanations of God but also wholly deserving of the lot in
which they find themselves in their present incarnations. Though bhakti
is a complex category, in Surinamese and Guyanese Hinduism it des-
ignates the goal of achieving complete identification with one’s depen-
dence on the deities who encompass and define existence. This theology
conveys a paradox central to Hindu conceptions of self-knowledge. In
an illusory (maya) material world, “people don’t realize our true self,”
and the everyday ambitions and yearnings through which we under-
stand ourselves and others are not who we really are. Instead, the self
can only be known by surrendering to the deities in ways that accept
the self’s final identification with them.
Diasporic fears of forgetting or forsaking Hindu identity further
intensify ideas about self-misrecognition that are central to Surinamese
bhakti. The religious and ethno-racial diversity of Surinamese society
implicitly makes statements of religious knowledge into declarations
about ethno-racial distinction and talk about religion into a perfor-
mance of ethno-racial consciousness. The Hindus I worked with selec-
tively strove to interpret their actions as essentially Hindu, to see their
lives as expressions of the indispensable rectitude of their Hindu ethno-
racial identity. To be a Hindu, particularly a Sanatan Dharm Hindu, is to
understand the self as in essence defined by membership in an ethno-
racial community and to affirm the natural benefits of that “destiny”
(Sarnami: kismet).2 Hindus spoke about the negative consequences of
abandoning this identity through conversion to Christianity or Islam in
terms of “honour” (Sarnami: ijjat). To be a Hindu is to devote oneself to
the honour of the family as a token of Hindu ethnic identity. From this
concern springs a wariness about forming relations with others: “We
have no friends, only family,” Hindus told me. To abandon Hinduism
for another religion meant losing the responsible self-awareness that
makes one an honourable Hindu, the harmful results of which were
held to be apparent in the poverty of (some) Christian and Muslim
converts.
The vital role of ethno-racial honour in Hindu reflections on the self
is deepened by Afro-Surinamese-influenced concerns about the impact
 A Fragmented Unity 65

of self-evaluation on personal well-being. The “self”3 is approached as

both the source of personality and an autonomous entity affected by
judgments about oneself, made by oneself and by others. Many Hin-
dus spoke about the self as the innermost principle of all living beings,
the reflective subject of moral action, and the guarantor of the continu-
ity of personal identity over time and between lives. Given this kind
of essence, however, the self is also objectified as a quasi-independent
entity that is easily harmed by negative self-regard. For example, the
members of the Hindu family I lived with advised me that a per-
son should neither boast about nor criticize herself or himself. Either
extreme of self-evaluation could make a person vulnerable to sickness
and even death. These concerns were enfolded in an ethos of personal
honour that stresses the need for Hindus to be shrewdly self-aware of
their moral duty to cultivate Hindu respectability. This commitment to
the personal embodiment of ethno-religious identity, however, could
also jar discordantly with a rather common fatalism about personal
destiny as determined by Brahminical astrology, personal karma, or a
rival’s witchcraft, all of which are outside of a person’s direct control.
As the foregoing makes clear, Hindu ideas and experiences of the self
are entangled with social commitments to the reproduction of ethno-
racial and religious distinction. On balance, the Hindus I engaged with
were concerned with ritual only to the extent that it preserves the every-
day demands of a family’s internal peace and economic security; they
left more intensive devotions to older, predominantly female, relatives.
Through life-cycle rites at birth, marriage, and death, Hindu ritual activ-
ity is focused on cultivating auspicious kinship. At the same time, Hin-
dus participate in a Surinamese social world rife with rumours about
hidden spiritual forces and nefarious occult plots that can expose one’s
own family members as the causes of personal and collective suffering.
Even when Hindus strive to stay clear of disreputable influences, as
we saw in the story of Sieuw’s family sacrifice, unexpected illnesses
and misfortunes are more likely to test Hindu assumptions about self-
knowledge than the theological lessons that are imparted by pandits
and sacred texts. In this way, petty jealousies and roving ghosts can
readily impinge on the notionally transcendent and immortal Hindu
soul.
The Hindu self is thus an ironic composite that is concurrently
embedded in the problems of existence in “this material world” and
radically beyond it. The interstitial nature of this position allows Hin-
dus who devote themselves to ritual piety to make claims over others
that can run against the grain of Surinamese egalitarian convictions.
A central quandary involves knowledge. Whether a Hindu goes to a
66 Suspect Others

Sanatan Dharm pandit or a Shakti medium, they are reliant upon ritual
knowledge mediated by others.
Through displays of purity and detachment from everyday socia-
bility, pandits and Shakti mediums attempt to preserve the sanctity of
the sacred knowledge that distinguishes them. Epistemic asymmetries
between people are generally accepted by orthodox Hindus, but they
also provoke incredulity – chiefly among Hindu men. Challenges to
egalitarian conventions among social peers – what Guyanese call “eye
pass” (Jayawardena 1962; B.F. Williams 1991) – are intensely resented
and demand redress. Since Surinamese across the ethno-racial spectrum
conceive of knowledge as a scarce resource but find this scarcity an
affront to the perception that, at least among equals, everyone deserves
the same respect, ritual knowledge is a subject of endless contesta-
tion. For Hindus, such competition over interpersonal respect is tied to
men’s ideological commitments to living according to the actually frag-
ile patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal ideals of Brahminical Hindu-
ism. These ideals are difficult to achieve in practice and are frequently
beyond the economic and social resources of many Hindu men. These
strains on masculine authority make ritual knowledge one means for
men to shore up ambitions to masculine control (see also Lalmohamed
1992; Sidnell 2005; Speckman 1965).
Pandit authority is safeguarded through acquaintance with Sanskrit,
the Devanagari script (which only a small percentage of Hindus can
read), and ownership of inherited holy texts written in Hindi. Still, the
wide distribution of Hindu ritual manuals and endless television retell-
ings of Hindu myths have made pandits’ control over religious knowl-
edge more tenuous. Some Hindus even told me that, because they know
the rituals themselves through books or as the result of direct revelation
from the divine, they have no need for pandits at all. While the majority
of Hindus are more deferential, the sheer expense of holding Brahmini-
cal rituals raises suspicion among even the most devout. As a common
Guyanese saying puts it, “Pandits are bandits” (van der Burg and van
der Veer 1986; Kloss 2016).
One way in which Hindus deal with the social implications of epis-
temic inequality between themselves and others is to cultivate incredu-
lity and doubt. Sceptical disbelief is central to how Hindu men assert
their authority over each other, their juniors, their wives, and their
children, as well as ethno-racial others like Maroons with alternative
ritual and political ideologies. Despite this gendering, as an epistemic
stance, scepticism was freely if inconsistently adopted by all my Hindu
interlocutors – and was especially apparent in anti-Afro-Surinamese
racecraft. A statement of egalitarian dignity, scepticism proclaims that
 A Fragmented Unity 67

the incredulous have a right to know and judge for themselves. So moti-
vated, scepticism sustains the Surinamese moral economy of general
suspicion and provides a reprieve from the many conflicting claims to
exclusive ethno-racial and religious authority that transect Surinamese
society. It is also often a first step towards alternative religious revela-
tions, like mediumship, that contest the conclusiveness of the spiritual
knowledge commanded by establishment ritualists like pandits. Unfet-
tered by Sanatan Dharm’s institutional respectability, however, such
alternatives require Hindus to accept even less socially reputable ritual
practices and open themselves to the sceptical ridicule of their peers.

Belief, Therapy, and the Limits of Self-Knowledge

However thoroughgoing, Hindu scepticism is never entirely impreg-

nable to doubts that threaten to undermine the sceptic’s certainty in his
or her incredulity. Pervasive apprehension among Hindus over their
ethno-racial social status jostles with fears about vulnerability to mali-
cious thoughts and emotions and can disconcert even diehard Hindu
sceptics (see Crosson 2020a for Trinidad). Jealousy/envy (jarān) and
greed (dalidar) are held to inspire people to work sorcery (ojha), or unin-
tentionally harm others with the evil eye (najar). Since “not everyone
has good eyes and good hands,” looking at the food someone else is
eating and thinking “that looks good!” may be sufficient to make them
sick. Crops are ruined in the same way.4
These fears lead sick or unsuccessful Hindus to search for healing
“outside” (bahar) allopathic medicine or pandit-led orthopraxy. Peter
van der Veer’s (1991) work among Hindustani migrants in the Nether-
lands and my own in Suriname indicate that ritual practices targeting
such “pragmatic” (Mandelbaum 1966) troubles like bad luck or sorcery
are common. Many of these treat the evil eye and other forms of witch-
craft, as well as associated afflictions caused by demons (bakuu/bakru)
and ghosts (bhut). Of particular note is the continued mystique of the
Inderjal (The Net of Indra), a popular grimoire that is said to be inher-
ited within families, and that can be used to command infamous occult
power through its spells (mantra) and rituals (tantra). Numerous spe-
cialists other than pandits may also be consulted. These range from
Afro-Surinamese diviners (bonuman, obiyaman) and Muslim holy men
(maulvi) to non-Brahmin Hindu ritualists and healers who specialize in
sweeping (jharai) away bad influences by passing their hands, a knife,
or a feather over the sick person’s body. Deity mediumship actively
promotes itself as superseding all these techniques, often by directly
incorporating them into ritual consultations with the deity. The Shakti
68 Suspect Others

medium Rajeev described sweeping, perhaps the prototypical proce-

dure of Hindu domestic healing, like this:

Normally … you wake up in the morning you might get some pain in
your body, or you walk somewhere, you jump over some dirty thing
(witchcraft) and you [are] allergic to it. You get pain. Then the dewta or the
devi, they jharai. The jharai is like a totka (a belief), right? They [the dewta]
know what they read within the self. They are dewtas and devis, you know?
When people believe, they fnd “I have no more pain.” They are dewta,
devis so we normally cannot say [how it works].

Whatever the ultimate source of a therapy’s power, “belief” (Sarnami:

biswās) is fundamental to its success. This was an idea that I heard repeat-
edly from Surinamese of all social backgrounds. As with their convic-
tion about the inherent integrity of the self or their ethnicity, Hindus
emphasized that a rite’s efficacy derives from the trust a person places
in it despite countervailing personal and social suspicions and doubts.
As can be seen in Rajeev’s explanation above, this conception of belief
is rooted in the contention that humans cannot really know the deities
but that the deities possess total knowledge of humans. This epistemic
imbalance equally characterizes a person’s relation to their true spiri-
tual self. The potency of this conception of belief becomes apparent in
Lakshmi’s description of how she became a medium:

Someone did something to me – very bad, fve bakuu were on me. I became
so lethargic. I didn’t know, but I had a close friend, a woman, but she went
[to a Shakti temple] … this person [a manifesting medium] … told her …
there is something wrong with me and if I don’t take care of myself I’m
going to die. And I began to pine away, and those things [the bakuu] they
were sucking [the life from] me, they were living on me, then I got sick
[and] I couldn’t understand [why]. I was menstruating all the time then.
And I don’t know why … and when I went there, the person manifested
[the goddess Kali] … And she told me that so and so [a person] is [affict-
ing me]. But [the medium] took out the frst [bakuu], and it was like a
stone! When I tell you I never believe in these things … my parents never
believe in these things. Well, you don’t believe until something happens to
you. Until you have an experience of these things, then you believe.

After she started to believe, Lakshmi slowly found that she too could
manifest the deities and serve as their medium:

I got vibrations through constant praying, meditations … then I go deeper

and deeper and deeper. Then I began to see myself like them. I begin to see
 A Fragmented Unity 69

myself when I close my eyes, I see myself like Shiva Shakti, sometime I see
myself like Lakshmi Ma (the goddess of fortune), or Durga Ma (the demon
slayer). I see plainly, when I close my eyes lightly, I see myself in their
form, I see myself like them. Then it [the deities’ shakti] began to come.

For Lakshmi, belief denotes the recognition of the chasm that separates
humans from deities. To be a devotee is “to be affected” (Favret-Saada
2015), caught up in the sensations of interconnectedness and identi-
fication that inundate self-perception in the wake of forfeiting disbe-
lief. Because credulity and superstition are seen to jeopardize Hindu
entitlement to social pre-eminence among Hindus and within Suri-
name’s ethno-racial hierarchy, Lakshmi is at pains to underscore this
point. Devotion is only successful when the devotee abandons scepti-
cism in the invisible for scepticism about the everyday assumptions and
social aims that define self-knowledge and identity. By this description,
belief is the cultivated attenuation of the suspicions that police every-
day Hindu egalitarianism in favour of the unseen but unchallengeable
power of the ritually revealed divine.
Misfortunes like pain and “dirty things” like witchcraft remind Hindu
sufferers of the extent to which the everyday Hindu self that strives for
egalitarian respect is entangled in opaque interpersonal conflicts and
subject to invisible forces and agents. By urging belief, Hindu Shakti
devotees assimilate social suspicions to the encompassing primacy of
deities “able to read within the self” and reveal the spiritual relations
that actually account for personal well-being.
It is these revelations that establish human ontological dependence
on the deities and enable possession. When I asked Kissoondial how it
felt to be possessed, he put it this way:

You feel very good. Free. You feel like there is nothing to worry of, that
there is nothing that … can harm you at the same time, or disturb you …
[Nothing] is able to attack this [body], [or] make corruption with you[r]
[body] … You feel so … good. The body come so light. So free …

It is through this selfless freedom that Shakti devotionalism promises

to reconcile the competing epistemic tensions of Surinamese Hindu-
ism. By offering devotees complete self-effacement, Shakti ritual grants
them the epistemic assurance that comes when a person fully identifies
themselves with a self-eclipsing divine will.
Though Shakti ritual runs contrary to the studied scepticism that is
often used to uphold Hindu exceptionalism, it does provide a more
democratized Hinduism. Against the asymmetries of knowledge
70 Suspect Others

accentuated in orthodox Hinduism, Shakti distributes divine aware-

ness to anyone willing to whole-heartedly subordinate themselves to
the devotional injunctions of the deities. In so doing, it assigns all
genuine ritual knowledge directly to the divine. While pandits can
be challenged for lording their knowledge over their patrons for
worldly gain, Shakti mediums proclaim that all knowledge is tran-
scendent and therefore beyond the ability of humans to really know
or contest. Using devotion to empty themselves and make way for
the deities, mediums strive to stamp out their individuated identities
so that divine knowledge can flow through them and into the world
to overcome the illusions of material reality. However appealing this
solution might be, no less than with pandits, this direct divine insight
still requires frail, racialized human bodies to make it known. The
inescapable corporality of Shakti mediumship has significant conse-
quences, both for those who practice it and for its wider acceptance in
Surinamese society.

Shakti Ritual: The Opening Puja

The Sri Shakti Mandir was one of the few semi-public spaces in Paramar-
ibo where Hindus might personally encounter deities who are otherwise
known only from mass-produced images, television, or the imagina-
tion. While the temple’s annual ritual schedule was fixed to the Hindu
calendar, its fortnightly Sunday mediumistic consultations were what
brought in the majority of attendees. These consultations were the life-
blood of the Sri Shakti Mandir, and I spent most of my time there observ-
ing them. The remainder of this chapter describes key moments in one
such broadly representative fortnightly ritual consultation.
Possession rituals are a stage for Hindu conceptions of the self, per-
formances that expose the social and theological contradictions of this
self and attempt to reconcile them within an encompassing bhakti aes-
thetic. Protean divine efficacy – shakti – is of finite quantity in the mate-
rial world. Rituals (puja) must be conducted to build up this power. The
more demanding these rituals are, the greater the shakti that is available
to transform devotees’ lives. Rituals therefore need to be performed
persistently to ensure the flow of divine energy. This flow is subtle and
easily interfered with by the introduction of impure substances, emo-
tions, and intentions. Here is how one pujari described the proper atti-
tude for attending temple:

Whatever problem you have, leave it home, or leave it outside. When you
come in[to] a mandir (temple), you must be a different person. You cannot
 A Fragmented Unity 71

con somebody that has Mother and Baba’s blessing, alright? Or [who] has
Mother and Baba’s shakti. You cannot con them, because if you con them,
you’re conning yourself because you have the same shakti, too.

As this implies, the goal of Shakti ritual is to generate the blessings of

shakti through the collective work of making offerings to deities who
personify and distribute it. Ritual “work” in the temple is divided
between those with routine responsibilities (pujari) who are dressed in
consecrated ritual uniforms – pastel red and yellow saris for women,
yellow dhotis and shirts bound at the waist with red beaded sashes
for men – and either first-time supplicants seeking solutions to per-
sonal troubles or regular votaries fulfilling devotional regimens previ-
ously assigned by the temple’s deities. Before coming, all devotees are
expected to hold a three-day fast to cultivate the personal purity that
allows them to engage the divine. This involves rigorous abstinence
from “rank” items – meat, fish, and alcohol – and sex. Menstruating
women are also expected to excuse themselves from ritual duties.
Bhakti theology, as articulated in Suriname, is tied to pervasive Guy-
anese and Surinamese belief in the legitimating value of labour (see
Jackson 2012). Devotion is work. As work, it requires the sacrifice of
time, effort, and resources. The deities attain their own power to aid
humanity through their own supplications to God. In exchange for the
deities’ bestowal of material success and good fortune, humans owe
them devotion as an acknowledgment of their subordinate place in the
cosmic hierarchy of being. The deities will only help those who help
themselves by undertaking strenuous ritual obligations. Wholehearted
submission to the divine is rewarded by increased joy in accomplishing
the required devotional labour. As with physical labour, the vigour with
which devotional effort is expended is what enables people to achieve
their goals and desires. Those who fail in their ritual obligations expose
themselves as lacking moral fortitude – a “laziness” that Hindus com-
monly ascribe to Afro-Surinamese and Amerindians.
Physically, the Sri Shakti Mandir is small. Built of concrete, it is a
large tiled room with a recessed main altar that is separated from a
kitchen/waiting area and a bathroom. Outside, in the compound’s
fenced-in yard, triangular flags (jhandi) of many colours flutter from a
stand of four-metre-high bamboo poles. Inside, flamboyant chandeliers
and plastic garlands hang above assorted religious posters. Among the
colourful chromolithographs of Hindu deities there is also a crucifixion
scene and a drawing of the Kaaba in Mecca – borrowed iconography
that affirms the universal scope and inclusivity of both the temple and
Hindu ritual.
72 Suspect Others

Figure 4 Durga image at the centre of the Sri Shakti Mandir.

The temple is dominated by a large statue (murti) of Durga mounted

on a lion and flanked by the monkey god, Hanuman, and Bhairo Baba
(a fearsome personification of Shiva and a mainstay of Guyanese pos-
session rites). To the right of the Durga statue sits a metre-high ling (the
aniconic phallic-shaped image of Shiva) under the raised hood of a giant
cobra (nag) and guarded by a diminutive earth goddess (bhumidevi). In
an alcove facing the Durga statue stand eleven slightly less than life-size
concrete statues of the temple’s primary gods and goddesses. Gaudily
painted, they occupy a tiled plinth and are divided by gender. In the
space where the genders meet hangs a large image of Shiva fused with
his consort Parvati in the form of the androgyne (Anadharaishvara) (fig-
ure 4), and a small Shiva ling on a carved stone base (yoni, symbolizing
Parvati). The image and the ling are, respectively, iconic (saguna) and
aniconic (nirguna) depictions of the cosmogenic unification of mascu-
line and feminine power. These images, Kissoondial declared, emblem-
atize the universe’s ultimate origin and cumulative reality, the theosis
towards which all the temple’s rituals were progressing. With his paired
shoulder tattoos of Shiva and Parvati, Kissoondial similarly sought to
incarnate this generative union within himself. Having decreed that he
 A Fragmented Unity 73

alone among the temple’s mediums was capable of manifesting deities

of both genders, Kissoondial had a monopoly on enacting the andro-
gyne’s primal transcendence of the individualized and gendered ego.
Shakti devotees treat images as living embodiments of the deities
endowed with divine agency. The statues of the deities that occupy
the larger portion of the temple demand care. They have to be bathed,
dressed in elaborate costumes and jewellery, and presented with veg-
etarian meals and sweets. Through this care, devotees receive the
divine gaze (darshan) that incorporates them into a deity’s shakti. Dar-
shan enables devotees to exchange both substance and perspective with
the deities (see Eck 1996; Gell 1998, 116–21; Marriot 1990; Mello 2018).
It is therefore essential to the emergence of Shakti mediumship. Apart
from clothing the gods, cooking, and assembling trays of fruit offer-
ings and flower garlands, devotees must also regularly dust, sweep,
and wash the temple to maintain its purity – domestic work that fell
predominantly, if not exclusively, on the older female pujaris like Arti
and Lakshmi.
Pujaris and supplicants “doing devotion” must arrive at the temple
early in the morning to prepare food offerings (prasad) such as sweet
rice (mitha batt) boiled in milk and the collective meal that follows every
puja. At the foot of each deity, devotees lay aluminum salvers piled
with cut fruits, sweets, and smoking incense. Each of the deities who
habitually possess mediums – Ganga Mata, Kateri Mata, Kali Mata,
Bhairo Baba, and Sanganni Baba – are presented with switches (“rods
of correction”), with which they can chastise their intransigent devotee
“children,” and neem leaf (azadirachta indica) brushes to jharai (sweep)
them clean of afflictions and defilements. Coconuts are another critical
component of pujas, and much time is spent on preparing them. With
hard exteriors that conceal liquid cores held within soft flesh, coconuts
provide a vivid simulacrum for the material qualities of animals and are
therefore an easy substitute for the chickens and goats traditionally sac-
rificed at Shakti temples (Guinee 1992; McNeal 2011; see also Willford
2006). Assembled into kumbams (symbolic bodies), coconuts’ abstract
corporality makes them model mediators between humans and gods.
Simultaneously standing for the sacrificer, the sacrificed, and the deity
to whom the sacrifice is offered, kumbams signify the sacrifice of the self
to the divine that is the paramount ambition of bhakti devotionalism
(Hubert and Mauss 1964; Prentiss 1999; F.M. Smith 2006).
The temple’s puja only began when all the prefatory offerings were com-
plete. This caused considerable variation in the temple’s week-to-week
program. Usually, the opening puja started not later than 11:00 a.m. Kis-
soondial or, more reliably, one of the junior male pujaris, then led eight to
74 Suspect Others

fifteen people in obeisance to every deity in the temple’s sanctuary. Gongs

were banged, bells rung, and a conch shell (shank) blown. Pungent cam-
phor smoke blanketed the room, and food, perfume, and fire (aarti) were
presented before each statue while devotees stared intently into the shakti
they felt radiating from the deities’ outsized open eyes. To guarantee a cur-
rent of mystical power, mantras – especially the Shiva Mahamantra, “Om
Namo Shivaya,” and that of the great goddess, “Om Aing Hring Kleeng
Chamundaye Namo Nama” – were chanted in unison in repetitions of 108
(jap) on prayer beads (mala) to accompany the other offerings.
Once mantra recitations were concluded, the pujaris sacrificed the
coconuts. The coconuts were split with a heavy cleaver, and their juices
were used to bathe (abhishek) the central ling-yoni and portable brass
deity figurines. The auspiciousness of the opening puja was then dis-
tributed by ladling out dribs of “five ambrosia” (panch amrit)5 water
into all the devotees’ waiting palms. The flames of the ghee-fueled lamp
offered to the deities were likewise reverently touched. With the deities
awakened and fed, the puja would end, and the pujaris and supplicants
would busy themselves in preparing for the afternoon’s many hours of
mediumistic consultations.

The Order of Mediumistic Ritual

Pujaris needed time to ready themselves for the physically arduous task
of “standing up” for the temple’s possessing deities. By mid-afternoon
most supplicants had already assembled. They came alone or, more
frequently, in families; most were mothers with children. Supplicants
from a variety of backgrounds – predominantly Indo-Guyanese Hin-
dus, but also Indo-Surinamese, and even occasional Creoles or Brazil-
ians – patiently waited their turn outside the inner sanctuary. Almost all
wore formal clothes, chiefly kurtas and saris or pants and buttoned-up
shirts or blouses.
Before too long, a recording of the staccato rhythms of round frame
tappu drums was switched on over the temple’s sound system.6 There
are temple drummers at nearly all Guyanese Shakti temples, but the
temples in Suriname are not large enough to sustain weekly drum
troops and therefore rely on recorded music for all but the most impor-
tant occasions. Wreathed in camphor smoke, one or more designated
mediums (marlo in Guyana, but simply pujari at Sri Shakti Mandir)
stood with tightly closed eyes facing the temple’s central Durga statue.
The volume of the recorded rhythm increased. In a steady layering of
celebratory sound, the pujaris added clanging gongs, ringing bells, and
stabbing blasts from a conch shell trumpet to the pulse of the tappu
 A Fragmented Unity 75

Figure 5 A manifesting deity takes the oath.

recording. Amidst this fanfare, the mediums would begin to vibrate

with the deities’ energy.7 Exploding into a juddering two-step hop, the
mediums swung their arms and heads to signal that their bodies are
being commandeered by the deities. Consecrated “dye water” was
now poured over the mediums from small brass vessels (lota). Every
Shakti medium I spoke with understood possession to be the “manifest-
ing” of a miniscule fragment of divine energy in a human body. If not
cooled with sanctified water, this superheated energy would burn up
the mediums’ feeble human bodies. With their long hair unbound, the
mediums – who were mainly middle-aged Hindu matrons – became
a dripping chaos of whiplash thrashes and frenzied movements that
were watched intently by the supplicants who waited just outside the
temple’s open doors. After around five minutes of this frenetic switch
in ontological frames, the mediums settled into a controlled, one-foot
forward, one-foot back stagger. Gesturing for camphor, the mediums
placed brightly burning squares of fragrant resin on their tongues until
the fire was extinguished. This “oath” – provided that they showed no
signs of fear or pain when taking it – proved the legitimacy of the medi-
um’s possession by a deity (figure 5). The oath satisfied, the attendant
76 Suspect Others

pujaris (who normally included me during my fieldwork) brought the

now-present deity a platter of sacred powders.8 With a greeting of “Pra-
nam,” the deity softly declared her or his name for the pujaris to loudly
announce. The newly arrived deities were offered sips of holy water
(dhar) infused with tulsi, and the same water was poured at their feet.
Coating their right thumb in sacred ash, turmeric, and vermillion, a
pujari would draw a line (tilak) up the middle of the deity’s forehead.
Uttering “My blessing be with you,” the deity reciprocated this gesture
for the pujaris and every other supplicant who addressed them over the
course of a consultation.
The call was now raised for the supplicants to enter. Consultations
take as long as the number of people who require help and can last
anywhere from one to five hours or more. Some days only a few people
came; on others it was difficult to push through the crowd. At each
mediumistic session, some supplicants were returnees, while others
were merely curious or anxious first-time inquirers with no previous
experience of Hindu mediumship.
Wary or enthusiastic, suspicious or steadfast, supplicants came for
divine advice about their general well-being, affirmation that they
were correctly performing their devotions, or to test a medium’s cred-
ibility. Supplicants routinely altered their opinions of what transpired
between them and a medium according to the changing conditions of
their personal lives. Even during consultations, people’s interpretations
of what was happening clearly skittered between suspicion and self-
doubt, humility and protest. Though frequently grateful, supplicants
were nonetheless routinely unhappy with what the deities instructed
them to do, and remonstrated with, or even disputed, the manifesting
deities’ revelations.

When “Mother and Baba Stand Up” – A Consultation

To show how the Hindu self is objectified in mediumistic Shakti rituals

in Suriname, what follows recounts a typical consultation at Sri Shakti
Mandir. While broadly representative in its structure and details, this
consultation also diverged from some otherwise ordinary features of
mediumship at the temple. In a temple where most of the mediums
were women, the medium here, whom I call Brian, is a middle-aged
man. While most consultations featured at least two mediums, in this
case, Brian was manifesting alone.
It was the eve of Mother’s Day 2013 – an important occasion in the
temple’s ceremonial calendar. Knowing that the preparations for the
next day’s rites would keep us at the temple until late that night, I
 A Fragmented Unity 77

arrived an hour after the end of the opening puja. Despite having pre-
viously planned to forgo consultations, Guru Kissoondial construed
the unanticipatedly large crowd of new supplicants as a divine sign
and ordered one of the pujaris to “stand up” in order to consult with
them. The pujaris hesitated. No one had prepared themselves to mani-
fest, and the arrangements for the following day’s celebrations were
behind schedule. Eventually, and with a show of considerable reluc-
tance, Brian, who was then the only other regular male medium at the
temple besides the Guru, volunteered.
Along with his wife, Brian had immigrated to Suriname the year
before from a small village in West Coast Demerara, across the river
from Guyana’s capital, Georgetown. Like many Guyanese, Brian had
lived for part of his life as a migrant labourer outside Guyana. After
many years in Curaçao and St Lucia, he had followed two of his four
adult children to settle in Paramaribo. Brian had found work as the fore-
man at a local construction site. His wife earned extra money by selling
snacks on the street downtown. A steadfast Shakti devotee, Brian had a
Guru in Guyana who had led him on arduous fasts and annual ordeals
of fire walking. Living in a rented room only two streets from the Sri
Shakti Mandir, Brian had quickly become an active temple member. He
was also less than discreet about his frustration with the established
female pujaris, believing they were the cause of the temple’s declin-
ing attendance. He illustrated this contention with an anecdote about
how one of the senior female pujaris had confronted his Sanganni for
not manifesting in the “proper” way and forced the deity to take his
oath a second time. Enraged by the woman’s presumption, Sanganni
punished Brian by possessing him with a “passion” that made Brian’s
body ache for many days afterwards. Like others I spoke with about
the temple, Brian’s judgments had a gendered edge. The older women
who managed it were dismissed as gossips whose mediumship was
regarded as less trustworthy than that of their male counterparts. On
the occasion described here, there was a definite sense that Brian was
eager to exhibit the superior efficacy of his possessing deities and put
the female mediums in their place.
Quickly collecting the requisite materials, Brian took up his position
at the centre of the temple. Recorded tappu music and mantra recita-
tions brought Brian to full possession after only a brief moment of
vibration. The deity now announced himself as Kal Bhairo (also called
Bhairo Baba). Bhairo is the local name for the pan-Indic deity known
as Bhairava (from the Sanskrit word for “terrible”), the fearsome form
that Shiva assumed to do penance for cutting off one of the four heads
of the creator god Brahma. In Suriname and Guyana, Bhairo is typically
78 Suspect Others

represented as a fanged blue child or an ash-covered mustachioed mus-

cle man carrying a club, a double-headed damaru drum, and Brahma’s
severed head in one of four hands. Like most of the temple’s possessing
deities, Bhairo spoke Guyanese English (“Creolese”) but did so in a way
that partly emulated the standardized English taught in Guyanese and
Surinamese schools. Though this was the dominant code, it was inter-
spersed with a small repertoire of Hindi words: beta/beti (son/daugh-
ter), accha (good), and samjhe (understand). Dressed in my pujari’s uni-
form, I stood to Bhairo’s left, recording and assisting him in whatever
way he requested.
During the mutual blessings between Bhairo and his attendants,
Bhairo upbraided the three older female pujaris, especially Lakshmi and
Arti. Bhairo “saw a lot of things” that had to be changed due to mis-
management at the temple. But now that the deity spoke through Brian,
the situation would improve. Bhairo pointed to all the new supplicants
waiting outside as propitious evidence of progress and predicted that
the temple would return to the popularity it had previously enjoyed
when hundreds of devotees had consistently come. Bhairo instructed
the pujaris to wash the entire temple before they prepared the deities
for Mother’s Day. The pujaris replied together that they would do so,
but only after asking the Guru for permission. Raising his voice, Bhairo
admonished them: he was giving them an order. If “nobody don’t want
listen,” he would not “present here” – manifest – at the temple again.
Apologizing, the pujaris demurred: they meant no offence, but respect
demanded that they consult the Guru about any alteration in protocol.
After all, they argued, there was no way the Guru would ever disagree
with a genuinely divine pronouncement.
Because of the generally egalitarian ethos of Surinamese and Guya-
nese Hindus, in Shakti temples and wider Surinamese society, posses-
sion was always subject to suspicion. Anger over unresolved doubts
about the authenticity of the other mediums led quite a few of their
mediumistic rivals to leave Sri Shakti Mandir to practise on their own.
These arguments most often addressed the medium’s character or the
quality of their possession performances. Questions about either issue
were a challenge to the legitimacy of the knowledge that the medium’s
deities revealed. Here is how Brian described the matter:

And you cannot have an enemy, you cannot [be] vex[ed] with nobody … I
mean you can be better than me or I can be better than you, but it depends
[on] how Mother and Baba take (possess) your body. It is how they come, that
[is] how you become better than somebody [else], better … because …
[of] how they work in your body towards people … The more you purify
 A Fragmented Unity 79

[yourself], the more [your body is] better for Mother and Baba. You cannot
go stand up with Mother and Baba [if] your mind is not clean. They will
come, but they will not come with pleas[ure]. Whatever [we] have to say
[to a medium who doesn’t conduct themselves right], we must say, because
your body [is not] ready for them … Just remember, your mind is like a scal-
ing weight (a scale), it [is] not balanced, [instead you must] focus on them
[the deities to] bring them how they [are] supposed to come. It depends [on]
how you prepare your body for them, how you prepare yourself for them,
so they come. That is what most people don’t understand.

The relative equality that is supposed to prevail among all temple

members as “Mother and Baba’s children” can only be contested by the
power of the deities. The power of a medium is based on the purity of
their devotional piety and the efficacy of their deities’ instructions. This
makes piety the subject of regular controversy, and temple members
try to establish their own superior devotional rigour to guard against
suspicions about the authenticity of their mediumship.
Disagreement resolved, Bhairo told the pujaris to call in the devotees
who had prepared sweet rice as part of previously prescribed multi-
week devotional regimes. Entering individually or in small groups,
supplicants came and stood before Bhairo. With guidance from the puja-
ris, each devotee poured dhar water at Bhairo’s feet from a small brass
vessel steadied with both hands above their head. “Next! Sweet Rice,
come!” the pujaris yelled, and an unemployed Indo-Guyanese woman
who was married to a fisherman took her place facing Bhairo. She was
a regular devotee who attended the temple with her teenage daughters
and son. “You have some question you like to ask me?” queried Bhairo.
The woman complained that she, along with one of her daughters and
her son, had lost some gold and silver jewellery. They had turned over
the entire house and yard looking for it, but none of it could be located.
Did she suspect someone, the god asked? The woman couldn’t think
of anyone; almost no one beyond her immediate family ever came into
her yard.
Her admission deferred to Bhairo: the lack of suspects suggested the
limits of her knowledge, not the absence of a guilty party. She did not
“know how dem walk” (didn’t know what other people did). The very
absence of a probable culprit was indication of an occult crime, a rea-
son for her to doubt what she really knew. For a few seconds, Bhairo
remained silent; he then commanded her to eat her sweet rice at the foot
of his statue and return before the close of consultations.
After the fisherman’s wife came a middle-aged Indo-Guyanese man.
Bhairo was curt with him, ordering him to “go [to the] seaside” to
80 Suspect Others

perform ablutions and make offerings. If he did so, after saying “one
mala” (one round of mantra recitation with prayer beads) before bed,
Bhairo would appear in the man’s dreams to show him what to do so
that he would henceforth “dance” (manifest the deities). The man gave
a shallow “uh-huh” in agreement, and Bhairo promptly sent him off to
eat his rice.
An older Indo-Guyanese man followed. He was hard of hearing, and
the din of the temple made a normally trying interaction more difficult.
As the man craned his neck and inched up to Bhairo until his ear was
only a few centimetres from the deity’s mouth, Bhairo asked him if he
was experiencing “pain in the belly.” When the man appeared uncer-
tain, Bhairo asserted that the man’s “whole skin (body) get pain.” The
man answered, “Yes, and my foot hurt,” to which an attendant pujari
rejoined, “That what Baba is telling you!”
The man blurted out that he was “getting echo” in his head. Bhairo
said that he didn’t have time just then to do what was needed to address
the man’s problem but would heal him. Bhairo ordered the man to
return to the temple the week after Mother’s Day with nine limes and
a sampling of dirt collected from five different “villages” (settlements
around Paramaribo). Like coconuts, limes are potent substitutes for sac-
rificial animals, and the fruit’s astringent juice is a vehicle for the sting-
ing potency of divine shakti.
Nodding his head, the man looked at Bhairo: “Baba, you know some-
thing, something there by my bed [when I] sleep.”
This was the man’s major complaint. Rather than address the prob-
lem, Bhairo replied coolly that he knew what it was that really distressed
the man. It would only become clear, however, when the man returned
the following week. Supporting Bhairo, one of the pujaris chimed in
that, without the dirt Bhairo requested, he could not expel the unknown
threat – which everything conspired to imply was sorcery. After the
pujari coached the man to pour dhar water at the god’s feet, Bhairo
told him to bring him two limes at the end of consultations. When he
came the following week, the man needed to “wear short pants” so that
Bhairo could wash him – explanations that did nothing to remedy the
man’s look of perplexity.
Bhairo solicited the man’s astrological sign: “What’s your planet,
when [were] you born?” The attendant pujari repeated this, shouting
directly into the man’s ear. As though shaking himself from a stupor,
the man said, “Oh, April month, twenty-fourth April.”
The man “should try to get yellow to wear,” Bhairo said, to “keep
more close to [the goddess] Durga.”
The deity then questioned the man: “You ever dream lion?”
 A Fragmented Unity 81

“Yes, yes that’s what me dream.”

“I see that, you must try to keep close to Durga Mata. Samjhe?” Clos-
ing his eyes and breathing heavily for a moment, Bhairo instructed,
“When next you come, I will show you what is the pain, accha? Take [the
sweet rice] and go eat now.”
A frail, elderly Indo-Surinamese woman limped into the room. I soon
found myself translating for her. She was sick and sought healing from
the deities. Bhairo instructed her to return to the temple for Mother’s
Day as part of a further “five weeks devotion” for Kateri Ma. After
drinking dhar water from the deity’s cupped palm, the woman was
guided by the pujaris to pour more water at his feet, and to eat a portion
of the sweet rice she had offered. When she took the rice directly from
the offering plate, Bhairo censured the pujaris: if devotees didn’t do “the
right thing, they cannot get help!”
Unsure what to do next, the woman inquired in Sranan, “Mi kan aksi
yu wan tu sani (Can I ask something), Baba?” All the pujaris answered
“aksi” (ask!). The woman stated excitedly that she “didn’t know what
had happened” in her house or who “had done these things.” Since her
“girl” (meisje) left, the woman’s whole household had “fallen down”
(saka). When the woman returned next week, all would be revealed,
answered Bhairo. Frustrated at this, the elderly woman insisted on
explaining her problems to me in agitated Sarnami: there was trouble
with her granddaughter, but no one could help, not even her pandit.
Ignoring her, Bhairo made an incision around the middle of a lime.
Studding the cut with cloves, he instructed the woman to bundle it in
a red cloth and wear it around her waist. Talisman in hand, the woman
left, though not without a few trailing glances of disappointment.
The lime that Bhairo prepared for the woman is one of a variety of
talismans that condense the main ingredients of Shakti devotionalism
and extend divine potency beyond its manifestations in mediums’ bod-
ies and deity images. As with mediums, Shakti talismans contain divine
energies that register the ubiquity of the deities’ immanent agency.
Metonyms for shakti, talismans are an aniconic means of making the
Hindu deities virtually present beyond ritual so that their efficacy can
more directly encompass mundane events like financial success or the
resolution of a family quarrel. Through such material tokens, deities
can remain in physical contact with a person but retain their potent
invisibility. Talismans accordingly “distribute” (Gell 1998) the power of
the deity among devotees and thread the temple’s rites into their daily
activities.
Caroline, Guru Kissoondial’s teenage niece who lived with her mother
and father in the temple compound, was the next to consult with Bhairo.
82 Suspect Others

For the first time that day, Bhairo used an intonation that resembled the
more formal cadence of her uncle’s manifesting deities to rebuke her.
“Mother say something to you last week, now I say something, tell you
something.” He held out cupped hands: “[Success is] there for you like
this, with open hands … but you [have] to work for it, otherwise how
will you get it? Hmm? It is there for you, but if you do not want it, how
will you get [it]?” Caroline was not serious about her devotions, said
the deity. There could be no excuse for failing to follow through with
the instructions the deities gave her. With a meek “Yes Baba,” Caroline
admitted, “Every time me come, them [the deities] tell me [to] keep [my]
fast … my parents keep ’em fast, but I get hungry, can’t keep [it].”
“Yes, I know, but I won’t expose you, samjhe?” replied Bhairo. “Be
careful what you do. This is what I see, so be careful, you must always,
when you [want] something … think how you going to go for it. If you
want to jump, what going happen to you? If you want skip on … to the
next thing, what [is] going to happen? Sometimes you [are] going to
fall. Hmm?”
“Yes, Baba.”
“So, … do not wait to fall. Accha? You have a very, very good future,
beti. Samjhe? Don’t mess with them [the deities]. What you must do,
keep the sweet rice fast by yourself. Take your time [to] see what you
[are] doing … I’ll help you to go and get it.” Caroline muttered her
thanks and slunk away in acknowledgment of the god’s reproof.

Blessing Regular Devotees

One regular devotee, a Guyanese woman who worked as a domes-

tic servant, now took her turn before Bhairo. She came to the temple
often to enjoin “Mother and Baba” to discipline her spouse. He drank
heavily to the neglect of her and their children and made a mockery
of the responsibilities of a good Hindu husband. Because drinking is
a core facet of male Hindu sociability (Sidnell 2000), at every temple I
visited I found a pronounced tension between the demands of a pub-
lic Hindu masculinity that is negotiated among male peers and which
emphasizes shrewd scepticism, and the moral expectations of Hindu
devotional domesticity that stresses self-discipline and sacrifice for the
well-being of the household.
Bhairo asked about the woman’s pains and admonished her for
neglecting to consistently offer him liquor at her home altar. Sweeping
her, up and down, head to toe, on all sides of her body with his neem
brush, Bhairo itemized all the ailments from which the woman suffered
and ordered her to bring a lime the next time she came to the temple.
 A Fragmented Unity 83

Before she left, the deity directed her to mix salt, lime, and blue deter-
gent in a bucket of water, throw the juiced limes to the four cardinal
directions, and bathe. On gaining her promise to follow his instructions,
Bhairo sent the woman off with an uncompromising comment about
people not wasting his time.
The fisherman’s wife, who had earlier asked after her stolen property,
returned. Bhairo asked her how long she had lived in her current home.
“Two years and a month.”
Would she believe what Bhairo had to reveal to her, he demanded?
The woman affirmed her trust and Bhairo uttered a single, muffled
word: “Bakuu.”
The woman started: “Bakuu in the yard!?”
Bakuu are a pre-eeminent vehicle of racecraft in the contemporary
Guianas (Pires, Strange, and Mello 2018). Surinamese and Guyanese of
all ethno-racial and religious identities agree that bakuu are the prime
demonic familiars of sorcerers. Repellent black dwarves, they enter
into unmeetable contracts to enrich the greedy in exchange for feeding
them with the lives of their buyers’ close friends and relatives. Uniquely
among spirits in the Guianas, bakuu now occupy an equally menacing
role across diverse ritual cosmologies. Many Surinamese and Guyanese
experiment with other ethno-racial groups’ rituals, and people perceive
the differences between these practices as complementary yet exclu-
sive. Some might regard other populations’ deities as variant transfor-
mations of their own, but they are nevertheless still manifestly either
Hindu or Afro-Surinamese. Even the Afro-Surinamese members of Sri
Shakti Mandir tended to talk about the temple’s stringent Hindu rites
as a subset of their own ritual tradition. Though they revered Hindu
deities, Afro-Surinamese devotees did not simply become Hindus at
the expense of their ancestral allegiances; the same was true for Hindus
who visited Afro-Surinamese ceremonies or healers. Bakuu, however,
violate all these distinctions. Hindus and Maroons alike complained
about bakuu and sought decisive solutions for their depredations. Con-
necting Surinamese and Guyanese anxieties about bakuu are their strong
association with the threatening alterity of other ethno-racial groups.
The more that bakuu are rejected as incarnations of what is unassimila-
bly evil in ethno-racial others, the more they become a standard feature
of a regionally shared racecraft that paradoxically unites all ethno-racial
identities in mutual suspicion.
Unbeknownst to the fisherman’s wife, Bhairo explained, bakuu had
been a long-term pest on the property she was renting. Are things rou-
tinely lost? Things did seem to go missing frequently, she affirmed.
Patiently, Bhairo instructed her to “check the home from corner to
84 Suspect Others

corner.” She should not be afraid while doing this – he would be with
her the entire time.
Bhairo filled in more detail: her house was infested with a fertile,
mated bakuu pair. Was she ever fearful of sleeping in her home at
night? Did she sometimes feel the house shake as if someone was
playing nearby? Seeing the woman’s confirmatory nods, Bhairo
explained that the bakuu had been jettisoned by “the first owners for
that place,” who had acquired and fed them in the pursuit of illicit
wealth. With an expression of surprise, the woman replied, “But
Baba the house hadn’t been there yet.” Without faltering, Bhairo cor-
rected himself, “The owner for the land then.” Whatever their ori-
gins, Bhairo cautioned, bakuu are voracious, and they needed to be
exorcized soon if she did not want to risk misfortunes more grievous
than stolen jewellery.
Bhairo assured the woman that there were many options for expelling
the bakuu from the property. One method was domesticating them with
routine offerings. Scoffing, the woman refused to satisfy the bakuu; she
wanted only to get rid of them. Bhairo counselled her to speak to Guru
Kissoondial. He would supervise washing her house with smoke – a
ritual in which Bhairo would manifest to lead a team of pujaris around
her property to expel the resident bakuu.9 Once she agreed to the rite,
Bhairo doused the woman with water, brushed her down with swift
strokes from his neem leaf brush, and sent her away.
As detailed in chapter 1, and underlined by Bhairo’s revelation, the
Surinamese landscape is an ambivalent source of opportunity and afflic-
tion for Hindus, whether long resident or recent immigrants. By prom-
ising to rid the fisherman’s wife’s house of bakuu, Bhairo implies the
spirit’s close relation with Surinamese land and people. Bhairo, a Shiva
avatar, controls the many land and boundary “masters” (spirits) that
own the countryside. Through his power over the land’s spirit own-
ers, Bhairo can expel unwanted bakuu abandoned by what Hindus tend
to regard as Afro-Surinamese malfeasance. In this way, Bhairo helps
allay doubts about Hindu belonging. Exercising his epistemic power to
define unseen things, the deity also asserts his authority to purify the
otherwise alien land for Hindu purposes.
The fisherman’s wife’s teenage daughter, Shalini, stepped up to
inquire with Bhairo about problems she was having with her sister.
Her sister had recently married, and their previously strong relation-
ship had deteriorated until they now regularly fought. Bhairo inquired
if Shalini “was living in her own home, or renting?” Confused, Shalini
began to explain her living arrangements, but then realized what
Bhairo meant. “Like rental,” she replied. How long was her currently
 A Fragmented Unity 85

assigned period of devotion? She “wasn’t under devotion” but was

“just praying.” Bhairo demanded to know if Shalini would fulfil a
devotional regime if he assigned one. Shalini demurred that she was
too “small” (young); she would certainly pray every week but consid-
ered devotions too “heavy” at this point in her life. Bhairo snapped
that it was her mind, not devotion, that was excessively heavy. Shalini
must “make her mind strong” – if she did not, she would never “lift up
herself, lift up her courage,” and attain her desires. Even as she stood
directly before him, Bhairo berated, her mind was somewhere else.
With a grimace of self-reproach, Shalini muttered, “It’s true.” Bhairo
explained the cost of Shalini’s weakness; she had a “big role to play
for [the goddess] Kateri” but could only take up mediumship through
devotion – a proposition she greeted with a blank face. Redoubling his
efforts, Bhairo interrogated Shalini: when she prayed at home did her
body sometimes shake?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she sighed. “It [is] like trembling, yeah.”
Confidently, Bhairo assigned Shalini devotions to Kateri, but she
interrupted him: “Yeah, uhm, but I have some more question. There
[is] a guy my parents want me to marry, I want [to] know if he [is] the
right one.”
“In order to get an answer to that, you have to get a picture of the
person.”
She had a picture on her phone. Bhairo, however, told her to wait and
show it to him the next time they spoke. Bhairo made as if to dismiss
her, but Shalini enquired “how far” she would make it in her studies.
Bhairo answered: “Like I said before, your mind [has] to be strong. You
can do good with school, but you have too many things [that] you put
in front [of your schoolwork]. When you [do] so [many] thing[s] at the
same time, it mean[s] you clog the mind. Samjhe? Sometime you got to
help your own self. Instead of getting married, you got [to] settle down
in school.”
“Yes, there’s too much things,” Shalini said with relief.
“You got to focus in one direction, you understand? And to do that,
you have to do Kateri’s devotion, samjhe?”
“But do I have to do the devotion now? Or, like, when I’m older?”
“Now you have the strength, you cannot wait to do it until [your
strength] gets worse and worse. Because [Kateri will] [be] with you,
you have to do devotion. And if you [do] not do that … If I tell you
something, you’ll believe me?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll never ever keep a husband. You have to do [devotion] for [you
to] marry, [or succeed at] school, all. Before you get in a relationship.”
86 Suspect Others

With this warning, Bhairo restated his injunction – Shalini had to start
her devotions that very day.
“Yeah, but me wanted to know about that thing, that thing ’bout
me and my sister, our relationship, me and my sister not get along so
good.”
“You listen … careful[ly to] what I said?”
Exasperatedly, Bhairo reiterated that Shalini’s mind was weak. Devo-
tion was the only solution for her lack of fortitude. “Sometime your
complexion dark, dark,” Bhairo said, suddenly.
“Yeah, it’s true,” replied Shalini, after appearing baffled.
“And white colour in the dream [the colour white frequently appears
in your dreams]?”
“Yeah.”
“So, you have to do devotion,” Bhairo nodded.
“Yeah.”
“Any more question?”
“Yeah, I lost a gold ring, I can’t find it; I really don’t know where it is.”
“I’ll explain when you come back. Two different thing I see. Accha?
When I come back I [will] tell you what it is so you can find it. Samjhe?”
With a hint of impatience, Shalini pushed Bhairo: “And if I do not
find it, you will tell me two different kind of things [explain what I
should do about two different issues]?”
“The schoolwork you doing … put a Saraswati [the goddess of learn-
ing] picture at home. When you come [home] from school, you wash
the pencil, and you place the picture in front of you in the afternoon.”
“Ok.”
“But you must have a lighted diya in front of her [the Saraswati
image]. Then you wash it and you go to school so she [Saraswati] can
take care of you.”
For a third time, Bhairo asked Shalini if she had further questions. She
could think of nothing else, and Bhairo swept, washed, and dismissed
her.
The last supplicant was brusquely washed and blessed. Bhairo asked
a pujari to call Betty, his medium Brian’s wife. Betty, who tended to be
gregarious and light-hearted, presented herself with stone-faced seri-
ousness. Before dousing her with water, Bhairo instructed Betty to “take
half of the lime and wash the home. Samjhe?”
“Yeah, boss,” she answered, impassively.
“And make the pujari bathe his skin with it. Accha?”
Bhairo sharply exhaled: “He [Brian] has to continue thinking about
his devotion to Kateri Mata. Samjhe? She’ll help him with that.”
Bhairo had Betty untie her hair and doused her with water.
 A Fragmented Unity 87

“Your devotion is very weak. You have the shakti … of the Devis (god-
desses) … but you are keeping yourself [down], because your devotion
is very weak. Samjhe?”
“Mhhm.”
“Even sometime you don’t want to go [to] the altar [at home]. Hmm?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not keeping me [back], you’re keeping yourself back. Samjhe?
You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Before I go, I want you to get me a silver coin and a piece of red flag
[cloth] for me. Samjhe? I’ll make something for you for [your] business.
Samjhe?”
Washing her, Bhairo instructed her to rub her hands down the sides
of her dripping body.
“What you must do now, you must take [a] bath every Sunday, you
must bring the water from [the] seaside … Samjhe?”
“Yeah, Baba.”
“And you have to continue devotion for Kateri Mata.”
“Yeah.”
“Any question you want to ask me?”
“No, Baba.”
Sodden, Betty shuffled off to get ingredients for the talisman. Bhairo
looked at me and said that Betty needed “to be more serious with her-
self. Once you’re strong in your devotion, you’ll get all the deities very
close to you. If you stay like this (indicating an unfaithful devotee)
they’ll keep away from you. You’ll have it [the gift of manifesting the
deities], but they’ll stay far away from you.”
Was anyone else waiting? “That [is] all for today, Baba,” the other
pujaris answered. Betty came back, holding the requested items in
her palm. Bhairo resumed his directives: “What you must do is keep
close to Kateri Mata and Sanganni. And Hanuman, he’s with you.
Samjhe?”
Looking away, Betty offered a faint “Yeah, Baba.”
Bhairo composed the talisman: one “silver” coin (10 SRD cents), some
neem leaves, vermillion, sacred ash, and five lime seeds. Tying them
into a tiny strip of red cloth, he breathed his shakti into it, sprayed it with
perfume, and ignited it with the flame of a ghee lamp. Extinguishing
the blue flame, Bhairo told Betty to put the talisman where she hid her
savings. Sweeping her down, the deity splashed her with a few final
pots of water.
“What you must do, you must pay more attention to what you are
doing, accha?” With no more than a feeble nod of assent, Betty left.
88 Suspect Others

In anticipation of Bhairo’s departure, the tappu recording was switched

on and the volume increased. Before Bhairo would leave, however, he
summoned Lakshmi. Against her protests, Bhairo washed her. As he
did so, she griped that she still had to clean the temple for Mother’s
Day. How could she clean up if she was sloshing wet? Bhairo raised his
voice: “I give you water and you don’t want it? Take all your pain then
[and] keep it, keep it.” Already soaked, Lakshmi laughed miserably and
submitted as another pujari reproved her resistance with a soft voice, as
though chiding a recalcitrant child.
It was now late in the afternoon. With Bhairo’s work done, the pujaris
assembled to thank him for helping “all the children.”
“That was my duty,” said Bhairo. “I waited a very long time to come
here, but you have no one to bring me present here. Accha?”
“Thank you.”
“I come here to perform the duty and hope that everybody, everybody
must be happy.”
“Yes, Baba. We want the mandir to be like before. Bring a lot of people
come here, make puja. We need puja every day …”
Bhairo interrupted: “You see it starts already.”
“Yes, we need some young ones to train them up. We’re getting old.”
“That’s why when they come now, you people have to step to the
side, and you show them what they have to do.”
“Yes, Baba.”
“And everybody must [be] look[ed] after the same [way] … Because
everybody wants to be in here, the problems that you have, you leave
’em outside.”
“Outside,” echoed the pujaris.
“When you’re in here, you must be happy, be love too …”
“Be together.”
“Even your enemy, [you] must be happy with them. When you leave
here [it] is something different from when you came here. Understand?
Everybody satisfied?”
“Yes,” answered the pujaris in unison. “Thank you for your time.”
The tappu recording blared. Bhairo seemed to involuntarily vibrate
to the rhythm. Shuddering along with the pujaris’ droning recitation of
the Shiva Mahamantra, Bhairo exhaled a deflating breath, and Brian fell
back into a young male pujaris’ waiting hands. Opening his eyes with
a series of rapid blinks, Brian looked around unsteadily: “What hap-
pened? Did Baba say anything about me?”
When the music was switched off, a bustling quiet filled the now
emptied temple. Without discussion, the pujaris set to work cleaning
and decorating for the next day’s Mother’s Day celebrations.
 A Fragmented Unity 89

Conclusion

The consultations just recounted illustrate the crises, diagnoses, and

therapies that brought people to confer with Hindu mediums during
the period of my fieldwork. Though as varied as ringing in the ears,
lost property, and whom one should marry, the leitmotifs of physical
suffering, future success, and intra-family conflict disclose the tussle
of competing self-conceptions that define contemporary Hindu life in
Suriname. Egalitarian sentiments about personal fortitude and inter-
personal equality jostle with the social and divine hierarchies that mesh
with pain to estrange people from popular ideals of scepticism and
self-determination. In a mediumistic encounter, who is in control? A
deity? Or merely a deceiving human? How does who a medium is affect
the legitimacy of their possession? If it is indeed a deity who speaks,
what power do humans have to persuade him or her to support their
cause? And if the medium is only another human, does listening to
them degrade the listener’s own self-worth as an independent wife or
husband and upholder of Hindu ethno-racial moral distinction?
Whatever influences converge in Shakti consultations, manifesting
deities like Bhairo predictably attempt to destabilize the apparent trans-
parency of their supplicants’ self-knowledge. Rather than simply claim-
ing authority over those who consult them, mediums disclose how the
self-opacity that they reveal in their supplicants is explained by the
spirits and gods who pervade and encompass human consciousness.
Self and other are thereby fused through invisible agents’ penetrating
proximity and inclusion in the operations of human self-awareness. It
is through this reality that mediums instruct their supplicants about
how to deal with an irreducibly relational existence that simultaneously
includes and exceeds them. Chapters 4 and 5 will analyse in detail, via
accounts of pain and dreams, how manifesting deities kindle doubt
about self-awareness and reveal that they are already in control of a
person’s destiny. Even when Bhairo urged devotees like Caroline and
Shalini to help themselves, he emphasized that this achievement is the
exclusive gift of laborious supplication to the deities. It is only when
a person’s mind is impregnated with divine shakti that personal goals
become morally appropriate and practically achievable.
When they come to the temple to ask about others, devotees are urged
to efface themselves through piety so as to arrive at the knowledge that
it is not they but the deities who are responsible for the achievement of
their innermost ambitions and desires. Self-doubt is thus the first step
towards self-certainty. The true self is described as what yields to the
deities, not the selfish inclinations that resist divine authority. Without
90 Suspect Others

divine assistance, the self remains opaque. People think they know
themselves and others, but in reality, all they see are the excrescences
of a worldly will blind to its true divine nature and the human rela-
tions that interfere with the attainment of this realization. Once people
are attuned to the deities, not only do they begin to perceive the true
nature of the self, but, as with Bhairo’s admonishments to Betty about
her husband, Brian, they are also offered knowledge that makes the
ways others “walk” equally transparent.
In the next chapter, I return to these same issues among Ndyuka
Maroons. Hindu and Ndyuka mediums generate reflexive self-doubt
in many of the same ways. The critical difference is the variety of selves
Ndyuka conceptualize and reflect upon, and what this implies for the
ways in which people become accountable for self-knowledge or the
lack thereof.
Chapter Three

Mediated Selves: Ndyuka Knowledge,

Suspicion, and Revelation

There are so many factors that determine the life courses of different people. We
Maroon people know that these differences result from the spirit of a person’s
birthplace (gadu pe a komoto). God makes everyone in her or his own particular
way. The spirits compete to accompany each new child born on earth. It is that
spirit (yeye) who accounts for the character of that child. The person who raises
the child will try to get them to behave in the manner they desire, but they will
fail because the spirit of their birthplace possesses them (ne’en tapu) just like a
[medium’s] possessing spirit (wenti). That is who defnes a person’s life on earth.
– Hugo, a Ndyuka man living in Sunny Point

“People don’t know [spirit] songs. Songs just come,” Ma Domii told
me sternly. I was driving her home to Sunny Point after a visit to her
son. Eager to document more Ndyuka ritual songs, I had asked her if
she might sing one for me when I received this unexpected rebuff. An
elderly Tapanahoni Ndyuka woman from the village of Godo Olo, Ma
Domii had been married to an esteemed medium (obiyaman) and main-
tained an active involvement in her son’s healing shrine (obiya kampu).
I had seen her singing at her son’s rituals and thought that she must
know at least a few songs. When I persisted in asking again, Ma Domii
reiterated that, out of context, she could have no firm knowledge of
such matters and then lapsed into silence before changing the subject
to less occulted matters.
Ma Domii’s reticence about ritual information captures the dynamic
tension between secrecy and transmission that defines Ndyuka revela-
tion. Initially, I thought her denial of knowledge was simply a mild
reproach to me for being too inquisitive. But other Ndyukas also made
similar professions of ignorance about collectively held but contextu-
ally grounded ritual knowledge. Not long after my conversation with
92 Suspect Others

Ma Domii, the respected mortuary specialist Da Robby also told me he

didn’t know anything about his ancestral history (fesiten toli) but needed
to summon this “wisdom” (koni) with a libation and earnest professions
of humility. No one admitted to knowing anything definitive about key
aspects of their personal identity, ritual form, or family past. It was only
under the right social conditions – circumstances in which unseen spir-
its were invited to ritually intervene – that these kinds of knowledge
“came” (kon) into human consciousness. Only then could Ma Domii,
Da Robby, and other Ndyukas who disclaimed personal knowledge
reveal what they otherwise said they did not know. Eventually, I came
to understand that these declarations of personal ignorance – assertions
that it is basically impossible for individuals to control certain catego-
ries of vital communal information – were decisive for understanding
the centrality of revelation to the “genealogical theory of mind”
(Gell 1998) through which Ndyukas apprehend the self.
What do Ndyukas know about themselves, and how is this knowledge
revealed to regulate the epistemic opacity or transparency of one’s self
and others? In this chapter I consider how ideas about what knowledge
is and where it comes from define what can be said and experienced
about the self. These conceptions apply across the varied domains of
an increasingly urban Ndyuka social reality. Rather than telling a story
about social competition for strategic control over scarce information
(cf Simmel 1906), Ndyuka epistemic ideology holds that secrecy is a
function of the ontology of knowledge. People do not merely hide what
they know; what they know is instead contingent on humanity’s essen-
tial difference from, but inseverable hereditary relations with, the invis-
ible spirit and ancestral sources of legitimate knowledge.
The continued importance to Ndyuka society of revelation and its
ontological limits gives rise to a galvanizing paradox. As in the case of
Ma Domii, the authority of traditional descriptions of personal identity
and genealogically determined social relations derives from revealed
knowledge that is necessarily external to the fleeting perspectives of
those currently alive. Concurrently, however, almost anyone is, poten-
tially at least, a vector for powerful secret knowledge and therefore
possesses the potential to change how tradition is understood and
enacted in the present day. Accordingly, even as Ndyukas insist that
revelation offers ready answers to human problems, their reliance on it
points to deep doubts about the human aptitude for ever satisfactorily
understanding either themselves or spirits and other non-humans. In
what follows, I trace how the dilemma presented by revelatory knowl-
edge enables Ndyukas to experience a manifold self about which they
would otherwise know very little and, at the same time, threatens the
 Mediated Selves 93

authority of those who purport to reveal such socially consequential

hidden knowledge.

Ndyuka Subjective Multiplicity and the Origins of Knowledge

For many Ndyukas, the deficiencies of unaided human knowledge

expose the origins of personal subjectivity in an inherited amalgam of
spirit and ancestral relations. To know anything significant, Ndyuka
persons must contain a coalition of agencies simultaneously distinct
from, yet integral to, their identity and agency, and of whom they are
only ever partially aware.1 As Da John, my field assistant, described
it, the human body is “a house (osu) for all the things that live inside it.”
In Ndyuka ritual, persons are accordingly approached as relational
assemblages “composed” (Guyer 1996; MacGaffey 2000) from the influ-
ences of multiple spirit and human allies and enemies (see Beliso-De
Jesús 2014; Espirito Santo 2015; Matory 2007, 2009a; Palmié 2006; Wek-
ker 2006 for other Black Atlantic examples).
Ideas about the self’s essential multiplicity and the ways that it
registers in human subjectivity surfaced repeatedly during my field-
work. Whether in Paramaribo or in remote interior villages, I was often
included in Ndyuka conversations about how many souls or spirits
(yeye) humans have. This was a subject of consistent interest and recur-
rent disagreement for urbanites and villagers alike. While most people
settled on two to three souls, others gave numbers as high as ten or
even fifteen.2
Unlike mediumistic spirits (wenti/gadu) that commonly possess
people out of revenge or affection, these personal souls/spirits endow
every human with a discrete character in continuity with that person’s
lineal identity and only definitively separate from the body after death.
Of all the personal spirits that Ndyukas named, three – the akaa, the
nenseki, and the gadu fu a peesi – were the most consistently corroborated
(see also Vernon 1992). The akaa is a unique spirit sent from God (Masáa
Gadu) at the time of birth to direct a person’s ethical impulses, desires,
and intuitions. The nenseki is generally “an old person from your fam-
ily” but may also be an animal like a hunting dog associated with a
lineage. Nenseki mark people’s bodies and personalities, and idiosyn-
crasies of appearance and personality are attributed to them.3 More-
over, it is believed that nenseki may be passed down and reincarnated in
one’s descendants. The third of these spirits is the gadu fu a peesi (some-
times also called bun gadu), the tutelary spirit of a person’s birthplace,
mentioned in chapter 1. Like goonmama earth spirits, the gadu fu a peesi
often takes the form of a boa constrictor (Constrictor constrictor). In the
94 Suspect Others

past, this spirit was associated with conception, though its importance
in this respect seems to have declined with mass migration away from
interior villages (Vernon 1992).
From intuition to conscience and intelligence, all tendencies of
human consciousness are potentially attributable to the agency of
these indwelling spirits. Ndyuka anecdotes commonly tell of people
who have sickened because of their souls’ fear or disgust in situa-
tions of shock or discomfort. Inadvertent spills of food or drink are
greeted with exclamations of “It had to happen!” because such seem-
ing accidents are in fact obligatory gestures of respect for these unseen
agents. The medium Da Mangwa explained that when a person walks
through town and sees something in a shop window that gives them
an immediate urge to buy it, they must do so because this is your akaa
requesting a gift. Similarly, Da Robby told me of being overcome with
an intense “desire” (losutu) for a beer while driving his taxi. Though he
rarely drank, he was suddenly unable to think of anything else. Against
his better judgment, he stopped at a Chinese supermarket and gulped
down a large bottle of lager. Rather than becoming drowsy or drunk, Da
Robby felt abnormally good and woke up the next morning energetic
and refreshed – details that revealed that the beer had been an offering
solicited by his akaa.
Romeo, a gold miner, explained that these various spirit inhabitants
stand alongside the body to guide a person’s everyday consciousness
through unexpected intuitions and emotions. He gave the example of
an office worker on their way to work who, just as they were about to
arrive, is overcome by a sudden impulse to call in sick. According to
Romeo, the person experiences this sensation because a relationship
beyond their conscious awareness is dangerously wrong. Perhaps the
office worker is bewitched or has inadvertently done something to
offend her body (sikin) or soul (akaa). Alarmed, the person’s embodied
spirit (yeye) reacts with a flash of queasy insight, a feeling that indicates
that some component of the person’s spirit substructure is warning the
aggregate self of danger. Romeo said that a person must listen to these
messages and abide by what keeps the body and its spirits happy. Oth-
erwise, a person will fall sick and even die as a result of egoistic intran-
sigence against the unconscious agents that animate the self.
The inscrutable spontaneity of such polyphonic thoughts, feelings,
and desires provides Ndyukas with evidence that their selves are
infused and directed by a multiplicity of invisible agents about whom
they are only ever dimly aware. Da John put it like this: “If I alone
were thinking, my attention would be more focused.” Mikhail Bakhtin
(1986) theorized polyphony as the literary creation of “a plurality of
 Mediated Selves 95

consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world” that
“combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (6). Ndyukas
perceive the multitrack babble of consciousness as a sign of the col-
lective origins of their personal agency. For Ndyukas, this polyphony
expresses an ontology in which the self is a relational aggregate embod-
ied in both individual sentience and the dynamics of Ndyuka kinship.
By this account, each Ndyuka self, who they are, and what they feel and
know, is a peculiar assemblage of spirit identities, all of which signify
the present generation’s derivation from the ancestral past.4 A person
achieves proper self-knowledge when they acknowledge their reli-
ance on these agents and understand how their own bodies and minds
evince the ontological principles of Ndyuka kinship.
To become ethically effective social agents, Ndyuka persons must
cultivate an appropriately “humble” (saka fasi) awareness of themselves
as living incarnations of their lineage’s history. For instance, in late 2012
I received word that Da John, who would soon become my research
assistant, had returned from a protracted stint prospecting in the inte-
rior. When I arrived at his house to welcome him back, his children told
me he was indisposed. After a fifteen-minute wait, Da John emerged
bleary-eyed from the room he shared with his wife. He apologized for
not greeting me sooner, but he was expecting a message. Da John had
fallen afoul of a dispute between his matrilineal relatives over the gold
claim he had been working. Unemployed and with many dependents,
Da John had retreated to his house in Sunny Point, shut himself inside,
and waited. If he made himself available, sooner or later, the “sani”
(things) that “stood with” him – God, his akaa, his ancestors, and lin-
eage spirits – would tell him what to do next through the medium of
his body.5 Da John interpreted his setback as a signal that he had insuf-
ficiently heeded these entities as himself. He could not know how to act
unaided; if only he listened intently enough, however, the polyphony
of other agents implicated in his person in the present would be reliable
guides. This recognition was a necessary step for restoring certainty
about the agency of Da John’s spirits in the conduct of his individuated,
though not individual, life.
Taken together, Ndyuka concepts of the self point to a “composi-
tional” (Guyer and Eno Belinga 1995) theory of knowledge that empha-
sizes “the social production of multiplicity amongst singular people
[…] each at their own frontier of expertise” (Guyer 1996, 2). Every
Ndyuka person receives a distinctive weave of maternal and paternal
ancestral relationships that potentially make them a unique medium for
multiple lines of esoteric knowledge. In such a knowledge tradition, it
is difficult to draw a permanent division between the practical and the
96 Suspect Others

occult or the personal and the collective. Everything that is traditionally

known is inherited through genealogies of revelation that inalienably
mark everyone within a descent group. But this collective knowledge is
reserved for those like elders and established mediums who have com-
pelling claims to its power. New knowledge demands new revelations
and therefore leads to repeated struggles over who has the authority to
speak for tradition. The multiplicity of the self that Ndyuka mediums
reveal constitutes a dynamic frontline in battles over who has final con-
trol over the distribution of efficacious esoteric knowledge (Thoden van
Velzen and Van Wetering 2004).

Obiya, Spirits, and Ndyuka Healing

Like Da John, many Ndyukas believe that self-knowledge is best

gained by attending to the self as a palimpsest of clues of the myriad
of invisible others who make up each living person. While knowing
one’s own self is far from straightforward, knowledge is even less cer-
tain when it involves others. This sensibility connects Ndyuka percep-
tions of themselves with the widespread mistrust of the human ability
to interpret others’ minds.6 Precisely because of the ubiquity of such
doubts, people feel that they must continually try to discern what those
around them are really thinking. One might glancingly infer another’s
state of mind from their facial expressions, but all appearances – and
even the thoughts of one’s own mind – are in the end opaque and
prone to deceive.
Ndyuka concerns about the opacity of their own and other minds
are countered by interventionist possessing spirits who enjoy profound
insight into human thoughts and intentions. Effective knowledge of
“oneself as another” (Ricœur 1992) is best provided by spirit mediums
(wentiman/obiyaman/bonuman) and oracles (tyai-a-ede, luku). Jenny, an
urban Ndyuka woman, explained that she did not think that living
people

can know what others are thinking. But [you can] with help from spirits
(wenti). A spirit medium (wentiman) can tell you your thoughts. A spirit
medium can know what you are thinking without you saying anything.
Because so many times I have heard spirits tell people that what they are
thinking is not good, and that they shouldn’t do it, without them having
said anything at all.

Ndyukas of both sexes and all ages may become mediums, though a
person’s age, family, and gender significantly impact which spirits they
 Mediated Selves 97

give voice to and how much influence they exert.7 Looking inside their
patients’ bodies, mediums apprehend them as composed of, and sick-
ened by, a dense overlap of constituent human and spirit relations. The
apparent confusion in Jenny’s quotation between personal knowledge
and knowledge of others shows the centrality of spirits in producing
the polyphonic yet obscured character of Ndyuka selfhood and subjec-
tivity. Only spirits have the power to penetrate and judge the opacity
of self and other. Ndyukas therefore rely on spirit mediums to break
through impasses between people and reveal the concealed feelings
that account for the tainted relations that cause misfortune.
Like many Hindus, Ndyukas consult mediums about a sweeping
array of interpersonal and physical problems. These include everything
from family quarrels and intra-office animosities to protracted ailments.
If an affliction resists biomedical treatment, mediums step in.
Ndyuka healing is based on therapeutic obiya medicines that revise
the relations from which each person is composed. Obiya is among the
most important Afro-Surinamese concepts. Polysemous, it simultane-
ously denotes (1) a pervasive cosmological potency created by God
(Masáa Gadu); (2) a large variety of interventionist spirits; and (3) vari-
ous therapies that include both simple herbal preparations and elabo-
rate rites of ritual bathing, divination, and possession.8 Like a number
of related terms for African practices centred on ritual powers and
objects (see Blier 1995, MacGaffey 1988, 2000, 2001; Matory 2018), obiya
is practically untranslatable, but is perhaps best approached as a spirit-
medicinal technology that empowers humans to remake reality through
the fusion of spirit identities with the physical and symbolic properties
of plants and other found materials.
Obiya is most commonly made by mixing ingredients like leaves, clay,
alcohol, food, detergent, and tools like machetes, with rules (weiti), pro-
hibitions (kina), songs, dances, and prayers in rituals supervised by pos-
sessed mediums (see figure 6). According to Ndyukas, obiya exemplifies
the principle that everything that exists has some “power” (makiti) for
causal influence (Price 2007; Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering 2004).
Using the metonymic and metaphorical properties of natural ingredi-
ents, obiya infuses humans with the power of spirits and increases the
efficacy of human action. For example, one plant commonly found in
obiya recipes is kankyankama, an epiphyte that grows high up on the
branches of large rainforest trees. Mediums explained that this put it
“above” (a tapu) the afflicting relationships that the plant was used to
treat. Another leaf, amooman, gains its abilities from its name, which
means “greater than [a] man.” Women use it to control their lovers,
and men to defeat business or romantic competitors. Like the spirits
98 Suspect Others

Figure 6 Da John prepares obiya.

that aggregate into the self, every ingredient in an obiya recipe is both
a specific causal power and an agent that must be ritually encouraged
to accomplish a specific goal. Ndyuka mediums heal by harnessing
these occult “capacities” (kakiti) to either develop or expel the spirit and
human relations that they reveal to be responsible for their patients’
afflictions and misfortunes.
As theory and practice, obiya is what makes the polyphony of the
invisible spirits and relations that constitute Ndyuka selves apparent
in everyday events and the enigmas of ordinary consciousness. As
already explained in chapter 1, spirits have been part of Ndyuka life
since at least the earliest period of ancestral revolt (Price 1983; Thoden
van Velzen and Hoogbergen 2011). Ndyukas recognize many kinds
of spirit, of which those who make obiya are the most important. Of
these, Ampuku owners of the forest, ghosts (divided between victims
of tragic deaths like murder [koosama] and more venerable shades from
the earliest period of Ndyuka history [fositen sama/yooka]), constrictor
serpent spirits (Papa/Fodu/Dagwe), African war medicines (Kumanti),
Native Americans (Ingii), and river spirits (Toné) are the most prominent
 Mediated Selves 99

among the normally invisible host that swarms Suriname’s rivers, trees,
mountains, and land.9
For Ndyukas, having connections to many spirits provides humans
with a “wealth in knowledge” (Guyer and Eno Belinga 1995). Sustain-
ing an abundance of exclusive relations with hereditary spirits expands
a Ndyuka person’s or lineage’s capability for effective social action and
influence. Just like relations with human persons, however, relations
with spirits also bring with them decided risks. In addition to possess-
ing people, spirits threaten to become vengeful kunu dedicated to the
annihilation of matrilineages whose members they blame for having
wronged them through disrespect or violence. At one and the same time,
spirits are therefore responsible for upholding the key Ndyuka moral
principle of lineage solidarity and a major explanation of human suffer-
ing. This exemplifies the tragic centrality of spirits to Ndyuka theories
of belonging already described in chapter 1 (Price 1973; Thoden van Vel-
zen 1966). Respected out of fear of reprisal, kunu encapsulate Ndyuka
ambivalence towards spirits as intrusive beings better left alone but
apart from whom humans could not exist. Though Ndyukas complain
that the collective guilt that kunu impose is unjust, kunu are nonethe-
less regarded as an immutable fact, and they decisively condition how
Ndyukas reflect on self-knowledge and personal responsibility.
As kunu make apparent, Ndyukas perceive spirits as anthropomor-
phic beings who share Ndyuka values, kinship, and political orga-
nization. Spirits live in houses in their own native lands; speak their
own languages; have husbands, wives, and children; and pursue plea-
sures like dancing, joking, and drinking under the supervision of their
own leaders. Mirroring Ndyuka preferences for exogamy, spirits also
reproduce promiscuously across spirit species to generate an ever-
proliferating assortment of hybrid spirit identities (Price 2007; Thoden
van Velzen and van Wetering 2004).10 Even the remotest forest is a
spirit settlement subject to moral expectations of mutual recognition
and respect. Since these same moral principles ideally govern Ndyuka
villages, from the resolution of inter-family disputes to the conduct
of hunting, agriculture, and mining, spirits enforce a common ethics
across all domains of Ndyuka sociality.
Despite sharing many human traits, spirits are superior to living
humans. At his healing shrine in the forest on the outskirts of Paramar-
ibo, Da Boonmila, the medium Da Espee’s tutelary Ampuku, was happy
to boast of the differences between humans and spirits:

Wenti don’t go to the land of the dead (Adyaniba). But people go to the
underworld. Because of this, there is no way you [addressing his human
100 Suspect Others

audience] can be stronger than me. If I want, I can go from here and, before
you can count to fve, arrive in Ndyuka [an hour and a half airplane fight].
I can walk with the wind. But you walk with your feet; or go by boat; or
cars, those sorts of things. But I fy like a butterfy (babé) … what you don’t
see, I see.

According to Da Boonmila and other spirits, spirits are immortal, invis-

ible, and free to move across vast distances – faculties that provide them
with strength and knowledge inconceivable to body-bound mortals.
The medium Ba Ben’s possessing spirit Agidibo articulated it this way:
“The wind blows in the heavens and not a single human can under-
stand its speech, but I can see into the hearts of humanity.” When spirits
speak through mediums about the world concealed from humans or
describe their capacity to see into human minds, they are explicit that
this knowledge is exclusive to them.
However formidable their powers are, spirits are neither omniscient
nor omnipotent. While spirits are uncannily intimidating when com-
pared to living humans, their efficacy is restrained by an array of taboos,
personal idiosyncrasies, and historical relations. Spirits often aver that
they only help Ndyukas because God compels them to use their powers
to relieve the pains of weak, ignorant humans. In the end, like Ndyukas
themselves, Ndyuka spirits cannot do as they please but must speak for
some version of the moral order that Ndyukas understand to be innate
in all social and environmental relations.

Mediums, Patients, and Suspicion

That spirits are invisible, can read minds, and are able to fly exposes
the ontological asymmetry between them and humans. Spirits show
humans that human knowledge is, when unaided by spirits, entirely
restricted to a narrow and often misleading sliver of reality. These
epistemic restrictions force Ndyukas to rely on an array of revelatory
rituals in order to resolve what is otherwise unknowable about social
life. Despite the further erosion of the ritual cohesiveness of Ndyuka
society in the wake of mass migration to urban areas, spirits persist in
expressing themselves across the many domains of Ndyuka existence,
exposing hidden relations, creating new obiya therapies, and impos-
ing justice. At present, mediumistic obiya “work” (wooko) assumes a
variety of forms for urban Ndyukas, and life in Paramaribo has modi-
fied ritual ingredients and methods. Because large-scale Ndyuka
relocation to Paramaribo only began after Surinamese independence
in 1975, these recent adaptations reflect both critical strengths and
 Mediated Selves 101

weaknesses in the ability of Ndyuka ritual knowledge to address

rapid social change.
Many Ndyuka and other Afro-Surinamese mediums live in Para-
maribo, its suburbs, and its forest periphery. During my fieldwork, I
knew of four full-time obiyaman in Sunny Point, one of whom divided
his practice evenly between Suriname and the Surinamese diaspora in
the Netherlands. Even more mediums practised in neighbourhoods
closer to the city. The number of patients visiting different mediums
varied considerably, rising or falling with a medium’s popularity and
reputed rate of success. Three of the four Ndyuka mediums with whom
I collaborated most closely frequently only conferred with one or two
patients on the days they consulted. A popular obiyaman, though, might
see upwards of twenty people over four hours of intense consultations
held two to three times every week.
Of the 135 inhabitants of Sunny Point I surveyed in 2012, just over
half (78 out of 135) admitted that they visited mediumistic healers when
necessary. Though these results are far from definitive, they evince
something of Ndyuka ambivalence towards traditional healing and
knowledge production. However intense peoples’ doubts are, these
statistics also show that mediumistic healing continues to thrive. I con-
sistently met other ethnicities at Ndyuka mediums’ shrines, but most
patients were Ndyuka. Because of prevalent suspicions about fraudu-
lent mediums, many Ndyuka patients are related, however distantly, to
the mediums they visit. This proclivity for ethnic and kin familiarity is
linked to contradictory apprehensions over trust. On the one hand, kin
connections imply shared concern with one another’s welfare born of
a common heritage. On the other, given the consensus among Ndyu-
kas that kin are the most motivated to harm each other, kinship carries
a decided danger. These tensions expose the tragedy of Ndyuka kin-
ship: The very intimacies of origin and shared blood that bind people
together also produce the envy, greed, and resentment that are respon-
sible for personal and collective misfortune.
Ndyuka history, shot through as it is with revelatory revolution and
counter-revolution, is the story of repeated attempts to resolve this
contradiction and establish a definitive regime of trust (Parris 2011;
Thoden van Velzen and van Wettering 2004). Conflicted attitudes
about mediums and oracles were already present in late-nineteenth-
century anti-witchcraft movements, and even in formative fears from
the period of eighteenth-century maroonage (Thoden van Velzen and
van Wetering 2004, 2013). Over the past 130 years, suspicions about pre-
viously sacrosanct sources of revelatory authority have likewise stoked
Ndyuka prophets like Akalali in the 1970s and Gáangá in the 2000s to
102 Suspect Others

lead revolutions aimed at creating new dispensations of enduring kin

solidarity. Though authoritative knowledge ultimately originates from
unseen spirit sources beyond human abilities, such continuous streams
of new revelation mean that no revelation is ever immune from ques-
tioning for very long.
This tendency to epistemic instability has been exacerbated by vari-
ous sects of evangelical Christianity, especially Pentecostalism (Volle
Evangelie), to which a substantial number of Ndyukas have now con-
verted. With its wholesale attacks on Ndyuka tradition, evangelical
Christianity further inflames suspicions about the oracles, mediums,
and obiya on which Ndyuka society has historically relied. Such sus-
picions have spurred ritual originality and encouraged contemporary
Ndyuka mediums to better adapt their practices to urban Ndyuka
needs by shortening treatment times, easing taboos (kina), and simpli-
fying their techniques.
These strains on the legitimacy of traditional ritual knowledge have
provoked diverse responses from Ndyukas endeavouring to adjust to
new conditions of urban poverty, ethno-racial discrimination, and direct
state violence. Ndyuka reactions to urban life range from the wholesale
rejection of tradition (tradisi, gwenti), to the active integration of ritual
into electoral politics, as in the case of ritual dances (pée) sponsored
by the politician and former guerrilla leader Ronnie Brunswijk. As
emblems of an increasingly fraught Ndyuka “culture” (kultulu), medi-
umship and obiya are matters of considerable ambivalence for Ndyukas
in Sunny Point and other urban Maroon neighbourhoods. Url, a con-
struction worker in his early twenties who had spent nearly his whole
life in Sunny Point, voiced one common opinion when he told me that
his generation thought obiya was crazy (lawlaw), and that obiyaman were
simply conmen who pretended to be possessed to extort money. In con-
trast, other young Ndyukas – especially those with extensive experi-
ence in the interior mining gold – proudly asserted that they would
never forget their “roots” (lutu) in ancestral obiya. Even more numerous
were those who professed scepticism about obiya but readily admitted
that they might consult an obiyaman should the need arise.
These opposing perceptions disclose Ndyukas’ ambivalence towards
the ritual practices that they have inherited from their ancestors. Urban
Ndyukas are decidedly unsure about whether traditional methods
are still effective in the city or powerful enough to treat the sufferings
wreaked by modern witches (wisiman), their demonic bakuu familiars,
or the other maladies of the contemporary world.
Nothing illustrates Ndyuka views about the deficiency of human
knowledge more dramatically than suffering. Human inadequacy
 Mediated Selves 103

before the quirks of fortune, pain, and death underscores the poverty
of human self-knowledge and control. At the same time, like a witch’s
greed or a spirit’s anger, most misfortune is caused by conscious agents
compelled by recognizable emotions and intentions. Given the poly-
phonic “sociocentricity” (Wagner 1991) of the Ndyuka self, someone
is always to blame, but responsibility is never constrained to an indi-
vidual and always leaks out to implicate everyone to whom a person
is related through care and kinship. Not only does the inaccessibility
of others’ true intentions make people inherently untrustworthy, but
the offences incubated by such hidden thoughts have collective conse-
quences about which the perpetrator is frequently unaware.
These issues motivate Ndyukas to warn against naively trusting
mediums. Because spirits ramify within lineages as collective afflic-
tions, many Ndyukas wish to leave them be. Yet, with their superior
claims to knowledge, spirits are often the only recourse for resolving
afflictions inevitably rooted in human wrongdoing. To quote one pos-
sessed bakuu medium, “Bakuu [and by extension all spirits] don’t kill
people; people kill people.” As vehicles of spirit intervention, Ndyuka
mediums are caught between their patients’ competing needs for sus-
picion and revelation. Failing to suspect human and spirit others puts
one at risk of being defrauded or, worse, of being bewitched. Neglect-
ing a spirit’s demands, however, can bring even greater suffering. Da
Henny, a middle-aged Ndyuka tour guide from a village on the lower
Tapanahoni and my neighbour in Sunny Point, undertook a long search
for a cure for an enigmatic ailment suffered by his ex-wife. From this
experience he learned that

It is better to consult mediums unrelated to you. If they’re in your family

they will lie about the spirit possessing them (bali ne’en tapu). Then they’ll
expose things they know have already happened in the family. They’ll tell
you what they already know rather than carefully investigating what is
actually afficting you. If the medium is legitimate (bun, literally “good”),
then they’ll reveal things that either only you could know about, or about
which you had no idea. When a medium [who reveals verifably hidden
things] treats (déesi) you, there is a much greater probability that the treat-
ment will succeed.

This tension between casual acceptance of spirit power and commit-

ted scepticism towards anyone who claims to communicate it is typical
of Ndyuka attitudes. People know that spirits are real and their medi-
cines effective. They also know that people lie. The same divinatory
rituals that expose others’ veiled conspiracies also uncover the poverty
104 Suspect Others

of self-knowledge and the ubiquity of spirit control over seemingly pri-

vate thoughts and sensations. Paradoxically, then, valid mediumship is
revealed by the extent to which a medium convinces their patients to
doubt what the client knows about themselves – and thus undermines
the patient’s reasons for doubting the medium.
Alternatively, the very doubts about self-knowledge that empower
spirits also give rise to questions about the legitimacy of any particular
medium’s knowledge. For the same selfish reasons that people pursue
witchcraft, they may also imitate the visible effects of spirits to cheat
and dominate others. When performed by another person, the loss of
self-control that convinces many Ndyukas that they share their bod-
ies with spirits may be merely manipulative artifice. Such doubts lead
Ndyukas to undertake protracted therapeutic “quests” (Janzen 1978).
Over the course of an affliction, a sufferer and their family will visit
many mediums whose effectiveness is then determinedly scrutinized
and compared. Here is the narrative of one middle-aged Ndyuka
man’s search for a cure for impotence – a most serious blow to Ndyuka
masculinity:

Da Asasi sought solutions from so many people without fnding help.

First, he went to see the sister of the prophet Akalali who is possessed
by Ampuku spirits, but he didn’t improve. Then he went to another man
with many, many possessing spirits. This man took Da Asasi to purify
himself in the forest, but it didn’t help. Then he saw another man who
washed him in the river and sacrifced a chicken, but it didn’t help either.
Next, he consulted a Haitian he had heard about, but with no result.11
Now, another Ndyuka man who is the medium of an ancestral African
spirit is treating him. Finally, he has achieved some relief and can again
sleep with women but, because the treatment is ongoing, it is too early
to say so for sure.

Da Asasi’s case shows the pragmatic approach to healing fostered by

Ndyuka epistemic pessimism. A therapy is evaluated purely by its
results. At the same time, because knowledge of these hidden causes
is the near-exclusive domain of spirits, people insist that patients like
Da Asasi must believe that a ritual will succeed – at least until it fails to
achieve its promise. While unsuccessful treatments are variably ratio-
nalized as the results of differences in mediums’ expertise or taboos
broken by patients, mediums are still habitually accused of witchcraft
and dishonesty. Since spirits are the only ones capable of exposing these
hidden motives and misrepresentations, Ndyuka mediumship ironi-
cally invokes the revelatory necessity of spirit mediation and renders
 Mediated Selves 105

suspicious the motives of anyone claiming to be a medium. Mediums’

declarations about the exclusivity of spirit knowledge therefore prompt
Ndyukas to endlessly pit mediums against one another (Parris 2011;
Price 1983, 2007; Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering 2004).
Ndyuka patients are not credulous dupes motivated by naïve belief.
They actively pursue truth and personal control but do so suspecting
that their own discernment is provisional and open to manipulation by
the unscrupulous. Consequently, ancestral oracles and shrines in the
Ndyuka homeland remain decisive in Ndyuka efforts to insure against
the ever-present threat of ritual treachery. “The majority of urban (foto)
mediums learned their work through dissimulation …” began Da
Henny, as he framed his thoughts on the issue:

that is why they don’t know everything they should: a real spirit doesn’t
possess them. When a legitimate spirit seizes (kisi) you, it will demand that
you go to your home village so that the traditional authorities may con-
frm it through enstoolment (seeka en poti a banki). After being enstooled, a
medium won’t be able to lie (lei) or pretend that a spirit possesses them.
If they do, the senior mediums will know. The oracle for the matrilineage
or the clan will expose whether or not the spirit is legitimate. That’s why
swindlers who pretend to be mediums in the city have never gone to their
villages.

Even when vetted in the traditional manner, mediums are nevertheless

obliged by prevalent suspicions about them to recurrently verify their
legitimacy. Only after a client has been fully convinced to doubt the
accuracy of their own self-knowledge is a medium’s veracity in any
way assured.
The next section describes one man’s struggle to have his medium-
ship acknowledged by an ancestral authority. The resulting disappoint-
ment and disagreement show how thoroughly self-doubt and personal
opacity are involved in the ritual revelation of Ndyuka selfhood.

Da Aduna’s “Carry-Oracle”

All Ndyuka “carry-oracles” (tyai-a-ede) have the same design. A sacred

bundle is fixed to a narrow board long enough for bearers at either end
to place on their heads and not stumble over one another while carry-
ing it. Either revealed directly by a spirit or recovered from an earlier
oracle, the sacred bundle is built around an obiya recipe of leaves and
other activating substances. Bound to the board, the animating medi-
cines sit at its centre, buried under layers of vibrantly printed cloths, a
106 Suspect Others

central item of traditional Ndyuka wealth and, along with alcohol, the
main commodity exchanged with spirits.
The carry-oracle consultation I recount here took place at Ngobaya
Ondoo, a small hamlet (kampu) on the Maroni River just south of the
town of Albina on Suriname’s border with French Guiana. Just off a
shallow beach, Ngobaya Ondoo is a cluster of sparsely inhabited three-
room plank houses and assorted sheds built in a sandy glade. Though
the houses appear to end in a dense wall of jungle, closer inspection
uncovers a half-hidden clearing set back in the forest. In the middle
of the clearing sits a zinc-roofed hut barely tall enough for an adult
to stand up in. Unlike the solid siding of the wooden residences from
which it is set apart, the hut’s walls are open slats that let in just enough
light to blot its interior in camouflaging shadows.
The hut is a shrine (obiya osu). It contains the post (ponsu) at which the
shrine’s resident spirit – here addressed as “Masáa” (Master) – receives
libations and the carry-oracle through which he communicates. Masáa
is an Amanfu, a species of spirit related to the Kumanti war medicines
brought by the Ndyuka ancestors from West Africa.12 At the time, the
shrine was maintained by Da Aduna, who had inherited his role as
shrine keeper and “spokesman” (takiman fu a gadu) for Masáa from a
maternal relative. Though he lived in Paramaribo, Da Aduna cared for
the shrine on sporadic visits during which he activated Masáa’s oracle
for the matrilineage’s benefit.
Da John, Matt (a visiting American friend), and I came to the shrine
at the behest of Da Aduna’s mother’s brother’s son, Da Kwasi. He had
previously been an activist for BEP,13 one of the two major Maroon polit-
ical parties, but had fallen prey to possession by a disruptive spirit.
On the slightest provocation, Da Kwasi would leap up, “stamp” (baté)
the ground, and yell strings of spirit names and titles (telinen) in spirit
language.
Every kind of spirit has its own language. Of these, Kumanti, Ampuku,
and Papa are the most prominent among Ndyukas, though there are
many others. These languages are named after the species of spirits who
speak them; they are also – at least in the cases of Kumanti and Papa –
ports in Africa from which the Ndyuka ancestors were transported on
the middle passage. These historical traces are somewhat noticeable, in
as much as Kumanti has preserved Akan vocabulary and phonology,
while Ampuku has a clear affinity to KiKongo (though it is regarded
as wholly native to Suriname) (Borges 2016; Price 2007). When spirits
speak their languages, they tend to stress what is most audibly different
from ordinary Ndyuka and do so in either highly animated or very dig-
nified and restrained ways. Spirits start their possession performances
 Mediated Selves 107

in these languages but rapidly shift to more familiar human languages

in order to communicate with uncomprehending patients. For example,
Ndyukas associate Ampuku forest spirits with Sáamaka Maroons, and
Da Sako’s patron Ampuku, Da Asaimundu, would always speak Sáa-
maka during consultations so that patients could hear his dissimilarity
from Da Sako while still understanding what he was telling them.
Ndyukas regard spirit languages as natural languages, albeit esoteric
ones. Humans can learn these languages to attain occult knowledge and
potency. Despite being distinctive, learnable codes, at least to human
ears, the same spirit language can also sound very different when spo-
ken by different mediums, even when they are talking together as part
of a dialogue between two of the same kind of spirits. Indeed, there is
a decidedly agonistic quality to spirit languages, especially Kumanti,
which is exclusively male and highly martial. Men, whether possessed
or not, will often compete with one another to demonstrate their supe-
rior grasp of Kumanti and thereby establish their greater ritual author-
ity. Speaking a spirit language is therefore integral to the spirits’ broader
social legitimacy as strangers who are nevertheless active in everyday
human existence (see Irvine 1982).
Having already endured a few years of these outbursts of possession,
Da Kwasi was anxious for the lineage authorities to establish the spirit’s
identity and have it legitimated to stop the attacks. A close matrilineal
relative and a recognized medium for his own tutelary spirit, Kango, Da
Aduna had a notional obligation to help resolve Da Kwasi’s condition.
Despite Da Kwasi’s anxious appeals, difficulties in coordinating the
two men’s schedules had delayed the consultation for many months.
Only when I proposed to take them in my car did Da Aduna assure Da
Kwasi of a visit to the oracle.
After a three-and-a-half-hour drive on roads still scarred from the
civil war that had by then been over for twenty-five years, we met the
canoe that took us to the oracle’s shrine. It was piloted by Da Aduna’s
kinsman and ritual assistant, Ba Giofani, who was himself anxious to
consult with Masáa about a matrilateral cousin who had recently been
jailed in French Guiana on charges of cocaine trafficking. After spend-
ing the night in Ngobaya Ondoo, we awoke early to begin preparations
for the day’s séance. Da Aduna, Ba Giofani, and Da Kwasi first went to
check on the shrine. The son of the preceding medium had bragged that
he had taken the oracle to a new location farther up river. On inspec-
tion, it was discovered that only part of the oracle had been removed.
The most important element, the cloth-swaddled sacred obiya bundle
(pakáa) that endows the carry-oracle with its spirit’s sentience, remained
suspended from the shrine’s ceiling, untouched.
108 Suspect Others

Finding the sacred bundle intact, Da Aduna and Ba Giofani tied it to a

new plank. After some required upkeep, Da Aduna began the consulta-
tion with a libation of beer splashed from a calabash bowl at the base of a
small flag at the shrine’s entrance. A small audience of kinfolk who had
gathered from neighbouring settlements to consult the oracle looked on
expectantly. Addressing Masáa and the oracle’s deceased mediums and
caretakers, Da Aduna prayed, “Da Amanfu, we come here, Dambo, Da
Tukuti, Ma Antama, Da Anduana, please acknowledge the alcohol we
have brought.” He explained that, by relocating Masáa’s oracle to this
distant hamlet, others had separated Masáa from most of the lineage to
which he belonged. “As children of the lineage,” Da Aduna and his kin
now sought the oracle’s lost “wisdom” (koni) to reveal to them “what
needed to be done.”
Formalities concluded, Da Aduna and Ba Giofani balanced the ora-
cle atop carefully rolled cloth supports (tyatyali) on the crowns of their
heads. Once firmly in place, the oracle heaved the men forward in a
gesture of greeting and then pulled them in a circumambulation of the
shrine. When out of the audience’s view, Da Aduna loudly questioned
the oracle: “Though they removed the earlier oracle, have you [the
spirit] remained in this one? Will you use the oracle we have made to
replace it?” Oracles answer questions by dragging bearers left or right
in confirmation or refutation. Masáa’s oracle affirmed its successful
reanimation with a forward thrust that caused the bearers to lurch off
kilter and back into sight.
The authority exercised by Ndyuka carry-oracles and spirit mediums
is perhaps best understood through the central institution of Ndyuka
politics: the council (kuutu). The default format for nearly all acts of col-
lective Ndyuka decision making – including oracular and mediumistic
consultations – councils parallel oracles and obiya in being ritual assem-
blages that unite a polyphony of often opposed agents and powers to
make decisions and achieve communal goals. Whether for the family
(osu), the matrilineage (bée), the clan (lô), or the Ndyuka nation (nasi)
as a whole, it is councils that deal with the crises that beset Ndyuka
society.
Because formal councils were until the last quarter of the twentieth
century the exclusive domain of senior men, the form talk takes in these
meetings remains the most prestigious enactment of Ndyuka public
authority. Organized around ritualized turns at erudite dialogue, coun-
cil participants sit in a circle around a designated “answer man” (piki-
man), who provides formulaic feedback affirmations such as, “That’s
the way it is” (a so a de), to the statements of the speaker who holds the
floor. With due decorum, councils continue until all ratified participants
 Mediated Selves 109

have had their say and the most senior member declares that a resolu-
tion has been reached and the agreed upon course of action should be
undertaken. To establish what the correct action is, council members
depend heavily on inherited political titles, proverbs, allegories, divi-
nations, and prescient dreams. As with the obiya ingredients that com-
pose oracles, each of these modes of authority channels ancestors and
spirits whose implied presences enable their invokers to act effectively
towards a common purpose.
In the case of the consultation with Masáa’s oracle, because Da Aduna
acted as both oracle bearer and spirit interpreter, he was simultaneously
the council’s pikiman and most senior member. These equivocal roles
allowed him the ironic distance from the proceedings that enabled him
to maintain interpretive control over what happened during the ritual.
With the oracle in the full view of everyone, Da Aduna (or his spirit,
Kango – the context rendered it unclear) opened the inquest. As if
addressing a court of invisible judges, he explained Da Kwasi’s situ-
ation: “Look, he [Da Kwasi] is possessed (literally, “hollers” [bali]) by
something, and we want to establish what it is.” The oracle replied with
a shuffle, answering through Da Aduna that Da Kwasi’s spirit could
only be recognized if it made a firm declaration of who it was, where it
came from, and why it had seized him.
As if stung, Da Kwasi released an explosive shriek and leapt to his
full height. Slamming the whole weight of his bare feet into the damp
sandy soil, he bawled a litany of names in a spirit language. Ignoring
this outburst, Da Aduna proceeded, drolly, “We still haven’t heard [the
spirit’s name], but we’ve seen that it can yell, whatever it is. But the
names it exclaims belong to others (other mediums’ spirits). Some are
those of forest spirits (Ampuku), but we still don’t know who it is, or if
it’s called Sangoba Kisimaini, Taabo Taabo, Taalen Basiti, or whatever.”
Da Aduna catalogued a few more spirits, then abruptly announced that
only an obiya bath could force Da Kwasi’s spirit to reveal its true name.
Turning to Da John, Da Kwasi’s classificatory brother, Da Aduna
called on him to voice the family’s collective interest and demand that
the spirit name itself. Da John opened his mouth, but, before he could
speak, Da Aduna interrupted with a story: “I caught a little tokoo (a spe-
cies of secretive and inedible bird that is difficult to trap) and I carried
it into the village. I showed my mother. She asked me how I captured it,
because no one understood how or why I caught the bird. I am already
crazy.” Catching such a bird may be impressive, but is not very worth-
while. No sane person would bother. With this story, Da Aduna implied
that Da Kwasi’s spirit might be just such a difficult, but ultimately use-
less, and even endangering, being.
110 Suspect Others

Da Aduna’s parable questions the appropriateness of Da Kwasi’s

possession and illustrates the disputability of many apparent acts of
possession. While various spirits may initiate relations with humans,
only some are suitable for the person and lineage possessed, and all
spirits are unpredictable. People who violate rules on how to engage
with spirits are either malevolently possessed or outright mad. Ndyuka
ritualists draw a clear distinction between insanity (lawlaw) and legiti-
mate possession, and the extensive rituals required to confirm a spirit’s
identity make sure that this distinction is preserved. More than simply
being “against the self” (Nabokov 2000) as an inalienable core of per-
sonal agency and desire, Ndyuka rituals expose the impossibility of
having comprehensible selves outside of the social relations that con-
fer people with the self-awareness that they are persons of a determi-
nate kind. Spirits that aspire to successfully communicate with humans
must submit to careful examination by lineage authorities, including
oracles. Among Ndyuka mediums, legitimate self-control is a ritual
attainment earned through recognizing that crucial facets of the self are
beyond personal awareness and only comprehensible as spirit identi-
ties. Rather than regard Da Kwasi’s outburst as a symptom of psychic
conflict sealed within an impermeable individual, obiya therapy posits
that the mysterious opacity of Da Kwasi’s actions results from a collec-
tive failure to adequately identify the other agencies through whom he
becomes himself.
Masáa’s oracle again jolted into motion, walked to the side of the
shrine and halted. Da Aduna “called people by their names” to sum-
mon a band of non-human spirits and the dead to help him identify Da
Kwasi’s possessing entity. The list concluded, Da Aduna declared that
Da Kwasi seemed to have inherited a spirit who “fights” (feti) for his
lineage “like a policeman to protect the house.” The oracle pointed to
Da Kwasi, and Da Aduna loudly declaimed, “Mineli [a spirit] caught
Maini and gave this obiya to the forest spirits in a place called Mango
Gobo. Then you (Da Kwasi’s spirit) must reveal your name to the fam-
ily so that those assembled here (lanti) can acknowledge it. If it is in the
blood [belongs to the lineage], if it is Chinese, if it is a forest spirit or
whatever, make it speak!”
Da Aduna’s invocation should have broken the inarticulateness of Da
Kwasi’s spirit and forced it to make its identity public. But Da Kwasi
just stood there. Notwithstanding his earlier outburst, he appeared to
have returned to his habitual self. Flustered by his own impassivity, Da
Kwasi implored, “I don’t know what it is that afflicts me. It’s like I’m
crazy (law). You’ve got to help me, find out what causes me to behave
this way, because it is killing me with embarrassment (syen). Every
 Mediated Selves 111

place I go, it causes a scene. Everything people say, or any mistakes

they make, provokes it to act out.”
The oracle’s attempts to rouse the spirit to reveal itself had so far
failed to stabilize Da Kwasi’s possession into a clear spirit identity. Da
Aduna now “tested” (puubei) him to check whether it was a mannengee
obiya (Kumanti war spirit). Da Aduna yelled, addressing Da Kwasi by
the name of his father from whom he would have inherited this species
of spirit: “Da Tolomi, if I say I will shoot you, what will you say?”14
Resounding silence. If the possessing spirit had been a Kumanti – the
war spirits who made Ndyuka ancestors invulnerable in combat with
the Dutch – it should have taunted Da Aduna back with a shout of
“Shoot me!” Da Kwasi simply stood by perplexedly, however, before
hazarding, “Don’t shoot me?” Reversing their roles, the visibly irritated
Da Aduna demanded that Da Kwasi incite him with the same provo-
cation. Da Kwasi looked straight at Da Aduna and screamed:,“If I say
I’m going to shoot you, what will you do!?” With a typical Kumanti
cadence, Da Aduna triumphantly bellowed: “Ooooo! If anyone says
they will shoot me, I will say shoot me, you will see! I want to see!”
Returning to his human voice, Da Aduna explained the situation:
“Your response tells me that I should do nothing to treat you just yet.
I will give you a beer and a madras cloth (pangi) to prevent you from
shrieking in public. But the spirit hasn’t really caught you yet. You must
tie the cloth around you, so tight that your eyes tear up. But, kikili hei,
kikili hei (words in spirit language), the issue will be resolved. The ora-
cle’s obiya will exorcise the culprit, and it won’t come back. If you don’t
expel it, though, you might die.”
The oracle instructed Da Kwasi how to make obiya to calm his spirit’s
eruptions. He needed to collect newly sprouted palm fronds (maipa
tongo, used to make kifongo fringes that guard the entrances to Ndyuka
villages and shrines), cut them up and wash with them. To activate the
recipe, one other operation was required: “To save a sinking boat, you
must buy a bucket to bail it out; therefore, you must take a handful of
change and throw it in the water with a splash. Then wash with it.”
Obiya is only effective when the person who assembles it recognizes
that each stage of its manufacture is critical to the amassed power of
the whole. Concomitantly subjects and objects, obiya are both conscious
agents and lists of ingredients. To guarantee the potency of this agency,
leaves from different species are gathered according to ritual procedures
designed to entreat and compensate a plant’s spirit and place of resi-
dence.15 A person making obiya must respect certain prohibitions and
pick the right leaves in the correct order and manner. As with Ndyuka
selves and Ndyuka councils, obiya is the efficacy that results when an
112 Suspect Others

aggregate becomes a coalition capable of coordinated action towards

the realization of specific ends. For the Ndyukas with whom I spoke,
every obiya recipe had one crucial ingredient that served as its “boss”
(basi). A unique endowment of the medicine’s guiding spirit, the iden-
tity of this component is zealously guarded. Just as the authority of the
Ndyuka paramount chief (gáanman) ties the twelve separate Ndyuka
clans into a single polity, an obiya’s master item ensures that a recipe
fuses into an efficacious assemblage of agents and powers. However
simple an obiya formula, its disparate ingredients do not dissolve into a
seamless whole but rather empower it through the clash of their quali-
ties. This emergent potency is what enables obiya to intervene in the
composition of similarly aggregate human bodies and subjectivities.
Having noted the obiya recipe, Da Kwasi asked for additional clarifi-
cation: “How many days must I wash?”
“Four days.”
“Does it have prohibitions (kina) on what I can do?”
“No,” answered the oracle.
Da Kwasi insisted on further detail: “Do I have to wash with it for a
whole week, eight days?”
“If you can wash with it for a solid month, that would be good,” the
oracle assured him.
Breaking spirit identity, Da Aduna now spoke to Da Kwasi as him-
self: “The obiya hasn’t taken full possession of you. That means you
need to wash quickly.”
With a look of concern, Da Kwasi asked, “When I’m finished can I put
the money I wash with in my wallet?”
“If you put it in your wallet, you’ll be guaranteed money in the
future,” said Da Aduna with oracular certainty. “When a paawisi (black
curassow, Crax alector) is hungry and finds food it cries ‘Kulen! Kulen!’
That means it has met with success. Look to Masáa [to acknowledge
him for the treatment’s realization]. Kango (Da Aduna’s spirit) has the
keys to the lives of mortals (libisama). He must oversee the healing of
your affliction.”
Crestfallen, Da Kwasi grudgingly accepted the oracle’s verdict but
remained sullen. After consulting with six other people who sought
the oracle’s help over matters as miscellaneous as jail sentences, loss of
sexual desire for a spouse, and insubordinate children, Da Aduna and
Ba Giofani took the plank from their heads and returned the oracle to
the shrine’s rafters. Unfolding three large lengths of batik cloth that Da
Aduna had brought from Paramaribo, the two men draped these one
over the other on the oracle’s faded sacred bundle. Renovation con-
cluded, Da Aduna and Ba Giofani returned the oracle to their heads.
 Mediated Selves 113

In a gesture of contentment, it swayed immediately to life. Da Aduna

announced the oracle’s appreciation of the many who made the “effort”
(muiti) to come, care for Masáa, and obey his advice. With this glad
affirmation, the oracle was returned to the shrine. Da Aduna double-
checked the building’s security, and we all returned to the beach to find
our different ways home.
At the beginning of the chapter, we heard Ma Domii suggest that she
mediated collective spirit knowledge even though she denied knowing
anything definitively herself. Similarly, the stubborn inarticulateness
of Da Kwasi’s failed mediumship discloses the extent to which self-
knowledge goes beyond any single person’s awareness. For Ndyukas,
knowledge is always an exclusive property of the specific history of
ancestral relations that authorizes a particular person to reveal it (Price
1983). Knowledge is not “known” (sabi) but rather revealed through
the spirits who personify this history in the present under collectively
stipulated conditions of election, descent, and ritual preparation that
depend entirely on the social context in which it is unveiled.
Da Kwasi’s spirit’s inability to respond to activation by a lineage
oracle places the spirit beyond these epistemic fail-safes. Much to Da
Kwasi’s chagrin, the spirit was exposed, not as an ancestrally activated
agent, but as an afflicting entity resistant to domestication. Masáa’s ora-
cle reveals not only that Da Kwasi lacks knowledge of the true nature
of the other agencies with whom he shares himself but also that, as cur-
rently expressed, these aspects of him are incapable of inclusion in either
his personal identity or that of his kin group. This is why Da Kwasi’s
spirit’s inability to name itself troubled him. If he were truly speaking
for a lineage spirit, his previous suffering would be endowed with dig-
nity as an intermediary of collective wisdom and power. Unfortunately,
rather than reveal a spirit whose intervention could positively “steer”
(tii) his lineage’s collective destiny, Da Kwasi’s impassivity before Da
Aduna’s authority disallowed him the social authority that his possess-
ing spirit would have otherwise claimed.

Ndyuka Altars and the Aesthetics of Secrecy

The testing of Da Kwasi’s possession indicates the decisive, if also

contentious, power of Ndyuka mediums and oracles to adjudicate the
limits of human self-knowledge and control. As displayed in Masáa’s
carry-oracle and Da Aduna’s possession, obiya assumes a multifac-
eted richness of material forms that are critical for understanding how
Ndyukas perceive themselves to be aggregates of lineally imposed
spirit relations. Shrines like Masáa’s, and the altars (obiya tafáa) they
114 Suspect Others

contain, are the screens on which mediums project their spirits’ power
into the world of living humans.
Shrines in Ndyuka villages typically resemble Masáa’s – small huts
scattered throughout the community. Without access to sufficient land
and worried about ritual purity, Ndyuka mediums have not fully rep-
licated traditional shrines in the city, opting instead to operate out of
private shrine rooms (obiya kambá) in or near their homes. Such shrines
vary in size and complexity, ranging from inconspicuous installations
of flags (faaka), calabashes (kaabasi), liquor (sopi), and beer bottles (batáa)
in a corner of a bedroom to freestanding sheds clogged with masses of
both organic and industrially produced conduits of spirit power (wenti
sani).
Many obiya therapies involve multipart prohibitions and can last for
weeks or months. To accommodate these rites, urban Ndyukas also
build healing shrines (obiya kampu) in rural areas on Paramaribo’s out-
skirts, most often near one of the few paved roads that lead into Surina-
me’s thinly populated hinterland. Forest shrines elaborate the features
of household altars, being made up of a series of outbuildings erected
around a central sanctuary that contains a spirit’s post and flags, ora-
cles (luku, gén-gén, tyai-a-ede), staffs (tiki), and the clothing (koosi) that
a shrine’s medium wears when possessed. Forest shrines embody the
widespread Afro-Surinamese idea of the rainforest as a place bursting
with therapeutic power that offers patients shelter from bewitching
relatives and contaminating urban spaces (Thoden van Velzen and van
Wetering 2004; Wooding 2013).
In household shrines or in forest camps, altars and offertory flags and
posts anchor the ritual lives of mediums (see figure 7). The altar of the late
Cottica Ndyuka medium Da Mangwa was characteristically complex.
From floor to ceiling, objects as diverse as ceramic Chinese deities, grind-
ing stones, surreally bound bottles, plastic toys, and sprays of wild grass
all jostled for attention. Such bewildering arrangements make Ndyuka
shrines enigmatic, a secrecy that some mediums encourage by declin-
ing to explain the objects they display. While flags and carry-oracles are
immediately identifiable to most Ndyukas, the diverse shrouded and
wrapped artifacts that fill mediums’ shrine rooms frequently defy easy
description. Patients are confronted not with a collection of identifiable
articles but with a dense throng of things, the functions of which can
only be dimly grasped or are outright unknown.
Like other African-derived traditions, Ndyuka ritual emphasizes
“secretism” – an “active, milling, polishing, and promotion of a repu-
tation for secrets” (Johnson 2002, 3). Ndyuka secretism encourages an
aesthetics of “accumulation and containment” (Nooter 1993; MacGaffey
 Mediated Selves 115

Figure 7 Da Ekspidisi’s altar for an Ampuku spirit.

2001, 145) that is vital to the polyphonic conceptions of knowledge and

the self that I have discussed so far. According to Wyatt MacGaffey,
“containment gives the impression that something may be hidden
inside, accumulation adds obscurity to make secrecy evident” (2001,
145). Ndyuka mediumistic possession folds people and objects into an
aesthetic of mystery that continually implies that bodies and things are
never quite what they appear. As seen in the common perception that
people are, in some sense, always possessed by a variety of spirit agen-
cies, Ndyukas approach their own and others’ embodied selves as simi-
larly obscure ritual bundles, the surfaces of which both intimate and
cloak the powers secreted inside.
Among the cryptic mass of items found on Ndyuka altars are the
many accoutrements mediums wear while possessed – most visibly,
braided bands/chords (dyemba, tetei, tapu baka), metal rings (bui), and
spirit wardrobes (wenti koosi). After fully occupying the mediums’ bod-
ies, spirits often coat themselves with white kaolin clay (pemba). The
whiteness of the clay gives the dark skin of many Ndyukas an uncanny
aura that produces “a visible modification of the body through which
116 Suspect Others

[the person] relates […] to the world beyond [their] body” (Munn 1973,
103). Through such self-estranging objects, Ndyuka rituals reveal the
porous boundaries between internal bodily states and the external
world’s ensnaring agencies and relations. Braided strings and metal
rings repeat the restraining visual tropes of ritually bound objects to
draw attention to otherwise hidden metaphysical constraints. The
knots and shackles convey that spirit protection is available only at the
cost of recognizing the cramped finitude of human bodies, knowledge,
and self-control.16
The cluttered colocation of so many cryptic things on Ndyuka altars
and in possession performances potently juxtaposes each item’s con-
cealed specificity to its position within a crowd of other similarly dis-
guised objects. In consultations, a possessed medium sits next to or in
front of their altar, or like Da Aduna, places themselves in direct con-
tact with an oracle to make them part of an “entrapping” field of vis-
ible secrets (see Gell 1998 for other examples). This compels patients to
assume positions in the room that compound the intersubjective asym-
metries between them and mediums (Hanks 2013). Patients’ eyes are
arrested by the opacity of objects – including a medium’s body when
adorned to host a spirit – that provide little insight into their actual
identities. This accumulation and containment of secret potencies make
Ndyuka altars and mediums’ bodies visually “sticky” in ways that are
calibrated to confound the personal certainties of patients and other
observers (MacGaffey 2001).
The gnomic quality of possessed bodies, oracles, and altars highlights
parallels between the assembly of ritual objects and the agency of a
medium’s spirit. Just as the authority of mediums derives from their
ability to communicate hidden knowledge, the concealed items on
Ndyuka altars function as evidence of human ignorance in the face of
spirit power. This concordance establishes an affinity between obscured
objects like the wrapped bottles that are prominently displayed on altars
and mediums’ own possessed bodies. In performance, a possessed
medium draws on these mysterious qualities to analogically empty
bottles and human bodies so that the contents of both can be replaced
with the relations revealed by the medium’s spirit. Everyday objects
can in this way become additional evidence for the unseen agencies that
account for a medium’s own transfiguration into their possessing spirit.
By itself, however, the “stickiness” of Ndyuka ritual is insufficient to
persuade patients of the invisible reality that mediums communicate.
Because of ubiquitous doubts about the legitimacy of spirit knowledge,
mediums must also ground their revelations in recognizable signs of
authority of the sort sought by Da Kwasi. As with knowledge, emblems
 Mediated Selves 117

of traditional legitimacy belong to the social status that they confer and
not to the living person who temporarily fills the role. Ndyuka ide-
ologies of knowledge ownership hold that traditional titleholders and
mediums equally derive their authority from ancestral and spirit pow-
ers that are immanent within them. Whereas spirits guide mediums,
Ndyuka titleholders are supposed to speak for, and be chosen by, the
collective governing power (tii makiti) of all their deceased predeces-
sors. Through “enstoolment” (Price 2007) of the sort that Da Kwasi
sought, Ndyuka titleholders and mediums are invested with lineally
recognized authority. Originally given by the Dutch colonial state to
mark succession to political offices like chief (kabiten) or village crier/
watchman (basiya), insignia like staffs and uniforms/costumes are
inalienable emblems of the right to speak for others at councils and are
conferred by the entire community, living and dead, seen and unseen.
While the enigma of ritual objects insinuates revelations of secret
knowledge, Ndyuka altars also collect tokens of past successes that
declare the medium’s right to become his or her possessing spirit.
Because patients demand assurances of legitimacy, mediums have to
make their authenticity apparent across multiple layers of evidence,
from emblems of traditional office like staffs, stools, daggers, and hats
to amassed gifts of fabric, food, and drink. Depending on their species,
possessing spirits drink distinctive brands of alcohol and soft drinks
and have strong preferences in tobacco. The bottles that fill Ndyuka
altars consequently advertise the medium’s spirit’s previous accom-
plishments in healing their patients and communities.17
In conjunction with the seemingly involuntary thoughts, moods,
and sensations that perturb human consciousness, the materiality of
Ndyuka mediumship highlights that every person contains the agency
of others, be they spirits, ancestors, or living kin and co-workers. Taken
together, the aesthetics of Ndyuka shrines, altars, and spirit possession
create an environment of self-estrangement that licenses mediums to
reveal the spirits within themselves and thereby expose their patients’
ignorance of the relations that make them who they really are.

Ba Markus’s Exorcism

Obiya rituals enact human self-opacity and use it to reveal the poly-
phonic Ndyuka self. How this is achieved is critical to the efficacy of
Ndyuka mediumship. To understand this process and how it continues
to define Ndyuka self-knowledge, in what follows I describe a contem-
porary urban Ndyuka obiya therapy that is broadly representative of
these rites as I observed them.
118 Suspect Others

Around six o’clock on a Tuesday morning in March 2013, Da John

and I went to meet Da Sako and Ma Tres, Da Sako’s third and youngest
wife, at their home in the Paramaribo suburbs. Da Sako is a consum-
mate modern urban Ndyuka obiyaman whom I came to know because
of his superb reputation as a medium. Born in a Tapanahoni village, he
suffered a string of personal calamities before his possessing Ampuku
forest spirit was recognized and he was able to move to the city and
pursue his vocation as a fulltime medium/healer. Serene and digni-
fied, Da Sako is the most popular obiyaman with whom I collaborated,
and was happy to have his tutelary spirit support him and his large
polygynous family through the payments he receives from his many
appreciative patients.
After a short wait, a taxi dropped off a man in his late twenties whom I
will call Ba Markus, a trunkful of obiya ingredients, and a trussed rooster.
Unusually, Ba Markus came alone, his parents and siblings having all
become Pentecostals. The previous Wednesday, Ba Markus had con-
sulted Pa Kodyo, Ma Tres’s possessing Amerindian (Ingii) spirit, about
his chronic lassitude and fiscal troubles. Ba Markus had explained that
he suspected his co-workers of bewitching him, but Pa Kodyo revealed
that the real culprits were a pair of matrilateral relatives. Out of envy,
they had bought a parasitic bakuu demon from a Hindustani shop-
keeper and used it to attack Ba Markus and siphon away his money
and vitality. In exchange for receiving healing, Ba Markus agreed to pay
the spirit 3,000 Suriname dollars, which was then roughly $1,000 US. A
considerable sum, this was, in 2013, at least one month’s earnings for
a moderately successful gold miner and almost half a year’s wages for
the lowest-paid civil servants.18 The money would cover all the ritual’s
ingredients and expenses, including the spirit’s fee for his help.
Da Sako and Ma Tres administered Ba Markus’s obiya therapy in
a forest clearing near an old sluice gate on the Suriname River south
of Paramaribo. Because city life involves extensive contact with ritu-
ally polluting people, especially menstruating women, it is considered
imperative that major obiya healings be conducted in the forest. This
particular site was popular with urban obiyaman and was cluttered with
the refuse of its repeated ritual use. Tattered cloth flags drooped amid
the clearing’s foliage above heaps of beer bottles and the other assorted
waste that was strewn along the river’s muddy bank.
As soon as we arrived, Da Sako and Ma Tres set about making obiya
to “cleanse and remove evil” (wasi puu takuu sani) from Ba Markus’s
body. To steel themselves against ritual contamination, Da Sako and
Ma Tres first bound their torsos with criss-crossed red and white pro-
tective cords and amulets (dyemba). With their bodies appropriately
 Mediated Selves 119

“closed” (tapu) to threatening influences, they could proceed in earnest

with the ritual. After driving a staff and a dagger (dokwe) into the sod-
den soil, Da Sako added an earthenware bottle (kanaki) filled with obiya
medicine to create a minimal altar. Walking back and forth across the
clearing from the undergrowth to the river’s edge, Da Sako “paid” (pai)
all of the place’s spirits. In return for these offerings of shells, feath-
ers, kaolin, eggs, and anise-flavoured alcohol, he implored the tutelary
earth (goonmama) and river (watáa wawenu) spirits to “retain the things
[the bakuu] that we have brought here to get rid of” and “not let them be
carried away by the river.” These preparatory offerings established the
clearing and Ba Markus’s body as parallel nexuses of animating spirits
who, upon accepting their due payment, would ritually intervene on
Ba Markus’s behalf. Just like Ndyuka persons, places “holographically”
(Wagner 1991) contain identities that are at once singular and manifold.
The unique characteristics of a place like a jungle clearing are the result
of the hidden histories of the numerous spirits who reside there. In the
same way that Ba Markus is concurrently an embodied person with a
discrete identity and a polyphony of kin-mediated spirits, places swarm
with diverse invisible owners who exert influence over each other and
all the beings who come in contact with them.
Across the clearing from where Da Sako made the offerings stood
a copse that screened off a further, smaller glade that was likewise
strewn with the detritus of earlier healing rituals. There, Da Sako placed
a plastic tub packed with obiya leaves wrapped in a dark blue cloth.
Before pouring river water over the leaves, Da Sako scattered them with
crushed garlic, cubes of blue detergent, one egg, and a full bottle of beer.
This “stench water” (tingii wataa), Da Sako assured, would overpower
and expunge the bakuu consuming Ba Markus.
Cutting two fronds from one of Suriname’s numerous species of
palms, Da Sako lashed them together at top and bottom, planted them
upright in the ground, and lit a tree-sap candle at the base. Walking
back to his altar, Da Sako bent down to pour a libation from a shallow
calabash bowl. All the Ndyuka obiyaman I know saw ritual speech as
integral to the activation of obiya. In the same way that ritualized ora-
tion enables Ndyuka councils to unite entire lineages and clans in col-
lective action, addressing the obiya, part and whole, as a single being
empowers the medicine’s disparate spirit elements to cohere into an
integrated agency.
Like all Ndyuka prayers, Da Sako’s made apparent the genealogical
origins of ritual knowledge. Starting with an invocation of the semi-
otiose creator (Masáa Gadu), Da Sako called upon the members of a cos-
mic lineage of authority that descended through all the major Ndyuka
120 Suspect Others

Figure 8 Da Sako purifying Ba Markus.

deities and every spirit “who made itself known through mediums
and oracles” to the immediate ancestors. The river was again implored
to “hold the dangerous elements without stripping the good compo-
nents” from Ba Markus, and his lineage ancestors (bée gáanwan) were
entreated to “stand behind and in front” (tampu a baka, tampu a fesi) of
him for protection.19 Along with supplications to Da Asaimundu and Pa
Kodyo – Da Sako and Ma Tres’s possessing spirits – Da Sako concluded
the libation with an appeal to the spirits of Ba Markus’s “house” (osu) to
make him “believe” (biibi) in their power, since the rest of the family had
forsaken them to attend church. Da Sako’s prayer finished, he and Ma
Tres could now blur their identities with those of their spirits. Though
neither undertook full possession performances, sporadic interjections
in spirit language indicated the active involvement of both mediums’
spirits throughout the rite that followed.
The first half of the exorcism was designed to wrench Ba Markus’s
afflicting bakuu from his body and trap it in the forest. Da Sako instructed
Ba Markus, who had stripped to his underwear, to stand on the dark
blue cloth next to the tub of “stench water.” Da Sako purified Ba Markus
with kaolin clay that he sprinkled on his head and shoulders and hands
and feet (figure 8). Stirring the obiya water, Da Sako intoned, “In the
same way that the green leaves reek, so too must [Ba Markus’s] body
and skin smell foul.” Picking up the trussed rooster, he poured the obiya
down the bird’s throat, immersed it in the tub, and doused Ba Markus
 Mediated Selves 121

with the water that ran from the convulsing animal’s plumage. As he
washed Ba Markus, Da Sako proclaimed that the obiya must “remove the
spoken malice” (puu mofu) from Ba Markus’s body. The “rooster must
change places with the boy [Ba Markus] to absorb all the evil afflicting
him,” Da Sako declared, and “make the bad [the bakuu] accept the life of
the bird so that Ba Markus continues to live.” Once the rooster’s life was
substituted, the afflicting relation incarnated by the bakuu would invade
the bird and void Ba Markus of the sufferings that it caused.
To fully separate Ba Markus from the bakuu, Da Sako alternately
touched Ba Markus and a neighbouring tree with the rooster three con-
secutive times. Pressing the rooster onto Ba Markus’s head, Da Sako
deftly broke the bird’s neck to ensure that Ba Markus had “swapped
roles” (kengi ede) with it. Pressing on the dead bird an additional three
times, Da Sako declared, “after he [Ba Markus] changes [places with the
bird], let everything be good.” Da Sako ordered Ba Markus to hold the
dead chicken and then smashed the “forgotten” egg on his head. Rub-
bing the oozing yolk over Ba Markus’s entire body, Da Sako rinsed him
off with the last measure of the “stench water” that was left in the tub.
As the water ran down Ba Markus, Da Sako confidently announced that
“the evil in his body will smell this and flee.”
On Da Sako’s instructions, Ba Markus dropped the dead rooster on the
fabric at his feet. Pulling apart the tied palm fronds, Da Sako formed a
vaginal-shaped opening and had Ba Markus act as though he was about
to step across, first with one foot, then the other, before finally inducing
him to quickly duck through. As the fronds snapped shut, the bakuu and
the relations that created it would be trapped behind. Da Sako tore open
the dead rooster to consult its entrails: “If the obiya hadn’t worked, the
innards would be completely black,” he explained. Finding the viscera
auspiciously white, to guarantee that the omen “continued white” (tan
weti), he dusted the cavity with kaolin before wrapping the dead bird
up in the dark blue cloth on which it lay. Carrying the bundle to the
roots of a nearby tree, Da Sako yelled, “mangwenu!” – the term for the
location where the negative relations that obiya purges are imprisoned –
and unceremoniously dumped it. Draining an entire bottle of clear rum
over the bird’s swaddled corpse, Da Sako sternly commanded the cap-
tured bakuu to remain where he had confined it.
If the first half of the ritual removed and incapacitated the inflicting
bakuu, the second marshalled the collective spirit power of Da Sako’s
and Ba Markus’s lineages to tie the different spirit forces from which
Ba Markus’s self was made back together. On the opposite side of the
clearing, Ma Tres had dressed an abandoned wooden pallet with over-
lapping white and red lengths of fabric. Ba Markus sat down on the
122 Suspect Others

pallet next to a second tub of “sweet” (switi) obiya, and Da Sako ladled
the formula over him, saying, “The obiya needs to help make this little
brother believe; his mother and father now go to church and no longer
wash with leaves, and leaves are not even permitted in his yard.” If the
stench of the previous obiya recipe drove the malign spirit relation out
of his body, this one’s sweetness coaxed Ba Markus’s own spirits back
in and invited them to stay.
Two full bottles of anise-flavoured alcohol (switi sopi) and a stout
beer had been mixed into the sweet obiya when it was assembled. Da
Sako fished these out, tipping the first half of the anise liquor on the
ground and the rest over Ba Markus, while he offered the stout to
his own and Ma Tres’s Ampuku spirits. Da Sako next opened a litre
bottle of beer and drained it for the oath god Sweli, beseeching him to
bestow Ba Markus “with potency” and “decisively separate the good
from the bad” in his life. In addition to indexing common spirit identi-
ties, alcohol and other beverages have a vital place in Ndyuka rituals.
Given their ability to disappear into bodies or be absorbed into the
ground, alcohol, water, and soft drinks have protean qualities that
make them perfect intermediaries for exchanges with the invisible but
thirsty spirits.
Da Sako called Ma Tres to assist him in bathing Ba Markus so that she
might contribute the full strength of her own spirits to his reintegration.
Splashing him with a large calabash, Ma Tres solemnly entreated the
spirits to “compel this boy to believe, so that he won’t lose the money he
invested in this work, to make all of the obiya stay with him, so that the
evil that was there with him won’t come back. He must be completely
healed, without any trouble.” Da Sako resumed dousing Ba Markus
with the “sweet” obiya until it was drained; before the water was gone,
he asked Da John and me to rinse our hands and faces so that we too
might participate in its blessings.
Stripping the two lengths of dripping fabric from the pallet, Da Sako
made small incisions in the corner of each piece while petitioning the
obiya to “Separate the boy from those things that they [the spirits] have
cleansed and removed from him!” In an act that mirrored the penulti-
mate moment of Ndyuka funerals, Da Sako ordered Ba Markus to grip
the fabric in the corners where he had notched them and walk away in
the opposite direction to tear off two long strips (see Pires 2015, 2019,
for Sáamaka). As Ba Markus tore the cloth, Da Sako explained to me
that exorcisms often inadvertently expel the patient’s akaa and tutelary
territorial spirit (gadu fu a peesi). If this happened, the fabric would catch
and absorb these components of the self so that they could be reincor-
porated at the ritual’s end.
 Mediated Selves 123

While Da Sako gathered up the leftover obiya ingredients in the surplus

fabric, Ma Tres braided a cord (tetei) from the torn strips that Ba Markus
gave her and instructed him to put it around his neck and not to take it off
for any reason. Wearing the cord, Ba Markus resembled the more exten-
sively girded Ma Tres and Ba Sako – a mirroring that proclaimed that all
involved were equally composed from the ancestral and spirit relations
that they had invoked. Da Sako tossed the rite’s botanical remnants on a
rubbish heap (dyiko) in the surrounding forest. There Da Sako drowned
the bundle in a bottle’s worth of rum to “seal” (tapu) it so that it would
“hold the evil” where it was into the distant future.
In a dramatic last act, after a final libation at the portable altar where
the exorcism had begun, Da Sako vigorously shook a one-litre beer bot-
tle and exploded the foaming contents all over the startled Ba Markus.
This is a common Ndyuka blessing, which I witnessed many times.
Ndyuka people of both sexes and all ages drink beer. When shared
from a large bottle, beer is a beloved medium of sociability and shared
abundance. Spraying a bottle of beer creates an additional impression
of well-being that propitiates the body’s spirits by showering them with
the liquid essence of auspicious conviviality.
As with Da Kwasi’s failed enstoolment, Ba Markus’s exorcism shows
how Ndyuka mediumship reveals the ontological boundaries of self-
knowledge. Obiya materially instantiates the metaphysics of the poly-
phonic Ndyuka self and reveals the workings of its component spirits
within a patient’s body. In obiya rituals, patients like Ba Markus are forced
to passively observe themselves as genealogically contingent composi-
tions of the agency of these invisible others. The obliviousness of patients
to this reality thereby becomes additional evidence of the self’s origins in
relations beyond the self-awareness of one’s everyday ego. Even with the
divinatory interventions of spirits, however, people remain in ignorance
about these agents, whom they sense but cannot name. Instead of a sin-
gular self that “exclusively determines the person’s fate,” Ndyuka obiya
rites mirror other African-derived Caribbean ritual traditions in engag-
ing “a distribution of agencies with critical and evolving interrelations”
(Espirito Santo 2015, 12). These rituals facilitate knowledge of this igno-
rance, thereby making possible the traditional ritual authority that draws
its legitimacy from being able to speak from beyond the limits of the self.

Conclusion

This chapter has surveyed contemporary urban Ndyuka ritual practices

and concepts of knowledge and the self. These examples demonstrate
that for many Ndyukas self-knowledge is only genuine when it implies
124 Suspect Others

further agents, whether ancestors, spirits, or relatives and neighbours.

These others, in turn, suffuse what is often assumed in the liberal tradi-
tion to be the inviolable interiority of a person’s thoughts and feelings
(Taylor 2007). Whether conferred through kinship or everyday social
interdependencies, seemingly private ideas, moods, and impulses are
seen as lively evidence of the agency of these relations and the general
ignorance that conceals them from ordinary self-consciousness.
That humans are concurrently polyphonic composites and generally
blind to this truth generates the central paradox of Ndyuka healing:
that afflicted people seek out therapies that are necessarily just outside
definitive proof or understanding. After Ba Markus’s exorcism and
reintegration, he remained a provisional bundle whose diverse constit-
uents exist at the periphery of his self-knowledge. He can only know if
the ritual has worked if he feels things are getting better, but precisely
how he knows this is a topic of persistent doubt.
Ndyuka assertions that the spirit world is the ultimate origin of all
genuinely efficacious knowledge do not support any final ontological
truth so much as constrain who is qualified to make declarations about
what constitutes these truths in the first place. This is a perspectival
irony that is likewise critical to the equivocal power of Surinamese
racecraft. Before racecraft can be adequately analysed, however, the
epistemic economy of which it is part must be further described. The
next two chapters move beyond Ndyuka and Hindu descriptions of
revelation, knowledge, and the self to show how these concepts emerge
within the interactive structure of mediumistic revelation.
Chapter Four

Painful Interactions

Pain invites suspicion and doubt. Shackling awareness to its flawed

corporeality, pain exposes physical and emotional weaknesses that con-
found the apparent transparency of self-knowledge. In ritual consul-
tations, Hindu and Ndyuka mediums transmute the opacity of their
patients’ pains – uncertainties about what the pain means and why it is
occurring – into doubts and suspicions that expose human ignorance of,
and dependence on, the manifold of unseen relations described in the
previous two chapters. In this way, ill-perceived but overpowering spir-
its and deities are revealed to loom out of pain’s somatic noise and the
whirling ambiguities of consciousness. Turning pain inside out, these
beings act through mediums to demonstrate that they have always been
present within human suffering and ignorance, strength and wisdom.
Having already situated Hindu and Ndyuka concepts of self-
knowledge within their ritual contexts, in this chapter I show the
decisive role of pain in how Ndyuka and Hindu mediums make their
patients experience the specific ontologies of relational self-knowledge
that they enact in mediumship. To make these otherwise opaque rela-
tions and agencies palpable, mediums interact with their patients in
ways that transform sensations of personal pain, doubt, and suspicion
into identifiable gods, spirits, kin, and enemies responsive to ritual
appeasement or expulsion.

Ndyuka Conceptions of Pain and Suffering

For many Ndyukas pain is what most forcefully indicates the ontologi-
cal primacy of kinship-mediated social relations in human life. This way
of thinking extends the meanings of pain beyond the semantic range of
the English word to encompass a multitude of sufferings. From physical
and emotional afflictions like sickness or grief to personal incapacities
126 Suspect Others

like chronic unemployment or troubles with the police, anything that

“hurts” (ati) by causing a diminishment of personal control is consid-
ered painful.
Pain is a therefore ultimately a kind of social relation. Through bonds
of kinship and contingent feelings of enmity, jealousy, or avarice, rela-
tions with others define the selves of Ndyuka persons. Within this
framework, pain is intergenerationally and interpersonally distributed
(Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering 2004; Vernon 1993). Ndyuka
bodies physically contain their social relations and express them as suf-
fering. This discourse shapes Ndyuka ritual practices and motivates the
political kinship that continues to be the bedrock of Ndyuka sociality.
Ndyukas (some of whom can narrate the sufferings of their ancestors
during slavery in the first person and present tense) hold pain as basic
to identity. Expressions of personal pain during sickness or mourning
are therefore always creative and resolutely collective events that affec-
tively and consubstantially bind people together.
Ndyukas talk about, compare, and express pains large and small as
common concerns shared by family and neighbours. Though Ndyuka
has a noun for pain (pen), it is rarely used. To talk about pain, people
most often use verbs like “eat” (nyan) and “hurt” (ati) – as in aches
and pains “hurt” or “eat” at the sufferer. Such statements are regularly
accompanied by idiophones – onomatopoeic sound icons of sensation –
like gudyuu gudyuu that convey specific qualities of throbbing, shoot-
ing, or tingling. Many of these idiophones also refer to the experience
of anger, giving it a consonance with Ndyuka perceptions of pain; anger
is likewise reactive, an affect caused by co-participation in a shared sys-
tem of interrelatedness.
Experiences of persistent intense pain or protracted anguish are seen
as messages about the limited self-knowledge that leads people to mis-
recognize the agencies from which they are composed. For Ndyuka
mediums and patients, pain reveals the basic relational structure of per-
sonhood and subjectivity. How pain feels indicates the relations that
matter, rooting these relations in the immediate sensations of social life.
Though pain can be divided into many registers – physical, emotional,
historical, traumatic, minor, or chronic – when exposed as another’s
malice, pain dissolves distinctions between personal and collective his-
tories (Lambek 1998, 2003). As an articulation of relations, pain leads
Ndyukas to more clearly understand their selves as embodiments of
Ndyuka society and history; Ndyuka pain is accordingly not derived
from history but is itself Ndyuka history (Strange 2018).
Instead of “destroying” (Scarry 1985, 4) language, pain stimulates
Ndyuka mediums and their patients to redefine the self as a polyphony
 Painful Interactions 127

of heretofore misrecognized relations. During consultations, Ndyuka

mediums harness the particular properties of their patients’ pains to
show that the subjectivities of both mediums and sufferers are com-
posed of spirit relations. In this way, the suffering body is revealed to be
an accumulation of integral yet misapprehended connections to human
and spirit others. Pain remains pain in the body, but each ache or throb
also signals the social interdependencies that compose the self. Ndyuka
revelatory practices, then, extend personal suffering into the conduct
and politics of relatedness. When understood as a warning about the
nature of social relations, pain enables Ndyukas to convert personal
ignorance about the causes of their suffering into evidence that the self
is best known as a kin-mediated multiplicity.

The Questioning

The following is a routine Ndyuka mediumistic consultation I attended

in May 2013. The interaction illustrates how Ndyuka mediums reveal
human subjectivity to be polyphonic and significantly composed by
spirits, and why these relations manifest in bodily pain.
I return to the mediums Da Sako (figure 9) and Ma Tres (figure 10)
whom I introduced in the previous chapter. It was a Wednesday after-
noon, and Da John and I were squeezed on a narrow bench in the cor-
ner of Da Sako’s shrine room. The shrine sits behind the long green
clapboard home where Da Sako lives with his three wives and many
children in the outskirts of Paramaribo. On the inside, the room is an
explosion of wrapped bottles, stools, staffs, flags, and assorted other
ritual paraphernalia that pack Da Sako’s and Ma Tres’s twin altars.
Outside the shrine, a dozen people waited to confer with the couple’s
spirits.
Ma Tres was possessed by Pa Kodyo, one of three spirits that used
her body as its “horse” (asi). Pa Kodyo sat on a low stool in front of
his altar dressed in the iconic red and white clothes of Amerindian
spirits. He spoke Sranan with a pronounced Indigenous accent and
mandatory masculine posturing. When possessing Ma Tres, Pa Kodyo
chain-smoked fat cigars and generously dispensed perfume to all who
entered. Across from Pa Kodyo was the un-possessed Da Sako, who
served as his assistant.
It was late afternoon, and Da Sako and Pa Kodyo had been seeing
patients for about two hours. Two young women, Sa Nyoni and her
elder sister, Sa Bigisa, had just entered the shrine room at Da Sako’s
invitation. After greeting Pa Kodyo and receiving the perfume dribbled
into their palms, the sisters took their places on the bench next to Da
128 Suspect Others

Figure 9 Da Sako.

John and me. Da Sako’s distant cousins from his mother’s native village
in the interior, they now lived permanently in Paramaribo.
A visit to a medium expresses a patient’s or family’s suspicions about
the source of their sufferings. Showing up at a medium’s shrine means
that a client has given in to the nagging doubt that some unknown
relation must be responsible. Consultations are therefore invitations to
those with greater knowledge to adjudicate the truth of these afflicting
identities.
Da Sako started the inquest nonchalantly: “So, girl, tell us what’s
wrong.”
“I have a problem with my ear,” replied Sa Nyoni.
“Your ear?”
“Yes.”
“What is happening with your ear?”
 Painful Interactions 129

Figure 10 Ma Tres.

“The whole day it’s eating (nyan) me,” said Sa Nyoni, gingerly mas-
saging the left side of her head.
“Oh, your ear is eating you?”
“Yes, my entire head.”
Pa Kodyo interrupts: “But have they already found the girl’s nasi,
Pa Asaimundu?” – referring to Da Sako by the name of his possessing
spirit.
Nasi are identical with nenseki, one of the three main kinds of spirits
that most Ndyukas understand to animate human life and conscious-
ness. As the previous chapter described, a person’s nasi is generally a
close relative, likely a grandparent, an aunt, or an uncle, but it can also be
an animal attached to the family, such as a dog, who takes up residence
in a person at birth or later in their lifespan. Nasi accordingly explain
their descendants’ appearances and personalities, often marking their
130 Suspect Others

continued manifestation in the body of a living relation with visible

signs like birthmarks that indicate the manner in which the nasi died.
A nasi spirit demands to be recognized as being an integral part of
the person in whom it dwells. Nasi can only call attention to their pres-
ence in a descendant’s body, however, through anonymous sensations
like pain that require interpretation. When a nasi goes unrecognized by
the person in whom it resides, its search for acknowledgment causes its
host to fall sick. For Sa Nyoni to describe herself as being “eaten” (nyan)
by the pain in her ear implies that she is just such a passive victim of
such an internal other who is using the pain to communicate its inter-
dependence with her.
Da Sako relays Pa Kodyo’s question to Sa Nyoni: “Who is … your
nenseki?”
“Huh?”
“Who is your nenseki?”
Sa Bigisa answers for her uncomprehending younger sister: “Never,
we don’t know who [the nenseki] is.”
As explained in previous chapters, Ndyuka politics is founded on
revelation and gerontocracy. This means that knowledge is always
partial, unequally distributed, and derived from kinship-derived obli-
gations to others. Older Ndyukas told me that they refrained from
teaching critical ritual-historical knowledge to even their fully grown
children because they felt that they were still insufficiently mature to
receive it. Such inequalities of knowledge ideally ensure complemen-
tarity between generations, making the young dependent on the old,
and the old reliant on the spirits and ancestors. Pain therefore forces suf-
ferers to beseech their elders for care. As Sa Nyoni’s incomprehension
shows, the vulnerability of illness places her in a position of reliance on
her older sister, Da Sako, and Pa Kodyo. All Sa Nyoni can say is that her
ear hurts. After that, she is subject to the knowledge of others, whether
mediums or elders. This reduction to child-like dependency on more
sagacious caregivers encourages patients to accept relational explana-
tions of pain; it also heightens the power of kinship to provide a causal
framework through which pains can be diagnosed.
Hearing Sa Bigisa’s admission of ignorance over Sa Nyoni’s silence,
Pa Kodyo exclaimed, “I smelled that, hear! I smelled that, I smelled
that … it is her dyodyo” (an allied, if not exactly equivalent, term for
nenseki used by Creoles) (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936; Wekker 2006;
Wooding 2013). With this proclamation, Pa Kodyo shows that the basis
of his knowledge is substantially different from that which is acces-
sible through human senses. His interjection reinforces his diagnosis of
the pain as a nenseki, but similarly points to the spirit’s ontological and
 Painful Interactions 131

perspectival difference from the humans he interacts with. As a nor-

mally invisible spirit, Pa Kodyo’s senses must work contrarily to those
of his human audience. He does not see the relation with the nenseki
but, like a keen hunting dog, sniffs it out. While radically enlarging
what he can know, this sensorial difference is not a state of unlimited
insight. In saying that he could “smell out” Sa Nyoni’s relationship with
her nenseki, Pa Kodyo also indicates the boundaries of his knowledge.
Just as the sense of smell picks up odours but does not easily deter-
mine where they originate, so Pa Kodyo’s sensorial range is limited to
generalities; he cannot provide precise identities. Though spirits have
increased capacities for seeing facts normally hidden from humans,
however bound to a lineage or clan, they are still outsiders, members of
a different community of beings whose full comprehension of Ndyuka
people is limited.
As an Indigenous spirit speaking Sranan – a language he confesses
to speak only reluctantly – Pa Kodyo makes statements about his
senses that underscore his degree of difference from his medium, Ma
Tres. Pa Kodyo’s ability to skew bodily gender and ethnicity provide
warrant for how he knows what he knows. The emergent integra-
tion of all these formal qualities in the interaction affirms the spirit’s
presence. By simultaneously being and not being Ma Tres, Pa Kodyo
achieves an ontological distance that, in the instability of interaction,
allows his ambiguous comments to become precise descriptions of
how the world really is and thereby identify the afflicting agent within
Sa Nyoni’s collective self. As Pa Kodyo’s interpreter, Da Sako acts as
an intermediary who extends this distance by relaying the spirit’s
words, even though the sisters undoubtedly understood everything
he said.
Da Sako immediately confirmed Pa Kodyo’s diagnosis but needed
additional details about the spirit’s identity: “So, it is her nasi who
is doing it [causing her pain]. Is it from her mother’s or father’s
lineage?”
“Mother’s lineage,” replied Pa Kodyo.
To make sure, Sa Bigisa reprises the question: “Mother’s or father’s
lineage?”
“Mother’s lineage,” Pa Kodyo repeats.
This answer is too generic, so Da Sako refines it: “Mother’s lineage
side?”
“Then it is a Yawsa1 woman,” declares Sa Nyoni, confidently.
Though nenseki may come from either the mother or father’s lineage,
the strong matrilineal bias of Ndyuka kinship makes it far more likely
for them to be from the mother’s family. In societies circumscribed and
132 Suspect Others

saturated by kinship, any general reference to a class of identity results

in a cloud of possibilities, and investigations into the psychological/
somatic features that define specific Ndyuka persons immediately
become exercises in genealogy. Galvanized by the medium’s perfor-
mance of authoritative knowledge, the specific qualities of the pain
wracking a patient’s body come to reveal the existential immediacy of
the genealogical relations who are causing it.

Identifying Pain

Once Pa Kodyo confirmed that the nenseki is from Sa Nyoni’s mother’s

family, all the participants began to explore her kinship ties with the
ascendant generations. Though Pa Kodyo provided the classification,
Da Sako and Sa Bigisa quickly take over deciding which relation is
responsible for Sa Nyoni’s earache. Ndyuka gerontocratic authority is
most often, but not exclusively, male. The eldest male present (except
for Pa Kodyo), Da Sako, who is moreover a member of Sa Nyoni’s
matrilineage, takes the investigative lead by asking the sisters to pro-
vide names for potential nenseki.
“You must name their names. Come, let’s hear.”
“It is Ma Amaliya, right?” says Sa Bigisa, suggesting her grandmother.
“Ma Amaliya?”
“Of course, the captain’s wife,” Sa Nyoni answers.
Pa Kodyo interrupts. They are on the wrong track: “It’s an old person,
a really really old person.”
This forces Da Sako to stop and think about his native village. In a
flash, it comes to him: “Yawsa person? Ooo, her mother’s side. What!
[…] Ma Atoonya was sick in the ears, right?”
“I can’t tell you. Listen, I don’t know those people,” states Pa Kodyo,
casually exposing the limits of his knowledge.
“Ma Atoonya. I think it’s Ma Atoonya,” declares Da Sako.
In a casual tone, Pa Kodyo addresses Da Sako: “They need to pray
and divine [to see if it is really Ma Atoonya].”
“Yes. Ma Atoonya. Ma Atoonya suffered from a sickness of the ears,
right?” Da Sako asks again with increased conviction. Suddenly, the
pain has an identity with a genealogy and formal qualities that expose
Sa Nyoni to be an incarnation of her lineage’s collective past. Ma
Atoonya was one of her great-aunts. The same pain that defined Ma
Atoonya’s life is now a sign of her presence within Sa Nyoni. The qual-
ity of the pain is the relation that connects them.
Instead of ratifying this result, Pa Kodyo repeats what he had just
said: “Tell them to pray and then see [what happens].”
 Painful Interactions 133

At the instant of discovering the nenseki, Sa Nyoni cries out, “It gnaws
at me until I can’t stand still!” But in the heat of the inquest, she is
ignored.
Sa Nyoni’s outburst seems to accord with Elaine Scarry’s asser-
tion that “the ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain,
at once so empty and undifferentiated and so full of blaring adver-
sity, contains not only the feeling ‘my body hurts’ but the feeling ‘my
body hurts me’” (1985, 47). Here the self-alienation that Sa Nyoni’s
pain foists upon her consciousness is not “empty,” however. Pain’s
relational qualities permit diagnosis by providing it with a character
and an identity capable of, for good or bad, caring about the person it
causes to suffer. Pain’s dysphoria implies the embodied intensity and
importance of Sa Nyoni’s lineal relations. The specified qualities of Sa
Nyoni’s pain – its degree, intensity, and location – posit a recognizable
ancestral other who exists within her but about whom she would oth-
erwise know nothing. Though Sa Nyoni suspected that someone else
was responsible for her suffering, she could not say who. The nenseki’s
revelation, however, objectifies the pain as an identifiable package of
properties, a sign of the relation for which it speaks, and the recogni-
tion that will resolve it.
Just as the variable qualities of a Ndyuka medium’s speech – its
tone, volume, lexicon, and prosody – call attention to their possessing
spirit as a particular identity with a valid prerogative to work through
their medium, so the properties of pain alert sufferers to the relation-
ships that they embody. Once specified, the correspondence between
pain and relatedness further integrates the qualities of a patient’s suf-
fering into the consultation’s interactive dynamics. Mediums seize
on the characteristics of a patient’s pain to demonstrate that relations
between humans and spirits are intimately, if not obviously, evident in
physical sensations. This is possible because, just like a birthmark, pain
shows how the materiality of the body incarnates the collective his-
tory from which it arises. As an aggregate of many relations, the body
hurts because the relations it contains exceed the sufferer’s inadequate
self-knowledge of who they are. Sa Nyoni’s ear pain thus contains and
expresses her kinship with Ma Atoonya. The location and quality of the
pain, when combined with her lineage identity, is a message that Ma
Atoonya is present both within her and as her.
At this point, Da Sako is now reasonably certain that they have identi-
fied Sa Nyoni’s nenseki: “I think it is Ma Atoonya. True. Then we must
search out Sa Afiiyodu (the sisters’ cousin, Ma Atoonya’s niece).”
“Then it’s to her we must go?” Sa Nyoni asks.
“Yes, make her pray for you,” reassures Da Sako.
134 Suspect Others

“Make her solve the problem with a prayer,” Sa Bigisa declares, a

solution Da Sako wholeheartedly affirms: “Yes! Ask her to solve the
problem with a libation.”
After Sa Bigisa explains to everyone exactly how Sa Nyoni and
Ma Atoonya are related, Da Sako reiterates the conclusion that they
have now collectively reached: “Yes, Ma Atoonya. Girl, do you
understand?”
“Yes.”
The sisters must go to the deceased Ma Atoonya’s living niece, who,
as her closest surviving relative, is deemed to have special access to her.
They then must entreat her to intervene for them by pouring a libation
to recognize and calm Sa Nyoni’s troubled nasi.
“You must go and ask Sa Afiiyodu to pray to your nenseki for you.”
Addressing the women together for the first time, Pa Kodyo describes
exactly what the nenseki requires in order to heal Sa Nyoni’s pain: “When
you meet [Sa Afiiyodu] you must wet her head with beer so that [Ma
Atoonya] can sleep through the night and wake up another day. She
must intercede for you, got it?”
Pa Kodyo is telling them that to heal Sa Nyoni’s pain they must go
as a family to ask a relation to offer a beer to Ma Atoonya, her dead
aunt. He is telling them that Sa Nyoni’s identity overlaps with that
of Ma Atoonya – that Ma Atoonya is also Sa Nyoni. Though Sa Nyoni
has been unaware until this moment, the earache is the persistence of
Ma Atoonya’s agency in Sa Nyoni’s body. The intensity of Sa Nyoni’s
pain announces this connection. Pa Kodyo’s possession of Ma Tres
likewise performs the same message that human bodies belong to
others. To be healed, Sa Nyoni must acknowledge that she simultane-
ously is and is not Ma Atoonya. Sa Nyoni is in pain because she has
so far failed to recognize the extent to which she is this relation. In
trying to understand the pain, Sa Nyoni is made to doubt what she
knows about herself and what makes her who she is. Her real iden-
tity, she is told, is more extensive than the confines of her everyday
self-understanding. Pain has driven a wedge into Sa Nyoni’s self-
knowledge. She has been forced to admit that her conscious exis-
tence derives from, and is exceeded by, her relationship with both Ma
Atoonya and her lineage.
Da Sako now pours a little beer from a recently offered bottle into his
hand.
“Yes, let me wet your head, your ears for you.” After rubbing the
liquid into Sa Nyoni’s hair and around her aching ear, he declares the
consultation over and the sisters leave without further comment to per-
form the task that Pa Kodyo has assigned them.
 Painful Interactions 135

Pain, Interaction, and the Evidence of Ontological Ignorance

The foregoing consultation encapsulates how Ndyuka mediums trans-

form doubts provoked by physical pain into revelations about self-
identity and self-knowledge. The interaction between Pa Kodyo, Da
Sako, Sa Bigisa, and Sa Nyoni presents a different approach to human
consciousness than that assumed by dominant European-North Atlan-
tic traditions. For Ndyukas, pain licenses mediums to redefine the bod-
ies and subjectivities of others. Sa Nyoni is coaxed to doubt her ability
to know herself and thus to reconceptualize her pain as simultaneously
within and beyond her. In the same way that Sa Nyoni cannot deny her
pain’s immediacy, Pa Kodyo’s diagnosis describes a basic truth about
Sa Nyoni independent of any prior understandings she may have had.
Pain, which for many contemporary Euro-North American thinkers is
testimony to the buffered individuality of the experiencing self, is for
Ndyukas unmistakable evidence that Sa Nyoni is not, in fact, such an
individual self. By requesting Ma Atoonya’s intervention, Sa Nyoni
and her sister acknowledge themselves to be composite collectives who
exist because they are dependent aggregates of kin and spirit relations.
Sa Nyoni must accept that she is unaware that Ma Atoonya is already
present within her. Sa Nyoni’s responsibility as a client is to admit her
opaque, derivative nature. In so doing, she learns to doubt that self-
knowledge can ever be separated from the genealogical sources of her
personal existence.
This revelation happens through the intercession of a possessed
medium, and such self-estrangement can only be achieved through the
effacement of the medium’s own epistemically limited human identity.
As seen in how knowledge about pain is created between Pa Kodyo, Da
Sako, and the two sisters, Ndyuka possession is, like so many human
interactions with spirits, a dialogic and collaborative performance
(Lévi-Strauss 1963; Overing 1990; Schieffelin 1996). The powerful result
of this “co-construction of reality” (Schieffelin 1985) is to establish that
the ostensibly autonomous, first-person perspective of everyday self-
awareness is, in important respects, a misapprehension of the manifold
of relations that actually account for thought and feeling.
To achieve this, Pa Kodyo/Ma Tres has to build their knowledge of
who Sa Nyoni really is from the patchwork of conversation. As Briggs
(1996a) and Wirtz (2007) have shown, ambiguity and unintelligibil-
ity are key resources for the efficacy of mediumship. Beyond that, the
interaction between a medium and their audience is not solely condi-
tioned on the underdetermined or general character of the information
they provide. Spirits like Pa Kodyo intervene in both the qualities of
136 Suspect Others

bodily pain and social relationships. In performance, these make pow-

erful statements about the concealed truths of their patients’ existences.
The epistemic asymmetry in spirits’ interactions with humans fuses the
physical sensation of Sa Nyoni’s pain with a description that works out
who the pain is like. Her ignorance of the pain’s identity empowers the
spirit to declare that how Sa Nyoni feels reveals the invisible relations
that make her who she is. Such basic revelations are possible because
the information emerges from carefully composed interactions between
humans and spirits.
As the participants talk together, Pa Kodyo adopts a privileged position
as a quasi-omniscient narrator supplying the broad outlines of his patient’s
identity. Pa Kodyo consolidates this role by strategically interjecting in the
flow of conversation to order and explain the interaction. He chooses the
“framing” (Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974) that determines how to inter-
pret what is happening and establishes who may talk, and about what
and when. The two sisters must keep up with Pa Kodyo’s interventions
and assimilate his certainty to their own doubts. In assuming this posi-
tion, Pa Kodyo transforms conversation into evidence for the ontological
pre-eminence of the relations that spirits alone can perceive. Like that of all
mediums, Ma Tres’s possession allows the details of the interaction to be
configured so as to establish an ontological parallelism between her pos-
session and the patient’s pain. Pa Kodyo’s presence within Ma Tres acts
to demonstrate that all humans are actually manifold selves whose bod-
ies and consciousnesses are possessed by numerous spirits like Pa Kodyo.
Presented with Sa Nyoni’s opaque pain, Pa Kodyo reflects Sa Nyoni back
to herself as a kin- and spirit-determined polyphony – and a conscious self
that is a cipher for her relation to her lineage’s collective past.
For the Ndyukas I know, possession is not a wild aberration from the
everyday self but rather a further demonstration of the relational foun-
dations of human existence. Just as a bullet hole points to the presence
of a shooter, so possession and pain reveal the agency of others within
a person. While engaging with a possessed medium, a client like Sa
Nyoni is shown the finitude of her self-knowledge and thus the extent
to which she can only ever really know who she is by reference to the
visible and invisible social relations that make her experience the world
in the way that she does.

Pain and the Reciprocal Revelation of the Composite Self

The consultation just recounted shows how Ndyuka mediumship

enrols pain to engender doubts about self-knowledge. These doubts
urge patients to recognize the opacity of personal consciousness and
 Painful Interactions 137

its underlying composition from multiple involuntary relations with

spirits. Such doubt creates the paradox already described in chapter
3: patients invite this kind of self-knowledge by consulting mediums,
but the very invisibility that permits spirits to seize control over visible
human bodies also makes mediums themselves highly suspect. How-
ever dramatically a spirit asserts its presence, it does so through the
medium’s otherwise unaltered body. Similarly, converting a person’s
aches and impulses into the voices of enigmatic spirit others erodes
many of the assumptions on which interpersonal trust between people
is based. To remedy this, mediums must establish an existential con-
vergence between the conditions of their own possession and the suf-
fering of their patients. In addition to telling vivid stories about their
involuntary induction into mediumship, mediums sometimes initiate
consultations with small-scale re-enactments of the sufferings that led
to their own patron spirits’ becoming socially recognized agents within
their kin group. Even if most patients rarely witness how this happens,
it is widely known that pain can resolve into spirit identities – a fact that
was, in some small way, recapitulated at the beginning of nearly every
mediumistic consultation that I attended.
The elderly medium Da Mangwa began his consultations with a
strained whisper that grew into a strong song and then a torrent of
vaguely apprehensible names from the spirit world. Tall, grey-haired,
and jovial, Da Mangwa sat on a small stool in his shrine room in the
Paramaribo suburbs, surrounded by an audience composed of his chil-
dren, his grandchildren, and me. Draped in his possessing spirit’s ritual
clothes and talismans, he convulsively shuddered in apparent discom-
fort as he continued his invocation (nyanfalu) in Ampuku tongo, the
language of Ampuku forest spirits. Da Mangwa chanted with increasing
volume. Trembling, he winced, and knocked the back of his head three
times against the wall. From an initial hybrid state, neither human nor
spirit, Da Mangwa’s identity had resolved into full-blown possession
by his tutelary spirit.
As we saw with Da Kwasi in the previous chapter, Ndyuka spir-
its announce themselves by violently stamping their feet (baté) and
exclaiming long series of names (telinen) in their proprietary languages.
Once Da Mangwa’s Ampuku spirit, Da Lanti Wenti, was completely in
control of his body, he greeted everyone in Ampuku tongo and, one
by one, embraced them all. Once entirely possessed, mediums like Da
Mangwa dust themselves with kaolin clay to let its eerie lustre signal
their transfigurations into spirits. A medium’s body remains the same
and yet is profoundly changed in manner of speech and presentation,
an alteration all the more jarring because their bodies remain otherwise
138 Suspect Others

unchanged. While these performances might pass in only a brief min-

ute, their complex integration of the properties of gestures, words, and
objects help frame the medium’s shift into a spirit capable of seeing the
concealed relations that structure human existence.
Da Mangwa had been a medium for most of his life and, at the time
of my fieldwork, was consulted regularly, even if it was mainly only
by members of his large extended family. Despite this, possession still
appeared painful. Every entrance of his spirit was announced with
moans and stabbing grimaces that contorted his face. This building
from inchoate cries into definite, if occult, phrases is what produced Da
Mangwa’s transition from fully human to fully spirit.

Hmmmmmhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, hmmmmhn heeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeee hnnn hnnn heeoeeeeee hn hnnhn Swamba swamba! huh u hu
eueueueueuuuu Kisumba fu dinango! hu hu huhnnnnnnnnnnnnhnnnnnnueu
tefun taa malongo! Mi Kisingwa fu Samba he he he huu hu nnnnnnnnnnneu-
eueueueueuuu Swambe zu, Swanga za! Kunun belu kunun belu kunun belu
Siamba! Kisi doo Mayombe! Kisi doo Manan Gugu! Mi Tosu Tosu Mgbemë!

This evolution from purely emotive noises into identifiable words

shows how mediumistic possession translates pain into spirit identities
who resist comprehension by human observers. Spirit invocations fre-
quently begin with uncomfortable vocalizations like groans and moans.
What starts as a sound immediately intelligible as pain ends in a wall of
semi-comprehensible spirit names that transform language into a mea-
sure of the distance between human and spirit realities.
Here is another example. This medium’s possessing spirit – her mur-
dered male cousin who has returned to seek redress for his violent death –
appears after Da Sako has enstooled him in a shrine at the medium’s
home in Sunny Point.

Heeei … hnhn … ai yoo Sweli Gadu … hnhnhn … ai oo Da Anado, ai oo Da Asa-

maya hnhnhnhnhnhnhn … Mi yonkuu yonkuu Tyoka oo Gadu! hnhnhnhnhnhn …
wani mi á wani mi go hnhnhnhnhnh hn hn hn hn ooho ooho nnhmm nnhmm
hnmm hmmmm … Den gáansama di sidon ya, mi e gi wi odi!

Heeei … hnhn … ai yoo God of oaths … hnhnhn … Father Anado, yeeees,

Father Asamaya hnhnhnhnhnhnh … I’m young, young Tyokaaaaa, God!
Hnhnhnhnhnhnhnh … wants me, I don’t want to go hnhnhnhnhnhnh hn
hn hn hn ooho ooho nnhmmm nhmmm hmmm hmmmm … The elders
who sit before me, I greet us!
 Painful Interactions 139

Here the spirit phases into his host, mixing recognizable names with
sounds of suffering that concurrently replay his tragic death and convey
the medium’s own fraught transition out of fully embodied conscious-
ness. Though brief, these initiatory exclamations make the medium’s
sufferings impossible to distinguish from those of her spirit. The per-
sonal anguish of the spirit is bound to the body of the medium and,
by implication, to the collective destiny of their lineage. In this way,
the physical grip of pain on the medium’s body intersects with perva-
sive Ndyuka anxieties about ruptured social relations and the need to
address them.
There is no word in Ndyuka that precisely corresponds to the English
term “possession.” Instead of “possessing” people, spirits “catch” (kisi)
human “horses” (asi) and “cry out” or “moan” (bali) from within their
“heads” (ede). As we have already seen, because Ndyukas conceive of
consciousness as being a composite of multiple spirit agencies, spirit
possession is, in some sense, the default state of human existence. Full-
blown instances of spirit possession like those enacted by mediums
must therefore be distinguished from the myriad of more subtle spirit
communications that course through people’s everyday thoughts,
moods, and sensations. The healing of pain is one particularly powerful
justification for having a spirit exercise socially approved control over
a medium’s body. Persistent suffering indicates that a spirit belongs in
their medium and must be ritually affirmed as a “co-presence” (Beliso
de Jesús 2016). Accordingly, mediums regularly tell stories of the pain
caused by their having unknowingly resisted their spirits, and of their
immense relief after traditional ritual authorities “broke” (booko) the
spirit’s tongue (tongo) and sanctioned it to speak. Audibly and visually
reiterating these spirit-inflicted sufferings serves to further underscore
the spirit’s right to belong in their medium’s body.
For the Ndyuka mediums I collaborated with, pain and spirits share
a phenomenology. Pain is well-defined; it registers on faces, in voices,
and yet defiantly remains just beyond the comprehension of both others
and the person experiencing it. Pain, and its generalization in more dif-
fuse sufferings, lingers indiscernibly, a hovering reminder of the limits
of human awareness. Just as it is impossible to vividly remember pain,
mediums profess partial amnesia concerning what transpires while
they are possessed. The evasiveness of both spirits and pain brings them
together in the minds and bodies of Ndyuka mediums and encourages
them to posit a fundamental affinity. Like pain, spirits in their invisible
immanence are present yet beyond undisputed proof. Spirits proclaim
themselves through performances of this tension, interweaving their
agency into human bodies to reveal that the unexpected events that
140 Suspect Others

beset human existence are in fact signs of the inflexible social obliga-
tions that spirits communicate.
With their intense focus on giving voice to suffering, Ndyuka ritu-
als strain against contemporary academic discourses about pain and
its social meanings. Recalling Elaine Scarry’s quotation about pain as
“actively” destroying language, we can now see how this argument
presumes a modernist language ideology that too narrowly defines lan-
guage as reference and reason (Bauman and Briggs 2003). In this ideol-
ogy, properly referential language endows the rational agent with the
reflexive self-control that enables their autonomy as a freely choosing
individual agent. By this account, moans, wails, and other improperly
referential expressions are not seen as means of communication but as a
regression to a pre-social, “animal” nature. Briggs (1996a), however, has
shown that even apparently meaningless exclamations are often pen-
etratingly communicative. When situated as indexes of the quality of
relations between people, apparently non-linguistic sounds like rhyth-
mic groans become forceful messages that command intersubjective
attention. As attested by Da Mangwa’s possession, these sounds call
attention to the act of a spirit’s taking over a person, vocally substan-
tiating the process whereby a human body reveals itself to be a shared
container for a polyphony of spirits. The discomfort of this transition is
a mark of the unequal relationship between humans and spirits, and of
the power spirits command to manipulate and assemble human bod-
ies and consciousnesses. For participants in mediumistic interactions,
emotive wails and moans thus serve to increase the affinity between
pain and identity, the possessed medium and the stricken client.
Suffering is why Ndyuka mediums do not choose to be possessed but
are instead chosen. Ndyuka mediumship and healing represent a dia-
sporic instantiation of the “cults of affliction” that Turner (1968), Janzen
(1992), and Devische (1993) have described in Central Africa. Ndyuka
people often look upon full possession with trepidation because of its
associations with suffering. Da Sako told me of having frequent injuries
that prevented him from working to support his large family, of having
his house burn down, and of long spells of bad luck. Da Mangwa cited
persistent ordeals like being thrown into snake-infested swamps and
sinking into raving deliriums. According to Ma Tres, her spirit came

when I was small … he would make me lose consciousness (fáaw) at eight

o’clock in the morning – that was the frst spirit, the forest spirit. When he
would knock me out in the morning, at eight o’clock … until eight at night
I would have no awareness of myself. Sometimes he [the spirit] would
throw me into the river. Other times I’d run to where they washed corpses
 Painful Interactions 141

for burial.2 He would drive me all over the place … Listen, he did every-
thing to me. But it was only when [the prophet] Da Akalali came to the
Cottica [in the 1970s] for the frst time that the spirit really made himself
known in me (kon tuu tuu a mi tapu). I was ffteen then, and my maternal
grandfather was still alive. [When he heard about my possession] he came
and took me from my father’s village where I had been living and brought
me to his grandfather’s village. Once there, they [her grandfather and
family] treated me with leaves (obiya), because he could see what kind of
spirit it was and soften him [the spirit] so that I could control myself again
and rest (kisi miseef losutu).

Ma Tres’s story shows that, rather than produce an unbridgeable dis-

tance between language and experience, the sufferings that induct
Ndyukas into mediumship reveal that experiences like pain are, in real-
ity, a means of expressing relationships that exceed ordinary awareness.
Ma Tres’s spirit speaks through her body to express his connection with
her family. By rendering her unconscious, the spirit communicates his
ability to remove Ma Tres from her everyday persona and place her
beyond her social obligations to her living relatives. To reintegrate her
into family life they were required to accept that her spirit was their col-
lective responsibility. Only when her maternal grandfather recognized
that the spirit belonged to his matrilineage did Ma Tres’s spells of physi-
cal suffering transform into a stable spirit identity capable of delivering
comprehensible verbal messages to humans.
Similarly, Sa Nyoni’s consultation illustrates how Ndyukas come to
perceive the body as a collective field of relational struggles and obli-
gations beyond everyday self-understanding. As Ma Tres recounts
her own experiences, the suffering that results from a family’s collec-
tive failure to heed their spirits is what notifies future mediums that
they might not really be as self-contained as they presume. Having
experienced and resolved their own tribulations, mediums are able to
attract patients similarly tormented by affliction to consult with them.
If a medium’s intervention is successful, and they identify the client as
embodying a powerful intercessory spirit, the client will, in turn, very
likely become a medium themselves.
Undone by the self-doubts that pain inflicts, patients look to medi-
ums to understand themselves. The resulting intersubjective mirroring
of mediums by patients is a key dynamic of mediumistic interactions.3
Organized to frame the patient’s pain as an immanent relation of the
same sort as the medium’s own possessing spirit, mediumistic inter-
actions galvanize patients to recognize that, like possessed mediums,
they are in decisive respects unaware of themselves or the relations that
142 Suspect Others

make them who they are. Just as the spirit displaces the medium, so
suffering’s disruption of everyday awareness alerts patients that they
have failed to recognize the spirits and relationships that are integral to
their being. Pain declares that spirits are already in control of the client,
and that every medium was therefore once in the patient’s place. As
Sa Nyoni is, so Ma Tres was. While nenseki like Sa Nyoni’s do not fully
“possess” the person whom they inhabit, they nonetheless stand in a
similar relation as a constitutive part of a collective whole unknown to
the conscious self without the benefit of spirit intervention.

Hindu Conceptions of Pain and Suffering

Like Ndyuka mediumship, Shakti devotionalism is a cult of affliction.

Inherited from immigrant forebears, Shakti rituals are understood
to connect present-day sufferings to the mythic Indian past. As with
other Hindus, Suriname’s Shakti practitioners feel that pain commu-
nicates hidden interdependences that suture humans to otherwise
invisible agents and relations, be these bewitching relatives or Vedic
deities. Unlike Ndyuka ancestral ritual, however, Hindu bhakti devo-
tionalism explains affliction in terms of a single transcendent soul-self
(aatma/jiw/praan).4 Suffering alerts obtuse humans to the existence of
this soul and its encompassment by a divine pantheon that is pragmati-
cally plural but ultimately unitary. Hindu and Ndyuka mediumship
practices are therefore similarly premised on the idea that suffering is
a code that communicates the fundamental relations that control the
life course of persons and families. Hindus, however, additionally seek
to reconcile mediumship with the transcendental non-dualism that is
emphasized by modern Hindu theology. Though kinship is no less
prominent in Shakti rituals than in Ndyuka rites, identification with an
increasingly standardized, transnational, textual, and institutional reli-
gious tradition importantly changes how Shakti practitioners interpret
what suffering has to teach them about self-knowledge.
In this respect, Hindu mediums’ position on the periphery of Suri-
namese society makes them particularly attentive to the wider influ-
ence of official Sanatan Dharm and Arya Samaj Hinduism. Though
Shakti mediums enthusiastically incorporate the practices of official
Hinduism, their claims to speak for the deities prompt them to address
pain and misfortune in intimate terms that are unavailable to respect-
able pandits. Lacking pandits’ theological expertise, Hindu mediums
are distinguished by the directness with which they confront human
suffering – a fact that was amply apparent in all the Shakti consulta-
tions that I attended. Here is an example from February 2013: A young
 Painful Interactions 143

Guyanese immigrant woman bows before Arti, one of the Shivshakti

Mandir’s senior mediums. The goddess Kali speaks through Arti to
upbraid the woman for having repeatedly failed to recognize what her
pain is telling her.

So how long will you go for now? Until you’re ready [to become a real
devotee], what to do? Don’t let other [people] tell you things that you [do]
not decide. Ok? Sometimes what happens with all your pain that you got
there (she puts her hand on the woman’s chest)? […] Tears you got. You feel like
[there is] no one in this world for you. But I am the Mother and am here for
you! […] They [the deities] want to tell you … things … you don’t want to
do. [That] … you don’t feel like doing! But then who knows you!? […] I put
it [the pain] there. You didn’t want to listen [to] your own father’s (mean-
ing one of the male deities) word! […] But he deals with the nonsense, ok?
That is the one there [in the pain], what you [are] dealing with and what
you [are] not dealing with. I am the Mother for you! See that you stand
for me, and I will take care of it! Leave everything in my hands! And what
happened there (she points to a pain in the woman’s arm)? She [a treacherous
friend] took all and she [is] gone? Take care [of] it! Who is in the pain?

“Who is in the pain?” Kali’s question reframes pain as the testimony of

the relations that bind the young woman to human and divine others.
The woman’s physical pains are evidence of both the goddess’s power
and the worldly intimacies that dominate her life and distract her from
devotion to the deities. Kali implores the woman to reassess her respon-
sibilities and allegiances. By failing to heed the deities’ warnings about
an abusive husband and treacherous friends, the woman has caused
herself unnecessary suffering. The goddess reveals that the people in
whom the woman has placed her trust harbour evil intentions towards
her. Their deceptions keep her locked within the moral decay of an
ultimately illusory material universe where she must daily struggle to
survive. Kali’s reprimand, though, also signals her ultimate unity with
the woman. The woman is invited to “stand for” the goddess. Through
sincere devotion, she can become Kali’s medium and transcend herself
through complete submission to the deities.
For many Hindus, pain is a fact of life in the “material world” that
obstructs ordinary human awareness. In both Guyanese English and
Sarnami, pain is expressed with a variety of nouns (pain, pira) and tran-
sitive and intransitive verbs, often in formulations like “My stomach
hurts (me)” (Me belly a pain me, hamaar bukh pirwaawe/pira dewe hai).
Hindus habitually complain about their aches and discomforts to their
friends and kin, and attentiveness to others’ pains and suggestions for
144 Suspect Others

their alleviation is basic to familial intimacy. In protracted or chronic

instances, pain entreats sufferers and their families to examine the situ-
ation in which it occurs for indications of the relations that may have
caused it. As described in chapter 1, many Hindus are deeply uneasy
about afflictions caused by sorcery (ojha) and spirits (Dutchman, bhut,
pret, winti, bakuu). “Grah,” the pain caused by the influence of the
planetary deities (naugraha, navagraha) of Hindu astrology, is another
important source of affliction accepted with equal gravity by Shakti
practitioners and Sanatan Dharm pandits (Gainda 1996). Like the major
deities of the Hindu pantheon with whom they are sometimes identi-
fied, these planetary deities can inflict punishing sicknesses on ritually
inattentive humans.
Any of the deities can discipline humans for violations of ritual purity
(such as failing to keep vegetarian before visiting a temple) or to urge
them to undertake owed ritual duties. Indeed, as will be described in
the next chapter, some Hindus regard sicknesses like chicken pox as a
possessing goddess whose treatment requires ritual offerings as well as
a visit to the doctor. Stern yet compassionate parents, Hindu deities per-
sonify the moral coherence of the joint family, the ideal form of Hindu
life throughout the Guianas. Humans are expected to yield to the deities
just as children and wives are supposed to submit to the decisions of
parents and husbands. Retribution results when subordinate intimates
fail to fulfil their personal duties within the cosmic moral hierarchy,
duties that rest on pious ritual devotion to both the family and the gods
and goddesses who sustain it.
The ideological centrality of the joint family in Surinamese Hinduism
means that numerous afflictions are the result of interpersonal conflicts
between family members, especially struggles between in-marrying
affines. As with many Ndyukas, Hindus frequently considered the
suffering caused by domestic violence, family dissension, or unem-
ployment as demanding ritual resolution. To answer the question Kali
posed above, unruly, drunken, and abusive husbands, fathers, or sons
are often “in” a supplicant’s pain.
Domestic conflicts are frequently the outcome of concerns about per-
sonal reputation and the sickening power of envy (hahe) and gossip
(talk name, nindara, gap-sap). A significant number of the Shakti consul-
tations I observed involved people – mainly but not always women –
distressed at how their domestic relations threatened both their physi-
cal well-being and their status as proper Hindus. Women complain
about the waywardness of their male kin and despair over the refusal
of those they love to live as moral Hindu householders. Husbands and
sons are frequently described as shunning domestic and ritual duties
 Painful Interactions 145

in favour of what Guyanese call sporting and gaffing – hanging out,

drinking, and partaking in frivolously competitive banter with male
peers (Edwards 1979; Sidnell 2000). Fears about male selfishness and
irresponsibility are also closely connected with socially destructive
activities such as sorcery that, like drunkenness, can inflict enduring
adversity on families.
Deeply marked by modernist devotional interpretations of the
Bhagavad Gita, contemporary Shakti practices aim to reveal that physi-
cal pain and other misfortunes are symptoms of human ignorance of
the essentially divine nature of the self. Shakti practitioners, however,
enact this rather abstract theology through the ameliorative preoccu-
pations that have traditionally characterized popular and therapeutic
Hinduism (Babb 1975; Fuller 1992; van der Veer 1991). The implicit cos-
mology of these popular therapeutic practices posits that humans are
entrapped in overpowering amoral or immoral relations with sorcerous
kin and neighbours, volatile ghosts, and capricious planets and gods.
Shakti devotionalism accepts this pluralistic struggle but subordinates
it to purer universal deities dedicated to the redemptive transcendence
of their devotees.5 How Shakti ritual reconciles these two registers of
explanation is the concern of the rest of this chapter.

Mythological Pain

When allopathic medicine fails to address suffering, or is considered

inappropriate, the first line of inquiry for Hindus is to consult their pan-
dit or a pujari. Most Sanathan Dharm pandits are also astrologers who
diagnose harmful planetary influences and prescribe devotional rem-
edies (Bakker 1999). These remedies include sponsoring ritual offerings
(puja), making fire sacrifices (hawan), and observing periods of regular
devotion in which the sufferer and their family increase their personal
auspiciousness through vegetarian diets and worship of the deities per-
tinent to their problems.
Learning from suffering is a key attribute of what Asad (2011) iden-
tifies as the “religious” body. Both Shakti and Sanatan Dharm rituals
aim to rhetorically encompass the individual pained body and align it
with the cosmological/mythological imperatives of Hindu devotion.
Though not themselves astrologers, Shakti mediums provide essen-
tially the same ritual resolutions as pandits. Rather than relying on
arcane Hindi-language astrology manuals, Shakti mediumship derives
its legitimacy from the dread pleasure of allowing devotees to consult
with the Hindu deities face-to-face. Espousing vegetarianism and elab-
orate regimes of personal devoutness, many Shakti devotionalists even
146 Suspect Others

attempt to surpass pandits in the enthusiasm with which they submit

their lives to the demands of Hindu piety.
The power of Shakti ritual depends on having sufferers identify their
pains with the deities embodied by Shakti mediums. This requires
translating the details of widely known episodes of Hindu mythology
into the particulars of personal suffering. Here is Guru Kissoondial’s
narrative of how pain revealed the presences of the deities within him.
As a young man in Guyana, Kissoondial found himself debilitated by
an illness that was

Like a heavy weight in your stomach. [I] didn’t understand … [why] it

happened to me. In that time, I go [to the] doctor and … [I had] pain … it
was the wind [that caused me] pain … And then with [my] head … [I had
the feeling of] swinging … [the demons] Rahu or Ketu must [have been in
my] head; Rahu [is] the head, [he is the origin of] most disturbance with
the head. And Ketu … [he] wrap your body, squeezing it. So, you are feel-
ing that tying, the pain in your skin … your whole body is tired. So that
is Rahu Ketu who do that. So, with all those pain[s] [I had], in the belly
[I had] pain … sometimes hot, cold sweat, cold fever. [I] just ask myself
why only me? I get sick steady; in the old home, my brother, my sister,
my father, nothing happened to them. Why me? [I] didn’t know what the
cause [was] at that time … [but] later [we started] going to mandir (Hindu
temple) [and got to] know more [by] studying the deota (deities) them.

As with many kinds of suffering, Kissoondial’s personal anguish

demanded an answer. Why was he, but no one else in his family, suf-
fering in the way he suffered (see Evans-Pritchard 1937)? His account
moves from fearful uncertainty and self-doubt to the recognition that
his pains analogically reproduce the astrological function of the Puranic
demons Rahu and Ketu (Descola 2005). According to Descola, analo-
gism consists in “the grouping within every existing entity of a plurality
of aspects the right coordination of which is believed to be necessary
for the stabilization of that entity’s individual identity” (212). Analo-
gism divulges persons as composites of affinities between parts and
wholes, microcosmic bodily properties and macrocosmic natural/celes-
tial beings and incidents. Significantly, while these relations register in
the body, knowledge about them is only learned from external sources
of revelation such as sacred texts. In their different aspects, Rahu and
Ketu – the head and body of a single decapitated serpentine demon
who tried to steal the nectar of immortality from the gods – inflict pains
that index their mythological role as the source of astronomical phe-
nomena (Dimmit and van Buitenen 1978). In binding and wrapping
 Painful Interactions 147

Figure 11 Sanganni Baba.

Kissoondial’s body in the same way that they attack the sun to cause
solar eclipses, Rahu and Ketu tipped their hands as being the cause of
Kissoondial’s personal torments.6
In this way, Shakti etiology links a deity to physical ailments that cor-
respond to her or his mythological role. Sanganni (figure 11) is the fear-
some deity who controls the ocean and guards the river goddess, Ganga
Ma. He makes himself felt in stomach pains because the stomach’s
churnings resemble those of his liquid domain, while Kateri, the “Little
Mother” (a deified Tamil infertility demon; Nabokov 2000), patron of
childbirth, is experienced in difficult pregnancies. Though many Shakti
devotees struggle to systematize these interconnections, their vague-
ness serves to expand their analogical force. Even when underdeter-
mined, the analogical paradigm makes mythological agency physically
present in human bodies, thereby increasing the deities’ capacity to be
identified in the ailments that afflict the lives of Hindus in Suriname.
In Shakti rituals, accordingly, human misfortunes are almost invariably
transfigured into personal relations with a limited pantheon of well-
known divine agents.
Isolating celestial causes for mundane pains subordinates the mate-
rial here and now of devotees’ lives to abstract theological concepts.
Though Kissoondial regarded Rahu and Ketu to be malevolent plan-
etary demons, he felt that his painful bondage to them was a predes-
tined divine revelation of the real significance of his human existence.
148 Suspect Others

For Kissoondial, the evil of suffering was not an ontological absolute

but a graded effect of human ignorance about the primal unity of
all sentient beings with God, and the ritual discipline needed to rec-
ognize this truth. An “illusion” (maya) thrown up by divine power
(shakti), the visceral impermanence of the material world indicated to
Kissoondial that it hid a reality that was beyond such transient pains
and pleasures.
During his own illness, Kissoondial spent three years hovering
between life and death, a period that taught him to understand the ulti-
mate source and final purpose of his suffering.

It … was Rahu, Ketu, and Shani Deo, the three dangerous Grah … who
give [me] more sickness and more problem … it’s like your head swims …
you cannot learn or gain anything you … want to … you [are] … lost. [You
are] so … disturbed that you don’t fnd good, that you don’t feel good
about anything. Good’s there but you don’t see it’s good. For … the three
years I was passing through … [my sickness], for that [reason] I end up
going to … the Madras mandir. I serve the mandir for three years, from [the
age of] nineteen ’til twenty-one … From the age of twenty, [though] it was
[supposed to have already] happen[ed], I end up with these deota, inviting …
the deota … to make the sacrifce [of my life to them]. Doing the devotion …
I start to feel … free. Feel free from what has happen[ed]. I forgot … [and]
put … all those [sufferings] at [my] back, … I [then] gave up myself [to]
help people now. If this is how it must happen, that the deota must come
to help through [my] body then … I give up everything, surrender to that …
Because I do not like to see the time when I was pass through all those
[pains]. I didn’t want to see or hear about anybody else [suffering like I
did]. So … I glad to do this, if [other people] can reach [this knowledge] …
[and] get [the deities’] help. That’s why I surrender myself. The deota must
be there to help. It’s like I ask them for that, it comes simple, peaceful, and
[they] give the help. It’s [that] I surrender to …

“Good’s there but you don’t see it’s good.” So Kissoondial summarized
his initiatory period of protracted illness. The revelation that his pains
communicated devotional obligations that transcended the narrow con-
fines of his personal awareness compelled Kissoondial to accept that his
body was, in reality, a depersonalized channel for the deities to use to
make this same truth known to others. Concurrently malevolent beings
and impersonal convergences of divine and planetary fate, Rahu, Ketu,
and Shani Deo punished and redeemed Kissoondial in equal measure.
His sickness consequently taught him to disavow his own agency and
see surrender to the divine as the highest human purpose.
 Painful Interactions 149

From my inquiries into the origins of Kissoondial’s illness, a picture

at once cosmic and relentlessly personal eventually emerged. Kissoon-
dial and his siblings attributed his long affliction – and their father’s
eventual suicide – to their father’s wilful neglect of his congenital ritual
duties to the family deities. A drunk who beat his wife and children,
Kissoondial’s father rebelled at serving the gods he had received from
his Indian grandparents. Though he refused his duties as a Hindu, a
parent, and a son, Kissoondial’s father nevertheless claimed superior
religious expertise and denigrated his wife’s and children’s Hindu
devotions to the point of briefly converting to Christianity. His father’s
impieties, Kissoondial felt, had driven the deities to choose him as a
vehicle for his family’s atonement.
Kissoondial’s family also linked these wider collective sufferings to
the curse of their paternal grandfather’s “Inderjal work.” The Inderjal
(Hindi: Indra’s Net) is the most notorious book in the Hindu Caribbean,
the definitive grimoire for working morally ambivalent and danger-
ously potent “mantra tantra” (ritual magic). According to Kissoondial’s
sister, a Maroon healer explained to a brother living in French Guiana
that their grandfather had sacrificed a snake in his search for occult
power. In vengeance, the ghost of the snake inflicted their father with
the violent passions that caused the whole family to suffer. Kissoon-
dial was made the special victim of his father’s and grandfather’s sins.
For Hindus, as for Maroons, serpents are feared and revered, and ser-
pent deities (nag deota) possessed Kissoondial and his sister during the
yearly Nag Panchami festival dedicated to them. Their father’s boast-
fully spiteful sins had taught the family the hereditary cost of personal
dissipation and justified the ways in which deities deployed suffering
to influence human destiny.
To Shakti practitioners, the conjunction of cosmology, kinship, and
personal suffering in Kissoondial’s biography establishes that pained
bodies reveal human responsibility to hidden divine relations and
exposes the deep ignorance that keeps humans from recognizing their
essential divinity. Such truths are never disclosed all at once. The sheer
persistence of misfortune provides a thread of causation that leads a
sufferer backwards in time through the life of the family and outward in
space to all the people they have known. The sufferer becomes a passive
object, subject to the gravity of various competing forces that are at once
ruthlessly private and majestically cosmic.
Kissoondial’s testimony shows how Shakti deities derive their author-
ity from the ability of their mediums to successfully explain suffering.
As recounted above, after a long hospitalization, Kissoondial began to
attend his local Shakti temple.7 Desperate for healing, he internalized the
150 Suspect Others

temple’s strict devotional program (described in chapter 2). Adopting

this pious ethos enabled him to reassess the cosmological implications
of his illness. Many hours spent chanting and fasting, alongside rigor-
ous abstention from fish, meat, sex, and alcohol, scrubbed away selfish
attachment to his personal identity and transferred control over his life
to the deities of his personal Hindu pantheon. He increasingly only felt
“free” when absorbed in the pieties that expressed his complete sub-
mission to this inexorable destiny. The more Kissoondial “surrendered”
himself to the deities, the more his personal sufferings became proof
that he had been born to be a channel for divine will.
As illustrated in Kissoondial’s life story, Shakti revelations ideally
incite sufferers to reconceptualize the self-defeating doubts that their
pains inflame as verification of humanity’s total dependency on the
Hindu deities. Full-blown mediumistic possession is the fulfilment of
this translation of pain into a manifestation of divine energy. Address-
ing pain to give it a divine or demonic voice in Shakti rituals makes
personal suffering a token of the universal truth of Hindu mythology.
In this way, pain and mediumship equivalently index human subservi-
ence to the deities. While pain’s resonance with Hindu myths and epics
enables its ritual transfiguration into Shakti mediumship, the roots of
suffering in family conflicts and interpersonal malice bring the gods
home, locating their agency in commonplace emotional turmoil as
much as in celestial dramas.

Arti’s Suffering

Shakti rhetoric about pain is, on its own, insufficient to transform sup-
plicants’ self-doubts into evidence for the presence of divine agency
in daily life. Sufferers must also be persuaded to accept that reality
is really the way that mediums describe it. What follows shows how
Shakti mediumship frames interaction to triangulate bodily pain,
human ignorance, and the power of the deities into a single proof of
ontological encompassment by the divine.
In the interaction reported here, Arti (Kali’s medium from this chap-
ter’s opening vignette) engages Shiva – whom members of Shivshakti
Mandir regard as the supreme personality of God – as he manifests
through Kissoondial. Before I analyse the interaction in detail, it will be
helpful to consider Arti’s own history of suffering. As with Kissoondial,
Arti’s story is typical of Shakti devotees. At the time of my fieldwork,
Arti was in her fifties and had long suffered from the vicissitudes of
poverty, migration, and sexism. Of Madrassi descent, her parents had
been Shakti devotees on the sugar plantation where she was raised in
 Painful Interactions 151

Berbice, Guyana. Since immigrating to Suriname as a young woman,

she has scraped by as a domestic, cleaning and cooking for well-off
Surinamese households. Childless, she had endured a series of abusive
relationships, a situation that she implied had continued with her cur-
rent husband’s heavy drinking.
Arti dates the sufferings that initiated her into mediumship to the
time of her parents’ deaths. She had hoped that she would be spared her
family’s inherited Madrassi ritual duties, and, in particular, the offering
of animal sacrifices. Ominous dreams of the nag deota (serpent deities),
however, warned her to resume these observances. After enduring a
stubborn illness and interpersonal setbacks that were accompanied by
intensifying nightmares, Arti eventually gave in and started to attend
a Madras temple in Guyana. There, almost immediately, she began to
“vibrate” – manifest divine shakti through uncontrollable shaking and
swaying. Arti described this as an experience of overwhelming power,
a concentrated effacing of her body and will. Her passive manifestation
of this energy indicated the beginning of a life of committed submission
to the deities.
Like many Guyanese, Arti came to Suriname as a refugee from the
economic hardships of 1970s Guyana, and settled in Paramaribo. It was
not long before she was again inundated by misfortune. Arti’s desper-
ate search for healing drove her, like many Shakti practitioners I spoke
with, to investigate other ritual traditions in the hope of achieving a
lasting cure. She visited Afro-Surinamese obiyaman and attended a Pen-
tecostal church but failed to gain any benefit from either. After visit-
ing the Shakti temple at Marienberg, Arti felt that she had no choice
but to revive her ancestral ritual allegiances. She dutifully attended
the Marienberg temple until its pujari’s death but still never felt that
her sufferings had truly ceased. She heard about Kissoondial when he
was still in the early stages of founding his own temple in Paramaribo
and decided to test him. After challenging him, Arti felt that Kissoon-
dial’s deities had genuinely communicated the exact devotions that she
owed them. Inspired by Kissoondial’s ardent example, she vehemently
surrendered herself to his ascetic regime of uncompromising vegetari-
anism and regular mantra chanting. For the first time in her life, she
sensed that her suffering had really abated.
When I met Arti, she had been attending Kissoondial’s temple for
more than twelve years. Despite her admiration for her “Guru,” she
found herself debilitated by fresh pains that increasingly threatened her
precarious livelihood as a house cleaner. She was likewise upset about
the interpersonal politics at the temple, the practical management of
which had progressively devolved onto her and Lakshmi, with whom
152 Suspect Others

Arti was cordial but wary. She felt that Kissoondial (who at this point
mainly kept out of the temple’s everyday affairs) ignored her and that
the other temple members disparaged her. In an interview with her
after the interaction described below, Arti expressed to me her frustra-
tion over the fact that her devotions now seemed unable to counteract
her mounting social and physical difficulties.
At the moment of the consultation recounted here, the deities had
only just manifested for the temple’s Father’s Day celebration. Though
Kissoondial had largely retired from routine mediumship, he still “stood
up” for important calendrical rituals. Sitting cross-legged on the temple
floor, Kissoondial underwent a brief prefatory vibration before coolly
announcing himself to be Shiva. To establish their otherness, deities
normally stand, hop, and sway for the whole of their manifestations.
Shiva’s ability to sit calmly at the temple’s centre amidst the frantic
movements of the other mediums befitted the peculiar gravitas that one
would expect from the incarnation of universal consciousness. During
the whole time that Shiva was present, I sat just to his left, recorder in
hand, listening closely.
Arti entered, saluted Shiva with a muted greeting of “Pranam!,” and
took her place across from him. (She was the second person to talk with
the god during consultations that would stretch on for another three
hours.) Staring fixedly into Arti’s eyes, Shiva returned her greeting: “Jai
ho! (Victory). My blessings be with you! What can I do for you?” With
tremulous assurance Arti returned his gaze, replying, “My nuh [don’t]
want nothing, Baba. Me want me pain [to] get better. That me want.”8
Rather than simply address the specifics of Arti’s pains, Shiva
exhorted, “Let every pain be my name. Let every feeling be my name!
Let everything become me! Then I become one with you, then there
[will] be no pain. My child, in this material world everyone feels pain
because … the world itself is a pain. Is disaster. You must go through
with it, if you do not know that you feel pain, or you cannot really feel
that pain, then you do not know that you lived. And you cannot know
to serve me.”
Initially, Arti held Shiva’s stare. Over the course of Shiva’s lecture,
however, her gaze wavered. Clearly disappointed, she looked at the
floor and replied, “Yes, Baba. Me know.” Shiva continued: “And all
these pains bring one to heaven, bring one to the goal of my feet, bring
one to my kingdom.”
Still looking at the floor, Arti responded with vague defiance: “Yeah,
Baba, but [it is] not so sometime.” Ignoring her, Shiva kept up his les-
son: “When so ever you come to me, when you reach me, there is no
pain.”9
 Painful Interactions 153

“Yes, Baba.”
“You have to feel in this world because you eat … You wear what
is produced in this world. You drink what [has] been created in this
world. All these things will create pain in the body of oneself. The body …
[is] create[d] from this world.”
Looking up, Arti asked Shiva a direct question: “Baba, me want [to]
know …” Before she can finish, however, Shiva interrupts her: “That is
why I ask what you want me to do?” Without hesitation, Arti answered,
“[I] want it [the pain to] come out from me body.”10
Responding reassuringly, Shiva continued to stare through Arti as
though she were wholly transparent: “Those are the pains that have to
come out, my child. Don’t worry, it [the pain] is going, easy by easy, [the
pain that has been] holding you [for] all the years [in the] past is going!
It will [be] loosened. Before the time comes for you to leave this world,
[the pains] will all go, you will leave freely.”11
Palpably frustrated with this response, Arti interjected, “But the time
is too late because, what [is] left …?”12
“Nothing in the world is … too late … my child. In this world [there
is] nothing [that is] too late. So is this world. So is Bhumi Devi (the god-
dess of the earth).”
Crestfallen, Arti muttered, “Baba!” forlornly under her breath.
Ignoring her, Shiva began to preach.

You do not know how … [much] pain, and weight and trouble that Maha
Shakti, as Dharti [her incarnation as the earth] have [with] everyone. You
have [only a] little, my child. That is nothing … Take my name, [and apply
it to] every pain to hold yourself, call [my] name, every pain you feel, call
my name. I will take care of it. Do not let the pain be more than you. There
is nothing a devotee should allow to become [greater] than my name:
Namah Shivay! Om! Namah Shivay! I am the Holy Spirit. Only the holiness
can take care of everything: pain and disasters, sickness and disease … the
Guru [Kissoondial] also faces pain, [but does] anyone come here to help
him chant … my name? To help take care of what is happening around
here? Or … take care of [all the] devotees that comes here? How much he
alone can do? As long [as] you wear the material body … you have the
feelings, the pain … if the Guru himself surrender himself towards us …
[your] body belongs to the material world, it will not come where the soul
will go [after death]. It [the body] surrender to us. It will leave here (at this
point Shiva emits a long sigh). It was created from this world, this earth. It
has to be left here. [After death] the soul will go freely, for the soul is free,
dancing, going its way. As you are my devotee, my child … beauty is pre-
pared for you. Never want … anything in this world, my child. That is
154 Suspect Others

what causes pain, when one desires … this and that. Wanting … this and
that. That is the thing that causes pain, over and over in the body because,
when you cannot fnd [what you want] … it disturbs … the mind and the
heart. All the senses become disturbed! […] You feel just lost. So, don’t
worry.

After Shiva concluded his monologue, Arti thanked him brusquely

before getting up to return to managing the rites unfolding around
them. Two other mediums were also manifesting deities in front of
where Shiva sat, and Arti was expected to help attend to them for the
next few hours during which the deities were speaking.
The above interaction exemplifies how Shakti rhetoric uses talk about
pain to tie the material world into the spiritual hierarchy enacted by
mediumship. That Arti consults Shiva at all makes the power of this
rhetoric amply clear. A medium with many years of experience at the
temple, Arti might easily give up in frustration before Shiva’s theologi-
cal bromides. Indeed, she frequently told me that she was unsure about
why she continued at the temple. Whatever her doubts, however, she
felt repeatedly compelled to yet again take her pains before the deities
in the hope that they might grant her the relief that she had experienced
when she first took up her devotions.
From Shiva’s perspective at least, the aim of the dialogue was to oblige
Arti, who was distinguished from other temple members by her partic-
ular stubbornness, to graciously accept that her pain was the result of
her continued ignorance of the truth that she herself already contained
Shiva’s power within: “Then I become one with you, then there be no
pain.” Though Arti simply demands a cure, Shiva responds by justify-
ing her pain as a warning that her immortal soul has been seduced by
the materiality of the world. Shiva depicts Arti as much like a prisoner
in Plato’s cave who mistakes the illusory appearance of her immedi-
ate existence for the deep structure of reality. In ways redolent of both
Vedantic interpretations of the Upanishads and Christianity’s Platonic
debts, Shiva urges Arti to recognize that pain is a gateway to salvation
and commands her to acknowledge that her sufferings are evidence
of the transience of her material incarnation as a human, a state that is
manifestly inferior to the unchanging reality of Shiva’s absolute, undif-
ferentiated consciousness.
Shiva explains that pain is a necessary reminder of worldly imperfec-
tion. The god tells Arti that she will only be healed when she has aban-
doned her search for physical gratification and learns to focus on him
as the fulfilment of all her needs. Shiva reconstitutes Arti’s sensations
and sentiments as a demonstration of her inability to know her true self
 Painful Interactions 155

through proper devotional relations – a failure that keeps her locked

in the painful illusion (maya) of the material world. Her incapacity to
understand that her pain expresses Shiva’s ultimate encompassment of
her is a decisive epistemic and ontological asymmetry, one that Shiva
reproduces in the structure of the interaction itself.
From the beginning of their interview, we hear Shiva’s metaphysical
refutations of Arti’s demands for immediate healing. Paying attention
to the direction of Arti and Shiva’s gazes shows how this metaphysi-
cal unevenness is embedded in the conventions of Shakti mediumistic
performance.13 Though Shiva kept Arti firmly in focus, Arti repeatedly
looked down or away, only twice momentarily making eye contact.
This strategy is the inverse of, but complementary to, another common
Shakti practice where the medium speaks with their eyes completely
closed (McNeal2012). In either instance, the consulting devotee is
denied intersubjective equivalence in the interaction, while the medium
repeatedly interrupts their addressees’ attention to hold the floor as an
exclusively knowledgeable speaker (see Hanks 2013).
Arti’s eye movements illustrate how the interactive architecture of
Shakti consultations sanctions mediums to epistemically encircle those
consulting them. Despite Arti’s vocal complaints before and after her
consultations with the deities, the interaction’s ontological framing
restrains her from effectively resisting Shiva’s metaphysical co-option
of her dissatisfactions and doubts (Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974). When-
ever she tried to articulate disappointment about her undiminished suf-
ferings, Shiva overwhelmed her with a fixed look and a blast of theol-
ogy. Everything Arti says is repurposed by Shiva into an expression of
her insufficient self-knowledge. In whatever way Arti tries to phrase
her request, the asymmetrical premise of the interaction constrains her
response. In Shiva’s account, pain is a blessing, a lesson that humans
are immaterial souls “sparked” from himself, God, the “over-soul.” As
is paradoxically encoded in Shiva’s refusal to heal Arti’s suffering, the
therapeutically equivocal will of Shakti puja’s possessing deities is pre-
sented as Arti’s only refuge. In this way, Shiva tries to convince her that
her personal pain substantiates the divine grace she is told she already
contains within herself and is currently experiencing in her audience
with Shiva.
Shiva deploys two key tropes to persuade Arti of the necessity of
accepting her pain as part of truly surrendering to the deities. As con-
veyed in the statement “Let every pain be my name,” Shiva first tries to
assimilate her pain into his primal sovereignty over her and the cosmos.
While he blames the pain on her tenacious ignorance of the immate-
riality of her true self, he also indicates that the material world is a
156 Suspect Others

manifestation of the divine, a goddess who suffers in her own right.

Sound, the most paradigmatically “immaterial” of physical phenom-
ena, establishes this link: “every pain you feel, call my name. I will take
care of it … There is nothing a devotee should allow to become [greater
than] my name: Namah Shivay!” Shiva instructs Arti to envelop her per-
sonal pains in the sound of his name by chanting the Shiva Mahamantra.
Identifying the sonic sensation of repetitively intoning his name with
the feeling of Arti’s pains, Shiva rhetorically fuses them into a single
experience of his own transcendental agency both within and beyond
her embodied suffering.
At Shivshakti Mandir, the Shiva Mahamantra is the most essential
component of the temple’s liturgy. Devotees measure their dedication
by the time they spend reciting mantras at home before their altars, and
mantras are an essential element of the devotional routines that deities
assign to human supplicants. Kissoondial regarded mantra chanting
(jap) as the foremost discipline of his ascetic surrender, and he spent
at least two hours every day reciting the names of the temple’s deities.
Similarly, at every ritual juncture – during the opening offerings that
precede mediumistic rituals, when the deities start to manifest in their
mediums, and when they finally leave their mediums’ bodies – all the
pujaris chant the Shiva Mahamantra in steady unison to produce an all-
pervading drone.
While there has been debate about what mantras are and how they
work (see Staal 1996; Yelle 2003), in this case I adhere to the theories I
encountered in Suriname.14 These conceive mantras to be divine names,
articulations of shakti energy that audibly encapsulate the deities’ all-
penetrating power. The Hindus with whom I spoke about mantras all
agreed on the form’s exceptional efficacy and identified it with San-
skrit, which they held to be the primordial language through which
the world was spoken into being. Mantras were understood to be the
key source of the ritual potency that animates deity images and temple
liturgy with divine charisma. As instruments of pure magical poten-
tial, mantras are imbued with considerable moral ambiguity, however.
Ramesh, a Guyanese medium residing near Sunny Point, told me that
his grandfather had known a mantra capable of instantly killing people
but had refused to teach it to anyone out of worry that it would be put to
evil ends. Because mantras can make even the worst desires real, those
I spoke with hedged the danger by promising that those who misused
them for selfish ends must eventually reap divine retribution.
There is an obvious tension between the mantra as an amoral instru-
ment of magical power and its role as the pre-eminent devotional tech-
nique of respectable Sanatan Dharm and Arya Samaj Hinduism. To
 Painful Interactions 157

pre-empt sorcery accusations and prove that they are righteous Hindus,
Shakti devotees pursue pious self-abnegation through laborious ritual
discipline. Mantras are only as powerful as the fervency of their reitera-
tion. Shakti devotees use the 108 beads on a strand of Hindu prayer
beads (mala) to track hundreds or thousands of mantra repetitions. Dur-
ing mantra recitations, devotees strive to fix their attention solely on
the deities’ names and to feel themselves melt into the reverberations
of the mantra’s increasingly abstract sound. Devotees explained to me
that it was meditating on mantras that taught them to sense that they
contained, and were contained by, divine shakti. When Shiva says, “Let
every feeling be my name! Let everything become me!,” he collapses
Arti’s physical and psychic experiences into the sonic pulsations of his
mantra and identifies both as expressions of his transcendent being. In
this schema, pain, like sound, becomes Shiva’s supreme self as it vibrates
within the devotee. Meaningless syllables like hreem shreem kleem from
which most mantras are built extend this identification. Just as what
appear to be a mantra’s separate words and phonemes blend into an
embracing auditory blur when repeated thousands of times with closed
eyes, all pain is assimilated into a single symptom of Shiva’s primordial
being and agency.15 In both mantra chanting and Shakti mediumship,
devotees are transformed from the subjects to the objects of their sensa-
tions and thereby reduced to passive containers echoing with a hidden
divine purpose that is just beyond the scope of their finite human iden-
tities and desires.
Similarly, to complete his rhetorical and metaphysical encompass-
ment of Arti’s pain, Shiva introduces a third superordinate entity,
Mother Earth (Bhumi Devi, Dharti Mai). As Shiva invokes her, she is the
feminine incarnation of the generative energy out of which he manifests
the material universe. Invoking the goddess establishes an analogy in
which Arti is both like and unlike Mother Earth. Arti and the Earth are
similarly suffering “mothers.” Despite the resemblance, this identifica-
tion exposes how minute Arti’s pains are when compared to the bur-
den of collective suffering born by the Earth, her mother. Just as Shiva
claims to contain the finitude of the material world within his infinite
spiritual being, Mother Earth experiences the collective sufferings of all
the beings whom she sustains and supports. Shiva describes this imbal-
ance to reprimand Arti. He warns her that her desire for comprehensive
healing arises from a pathological attachment to her ephemeral body.
Arti must learn to be grateful for the insignificance of her own pains
when contrasted to those endured on her behalf by her divine Mother.
Only by doing so can she become truly aware of her true immateriality
and free herself from the pain of continual rebirth.
158 Suspect Others

Whichever way Arti answers Shiva’s theological admonishments,

he responds by inciting her to greater devotion. This, he asserts, is the
only means for her to combat the pain that her self-misrecognition
causes her. Both the rhetorical premises and organization of the interac-
tion position Arti in asymmetries of existential knowledge. Whether
contrasted with her Guru Kissoondial, Lord Shiva, or Mother Earth,
in every case, either her suffering or her devotional fervour is called
into question: “Do not let the pain be more than you. There is noth-
ing a devotee should allow to become [greater than] my name.” Shiva
condenses all aspects of Arti’s suffering into the nominal details of a
cosmic purpose that is being accomplished in her interaction with the
manifesting god. Arti reacts to this information with disappointment;
at least within the structure of the interview, however, she has no alter-
native but to acquiesce to the devotional regime that Shiva commands.
The soteriological edicts of Kissoondial’s Shiva show the prominence
of pain in Shakti ritual practice. Pain compels people to question what
they know about themselves. As manifested in Shiva’s theology and
the rhetorical practices of Shakti mediumship, the gods translate the
self-doubts triggered by painful and unnerving physical sensations
and emotional states into seemingly compulsory announcements of
the ontological and epistemic dependence of humans on an otherwise
imperceptible divine reality.
As with Ndyuka mediumship, the need for revelation in Shakti rit-
ual also invites suspicion. Convinced or not about the reality of divine
presence, supplicants are confronted with the visibly human surfaces
of possessed mediums’ bodies. Like Ndyuka spirits, Hindu deities
communicate their power through their mediums’ corporeality. This
opaque packaging stokes doubts about human fallibility and potential
fraud. Ulterior motives of any kind that are attributable to recogniz-
ably human interests test the veracity of the messages that mediums
communicate. Talking about supplicants’ pains, however, identifies the
visible weakness of mediums’ human bodies with the everyday pains
of supplicants’ own embodied existences. When deities manifest in
the bodies of mediums they enact a cosmic analogy between involun-
tary experiences like pain and divine control. Pain is, simultaneously,
a deity, evidence of divine jurisdiction over human life, and a sign that
the highest goal of Shakti rituals is the effacement of all ignorant and
base human motives from the bodies of devotees.
Arti’s self-identity is rapidly submerged by this rising metaphysical
tide. Shiva tells her that her pain is a sign that she lacks the decisive self-
knowledge that would otherwise permit her to recognize the liberated
soul secreted beneath her personal suffering. If Arti were to genuinely
 Painful Interactions 159

surrender her abiding human frailty to the deities, Shiva promises, she
would finally see herself as what she truly is: an open frequency for
divine communication without any reason for existing other than com-
plete capitulation to this purpose.

Conclusion

Challenging self-awareness and control, pain makes us opaque to

ourselves. By giving pain a voice that speaks from both within and
beyond a sufferer’s body, mediums extend this opacity to the broader
features of material existence and then offer to resolve it by revealing
the identities of the agents who hide within the pain. If a sufferer’s pain
is in reality an otherwise disguised relationship with a spirit or god,
what else are they missing about themselves or the many others with
whom they live their lives? The ritual animation of pain in medium-
ship affords Hindu and Ndyuka sufferers a chance to experience their
innermost doubts as evidence for the intimate and powerful relations
that define who they really are. For Ndyukas and Hindus alike, pain
constitutes an internal rebuke to complacent presumptions that living
humans truly know themselves or understand others. Unlike the har-
rowingly solitary existence propounded in much liberal theory, pain
becomes an emphatic messenger, an embodied feeling that expresses
the superordinate power of a welter of invisible beings and concealed
interdependencies. Just as Da Sako and Ma Tres/Pa Kodyo worked
together with Sa Nyoni and her sister to render her polyphonic self
socially translucent, so Shiva engaged with Arti to make her pains
a transparent indication of her transcendental unity with his cosmic
consciousness.
Whatever their differences, mediums from both traditions work to
position sufferers in terms of their pains, objectifying them as eruptions
of relational interconnections beyond human awareness and control. To
resolve this diminishment of human capacity, spirits and deities offer
afflicted patients the chance to become mediums who are themselves
capable of assuming extra-human perspectives and to escape the gen-
eral condition of ignorance from which pain arises.
The next chapter continues with these themes. If pain is the primary
evidence of human dependence on a determining mass of initially
opaque relations, dreams provide another reservoir of testimony to the
obscurity of the self. Dreams sow equivalent doubts and suspicions
about the self and others that, in the space of mediumistic interactions,
give further glimpses of the many unseen influences that mediums
reveal.
Chapter Five

Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge

“Last night I dreamed about you.” This is what Sa Elana called to tell
me one morning in mid-2012. A civil servant, Sa Elana grew up in Par-
amaribo and is as comfortable in Dutch-speaking government offices
as she is with the ritual politics of Ndyuka kinship. In her dream, Sa
Elana encountered me at a Hindustani-owned store down the road
from Sunny Point. Her dream self was struck with an urgent impulse
to get me to leave. My dream self, however, had refused, saying that
I was very tired and needed to rest. Sa Elana became more insistent
that I must escape, but instead of going with her, I lay down and fell
asleep – at which point she woke up. Sa Elana knew that it was an omi-
nous dream and felt responsible for telling me. She also felt powerless
to know the dream’s exact message. On awaking, she had roused her
husband in the vain hope that he could interpret it, but he could not.
When Sa Elana finally located me later that day, she first narrated the
dream, then instructed me to consult a medium to learn the true nature
of the hazily comprehended threat.
At once intimate and opaque, Elana’s admission of having dreamed
about me was something I heard from a number of Surinamese over
the course of my fieldwork. While it did not happen every day, it
was not unusual for Hindus and Ndyukas to relate their dreams to
friends and family. Such an approach to dreams echoes concepts
that are remarkably consistent across the ethnographic archive (see
Jedrej and Shaw 1992; Lohmann 2003; Tedlock 1987). Rather than
being deemed confessions of the teller’s innermost fears or desires,
dreams are potential revelations about interpersonal well-being.
Unveiled across the bodily frontiers of consciousness, dreams offer
potentially powerful evidence for the bonds of relatedness that tie
people together (see Pandya 2004; C. Stewart 2012; Tedlock 1987).
Nevertheless, even when Sa Elana thought that she had received an
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 161

important portent about these connections, the fleeting obscurity of

the dream demanded interpretation (Descola 1989). Dream interpre-
tation concedes an ironic division of experience from reality, a separa-
tion that requires resources from beyond the self to explain the self.
Here self-knowledge is a condition of the inescapable relationships
that connect a dreamer to those with whom their future is mingled,
however indistinctly. Analogous to pain, dreams are a terrain where
these relations are revealed.
Thinking of dreams this way stresses a peculiar reflexivity that, as
with pain, appears ingrained in the structures of both phenomena
(Strange 2016): “Dreaming is a particularly interesting and problem-
atic area of self-experience precisely because in dreams the locations of
subject and object are often unclear, even dissolved into one another”
(Kracke 1991, 51). In dreams, people experience themselves as the sub-
jects of their actions, but on waking, this sensation of agency recedes
amid the dim puzzles and cartoonish vagaries that dreams leave behind
(Jedrej and Shaw 1992). The convincing qualities of phantasmagoric
dream experience pose a conundrum similar to the liar’s paradox –
a statement that is simultaneously true and false. This concurrence of
semiotic opacity and transparency makes dreams, all at once, real, less
than real, and hyper-real; any dream can therefore potentially inflame
doubts about the dreamer’s self-knowledge and self-determination in
ways that intimate the influence of forces and realities that exceed the
embodied self (Tylor 1871; C. Stewart 2004). Sa Elana’s perplexity illus-
trates the intransigence of these doubts, but also how such suspicions
about the limits of waking agency invite others to share in a common
dream life.
This chapter traces those limits through the subtle interconnec-
tions that fuse mediumistic interactions, the phenomenology of
dreams, and ontologies of self-knowledge. How do the consequences
of Hindu and Ndyuka dreams frame the ways in which dreams are
reported and understood within and outside mediumistic interactions
to shape self-awareness? The simultaneous opacity and transparency
of dreams provide an arresting template for ironies of self-consciousness
that exacerbate suspicions across Surinamese society. By ignit-
ing doubt about the boundaries of the self, knowledge, and reality,
dreams extend these suspicions to the conduct of waking sociability
and the coherence of the ordinary ego. The opaqueness of dreamed
meaning and action is therefore critical to how spirit mediums, by
defining epistemic restrictions on human self-knowledge, reveal the
contents of other minds and detect the invisible relations that deter-
mine human consciousness.
162 Suspect Others

Hindu Dreams

Dreams have played an expansive role in South Asia since antiquity. As

evidence about the underlying nature of reality, dreams and reflections
on dreaming have exerted considerable influence on Indic medicine,
philosophy, literature, and ritual (O’Flaherty 1984; Nabokov 2000; Ram-
Prasad 1995). When I asked Sieuw about the significance of dreams
(Sarnami: sapana), he readily explained that our experience of this world
is like an episode from the pan-Indic epic the Mahabharata, in which
Krishna puts the Pandava brothers to sleep and has them rehearse
the epochal battle of Kurukshetra in their dreams. This sort of oneiric
philosophical idealism is common among Hindus; pandits and popular
media alike depict humans as living in a derivative universe contained
within more ontologically fundamental levels of divine existence.
This was not the only reading of dreams I encountered, however. After
I was awakened one morning by a troubling dream involving a neigh-
bour, I asked the Hindu medium Anjali what it meant. She explained
that my dream revealed my neighbour’s sorcerous envy of me and her
daughter, a connection about which I was not otherwise fully aware.
Neither a private echo chamber for my burrowing interiority, nor a sign
of encompassment by an underlying divine reality, my dream showed a
nightly counterpart existence in which my soul lived out relationships
that were otherwise obscured by the narrow sentience of wakefulness.
For Anjali, “the awareness of the self is as phenomenally real when the
person is dreaming as when awake” (Willerslev 2004, 412). By exposing
the grip of others over the dreamer’s life, bad dreams alert the dreamer
to the need to protect themselves through devotional submission to the
deities. People will at times resort to standardized interpretations rely-
ing on symbols or inverted significances, but, in or out of possession,
Hindu mediums prefer to focus on dreams as disclosures of interper-
sonal relations.
Dreams’ visceral, kaleidoscopic, and evanescent qualities provide
Hindus in Suriname confirmation of both their subtle theological sig-
nificance and their occult bearing on exigencies like financial problems
and family discord. The Hindus I lived with conceived of dreams as
dialogical disclosures about who a dreamer was in relation to those
with whom they lived – especially family members, co-workers,
and neighbours, but also the deities and spirits on whose favour life
depends. When narrated and interpreted, dreams become communal
spaces where the dreamer enacts important aspects of this relationally
contingent identity. Dreams are a window into the obscured thoughts
of others and onto reality itself; a dream’s potential revelations parse
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 163

the content and risks of a person’s constraining ritual and interpersonal

relations.
Indeed, many Hindu mediums told me that they learned ritual and
occult knowledge directly through dreams. For them, “experiences
undergone when asleep” were “just as much part of autobiographical
memory as are experiences when awake” (Ingold 2000, 101). In dreams,
the deities assumed a diversity of forms to teach mediums while they
slept. According to Kissoondial, the Hindu deities even appear as
people of African descent, a fact that assured him of their universal
sway. Hindu mediums describe such dreams as being continuous with
meditation and inspired visions. The Guyanese medium Rajeev told me
that the Vedas are uniform across India because of pandits’ capacity to
meditate and thereby tap directly into the divine actuality of dreams. At
the same time, such claims give otherwise untutored mediums access
to occult powers beyond the broadly exoteric education of pandits.
Accordingly, dreams can be said to enjoy precedence over waking life as
a source of revelation about both immediate and transcendent realities.
Lakshmi, one of the principal mediums at Shivshakti Mandir, explained
how the nocturnal revelations she attained through prayer and mantra
recitation comforted her after she realized that she had moved into a
haunted house:

I was never afraid, I was always praying to Lord Shiva, he is my ishtdeota

(favourite deity). And before I came over here [to the house], I got a dream.
He dreamed me and he showed me everything that is going to happen
when I came over here. But I didn’t realize it then. He appeared in front
of me when I was sleeping and I got very much afraid because I didn’t
know … and then he spoke and told me not to be afraid … after he told me
that, … everything went away. I wasn’t afraid anymore. Then he began to
speak with me, but he didn’t tell me directly how it’s going to happen. But
he was talking to me, [telling me] different things, but when I came over
here now, different things started happening. Then I realized that he was
showing me these things. He was telling me that I’m going to have to pass
through these things, that I’m going to see these things …

“He dreamed me.” Lakshmi here understands herself to be a result of

Shiva’s power to unfold the illusions of the material world, the affective
and incidental unpredictability of which testify to the interventionist
imminence of his divine agency. Dreams are reminders that individu-
ated awareness of the world is ephemeral, the transient foam of epiphe-
nomenal waves churned up from the embracing oceanic consciousness
of the divine.
164 Suspect Others

Whatever the metaphysical grandeur that dreams might intimate, for

Lakshmi, as for many other Hindus, dreams are a dependable source
of practical theological knowledge. They possess the capacity to both
trouble and reassure people about the conventions of social life. This
approach to dreams is apparent in Lakshmi’s fears about household
ghosts and is likewise evident in the homely methods used to treat cer-
tain common illnesses. While I was living with Priya’s extended family,
her youngest daughter, Mansi, came down with chicken pox. One day I
found Priya busily cutting neem branches in the kitchen. She explained
to me that the goddess Durga causes chicken pox (Mata Mai) by possess-
ing children so that she can demand vegetarian offerings. To heal the
sickness, after “sweeping” (Sarnami: jharai) Mansi with the neem, Priya
scattered the leaves on Mansi’s freshly made bed and then rubbed her
down with a mixture of vermillion sindhur powder and oil and ordered
her to nap. While she was asleep, Mansi later affirmed, the goddess
had appeared to her and revealed the offerings that she desired. When
Mansi ate the foods that the goddess had shown her in her dreams, she
would be appeased and contentedly depart Mansi’s body.
Despite the importance of revelatory dreaming, Hindus can just as
easily dismiss dreams as ascribe them relevance. Depending on the sit-
uation, Priya, for example, told me very different things about dreams.
Sometimes dreams were simply “rummel” (Dutch: garbage), sheer men-
tal effluvium. On other occasions, they were vital predictions of future
events, or direct messages from gods or the dead; according to Priya,
her father occasionally gave her signs and warnings while she slept.
Like many Hindus I met, Priya was suspicious about precisely what
her dreams implied and her own ability to consistently assess when
they were significant. Such doubt blunts the sharp distinction between
dreams and reality, since uncertainty about whether a dream is spuri-
ous or a decisive unveiling of a person or family’s fate compounds the
vertigo that dreams induce. Endowing a dream with revelatory validity
undercuts the boundaries that might otherwise isolate its ephemerality
from the continuity of daily existence. All the Hindus I know, no matter
how mystically inclined, get on with the expediencies of waking social
life; there is a sense, though, that ordinary reality just might teeter on
the edge of a dream.
By exacerbating doubts around personal identity, self-awareness,
and agency, dreams and pain similarly demand meanings that can only
be sought from others and “elsewheres” (Littlewood 2004; Mittermaier
2011). In this way, Hindu dreams are a turbulent channel to the truth of
things. Like Zhuangzi’s famous dream of the butterfly, one might wake
to find the frames of existence confusingly reversed (Zhuangzi 2009).
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 165

Dreams place reality in a divided frame, bifurcating it into equally

misleading states of awareness. However opaque, this latent instabil-
ity prods unsettlingly at the surety of self-knowledge. Indeed, Hindu
mediumship derives an important component of its persuasiveness
from its ability to trouble the frontier between dreaming and waking,
self and other.

Dreams in Hindu Mediumship

It is eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning, and Priya and I have just arrived
at the temple of Kissoondial’s disgruntled protégé Vinod, near a large
banana plantation a few kilometres from Sunny Point. Two rooms of
white painted concrete set within the walled dirt yard of a single-family
home, the temple is inconspicuous apart from a dense grove of limp
jhandi flags. Upon entering the compound, we found six supplicants
already waiting outside the temple. Taking our place in line, Priya and I
struck up a conversation with a middle-aged Indo-Surinamese woman.
With forthright conviction, the woman told us that Vinod’s deities had
cured her sister of insanity so that she could return to university. The
woman herself now came looking for help in finding her missing wed-
ding ring before her husband noticed that she was not wearing it.
As we spoke with the woman, one by one, each person or family in
front of us was called into the temple through swinging, saloon-style
doors. When finally summoned inside, we encountered Vinod fully
manifesting a deity. Locked in metronomic rocking, Vinod was seated
on the floor across from his middle-aged Indo-Surinamese pujari, who
translated Vinod’s deities’ idiosyncratic English into Sarnami or Dutch
for the temple’s almost entirely Indo-Surinamese supplicants. Both
men were dressed in matching yellow tee shirts and red dhotis. Spread
around them on the floor were assorted ritual materials: half a dozen
odd drinking glasses, a bottle of rum, a bed of neem leaves on which
burned a bundle of cigarettes, and an aluminum tray that contained
small bowls of ritual powders – sacred ash (bibhut), vermilion (sindur),
and turmeric (chandan).
The moment we entered the temple, Priya became pensive, even
apprehensive, a look that she wore for the greater part of the six-minute
interaction. With uncharacteristic caution, she took a place roughly
opposite Vinod while I sat a little way behind her. Vinod did not face
us but sat at an oblique angle with his eyes tightly closed. His animated
swaying and outward impassivity radiated an uncanny otherness,
like a washing machine that has suddenly started broadcasting extra-
galactic radio messages.
166 Suspect Others

Without introduction, the deity began to speak (with many conces-

sions for comprehensibility, I have tried to preserve the original word-
ing to highlight its distinctiveness): “Chuti (Sarnami: ant), I will speak
[about a] variety of things yet still to inspire you. To gain … the (stars?)
you have big plans in your memory. Plans was big for you but when
you were to receive [the fruits of your] plans, what [went] wrong?”
Priya understands English. Nonetheless, the pujari immediately
translated for her. The translation only flowed one way, the deity’s
omniscience being taken for granted. Priya started to reply to the ques-
tion but could only stammer out three words before Vinod’s deity cut
her off: “Chuti, what happens [with the] obstacles in your life? What
happens to dreams in your life? What happens to pains in your belly?”
Each of the deity’s statements was shadowed by a burst of translation
that Priya tried her best to track with rapid looks between the medium
and the translator. The deity continued: “And what happens to confu-
sion in your dreams? What [there is for you] to gain [requires] a lot
[that] still [needs] to [be] accomplished. Do you dream of a child some-
times at night? Do you have dreams that people interfere with you?”
Before Priya can answer, the deity pointed at her stomach: “What’s
happen[ing] here [to] you? What’s happen[ing] to your back? Chuti,
there’s works (sorcery) which have [been] done … because of [the]
preparations of a [certain] person … I see a works there [in front of] you.
Do you find marks on your body sometime?” Pointing at Priya’s head,
the deity asked, “Do you have pain here sometime? And when your
head pains [you], do you focus on the person [who] is very (important?)
in your life?”
Trailing the translation, Priya answered that she has headaches
“bahut” (Sarnami: very, meaning frequently). The deity went on: “What
happens to your other hand? Chuti, [there] is a lot to complete towards
[fulfilling] all [that you] desire [and to] propel [you towards well-being].
Money comes, money goes. [There is] still (much?) [to be determined]
about [your] future plans. But there are a lot [of matters] yet involved
to share … with you, to give you … back [control]. Whatever [is] set
[from] now, it can happen next year, [or] it can happen for the other
(ensuing) years.”
After a brief, expectant silence, the deity resumed: “Since thirty [years
of] age …, what’s wrong with [you]?” Another lag for translation and a
tentative pause. Priya replied that she was thirty when she got married
(a little older than the average Hindu Surinamese), and she did feel that
events in her life did sometimes seem to go frustratingly “backwards”
(Dutch: achteruit). When Priya started to elucidate, the deity again inter-
rupted her: “What happens to happiness in your life? What you wished
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 167

for (inaudible)? Do you dream [about] snakes? Do you dream [about]

water? Do you dream of a dog sometime? One of your feet [is in] pain.
You have to do a work (ritual) with Chandrapal (the god of the moon,
a form of Shiva); you have to do a private work to clear these marks on
the body before you can become … normal. Sometimes you do things
but you don’t know how you end up doing them.” Priya answered with
a string of affirmations, but the deity simply spoke over her: “But [I will]
show you … what is in your life and teach you [what you need to do
to] complete [the ritual obligations that will resolve your troubles]. Any
questions for me?”
Priya affirmed her willingness to do what the deity requested and
then inquired if the prescribed ritual had to be performed at the temple.
In the brief caesura offered by the pujari’s confirmation of her question,
Priya leaned towards him and, almost under her breath, asked for the
possessing deity’s name. “Kateri Ma,” the pujari whispered, naming
the goddess as she persisted in speaking over him: “Chuti, we know
[about] what is confused in your mind. Chuti, any questions for me?”
At this prompt, Priya enquired about her three teenage daughters and
their success at their studies. Without waiting for Kateri Ma, the pujari
assured her that, should she fulfil the ritual devotions that the goddess
prescribed, these and other benefits would certainly be realized. Kateri
Ma bade us farewell to declare the consultation concluded: “Chuti, let
my blessings be with you.” With a humble Pranam, Priya and I stood
up, paid the 20 SRD consulting fee, and tiptoed out into the still soft
morning light.
On our drive home, I asked Priya for her impressions of the séance. I
had been the one who suggested that she come and see what she made
of Vinod’s mediumship. Instead of answering, Priya redirected the
question at me. I told her that I wasn’t sure and wanted her opinion. As
though discussing an uncomfortable dream from which she had only
recently woken up, Priya laughed nervously, and again solicited my
thoughts about the dreams that the goddess asserted that she had had.
Had she had dreams like that, of water, and children, and dogs? I asked.
Yes, maybe; she was unsure. How could she know? Honestly, I told her
that these topics seemed impossibly vague. Nodding her head as if hop-
ing to convince herself, she finally sighed and said that I must be right.
Though Priya remained unsure when I again queried her about the
consultation the following day, mingled with her family’s general sus-
picion of mediums, my own all-too-irrepressible doubts seemed to
assure her that Vinod merited mistrust. Some months later, however,
after a visit to an Indo-Surinamese medium (another former follower of
the original Marienberg temple and, briefly, of Kissoondial), Priya was
168 Suspect Others

not so sure. Manifesting Kali, that medium also informed Priya that
there was malevolent magic buried in her yard. In addition to strange
objects having been left in front of her house, unrelenting animosity with
her brothers-in-law, and frequent aches and pains, this general concor-
dance with Vinod’s Kateri Ma’s earlier diagnosis persuaded Priya that
Vinod had, in fact, been a legitimate envoy of the truth. As Priya put
it: “If you hear [something] from two [different] people, then you can’t
ignore it. Two people have already spoken, so something must be done”
(Sarnami: Dui janai bol chukal hai, okar chahi kuch kareke).
As we saw in the previous chapter, Ndyuka and Hindu spirit medi-
ums jolt normally smooth inferences about the transparent intelligi-
bility of bodily surfaces and the opacity of interior depths to trouble
the relation between appearance and reality. In doing so, a medium
establishes an existential parallel between their own possession
and their patient’s misfortunes. In the consultation just described,
Vinod’s Kateri Ma invoked myriad sufferings, social vexations, and
elusive dream memories to incite Priya to feel herself to be a passive
receptacle of the agency of human and divine others. In the same
way that manifesting deities eclipse the identities of possessed medi-
ums, mediums lay hold of a supplicant’s dreams to reveal that the
source of both her frustrated self-awareness and the difficulties of
her social life are to be found in the hidden relationships disclosed
by the medium. On learning this, supplicants, whom the goddess
described as ignorant human “ants,” are offered the chance to accept
that their bodies are already shot through with co-present agencies
and embrace the ritual interventions that mediums promise will
amend and alter these relations.
Both Priya’s indecision and Vinod’s Kateri’s verdict make clear that
dreams supplement pain in inciting self-doubt. Hindu ideas about
dreams disclose recursive contradictions within the dialogical origins of
all self-knowledge. To quote Jedrej and Shaw, “dreams are perceived as
both intensely personal and as deriving from outside, as both ‘me’ and
‘not me.’ This … constitutes what we might call the duality of agency in
dreaming: If dreams come from someone or something else, the actions
I perform in my dream may be subsumed within the agency of another”
(1992, 11). Replace the word dream with pain and the foregoing quota-
tion loses none of its acuity. Pain objectifies a separation of body and
will to arrest normally unthinking physical control; dreams divulge the
estranging opacity that is produced when consciousness becomes the
object of its own attention. In both cases, mediums amplify the mysti-
fications of consciousness to reveal depths of alterity simultaneously
internal to and beyond a supplicant’s self-awareness.
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 169

Priya’s vulnerability before these perplexities discloses the creative

force of doubt in Hindu mediumistic interactions. The above consulta-
tion shows how the epistemic structure of mediumship implicitly cul-
tivates ontological insecurity. As with pain, the dreams that possessed
mediums ascribe to supplicants prod them to doubt what they really
know about themselves. More than simple psychological manipulation
(“gaslighting”) or the hegemony of certain kinds of human authority
(Shaw 1992), however, these doubts are cosmologically constitutive
(Espirito Santo 2015). The possibility that the goddess knows about
dreams that Priya has herself forgotten creates a conceptual break that
reveals that the deity is already present within what Priya takes to be
inexplicable and confused about her own life. In the ontological frame
of mediumship, Vinod’s goddess’s leading questions – “Do you dream
[about] snakes? Do you dream [about] water? Do you dream of a dog
sometimes?” – are not inquiries but factual statements. Within this
frame, the apparent tentativeness of the goddess’s questions hinges on
a supplicant’s willingness to confront the possibility that, not only are
they speaking to a deity, but the deity knows the supplicant better than
the supplicant could ever know themselves.
Priya’s indecision about the consultation and her appeal to me (who,
as an educated, white, male, American researcher was often – frustrat-
ingly – deferred to even if my opinions were ignored) for assurance
show how readily assertions about dreams in revelatory contexts can
stimulate bewilderment about self-knowledge. The goddess tells Priya
that she is no more in control of her waking life than of her dreams:
“Sometimes you do things but you don’t know how you end up doing
them.” Just as waking from an unsettling dream can bring both relief
and a palpable feeling of insecurity, the goddess’s revelations about
what is otherwise hidden about reality simultaneously soothe and mul-
tiply Priya’s uncertainties. Conversely, Priya has no certain grounds on
which to contest the scattered, perhaps forgotten, dream evidence with
which the goddess confronts her. In this situation, the knowledge and
agency of human “ants” are shown to be cosmically redundant to dei-
ties who have already decided human destiny. Cosmology does not pre-
exist these revelations or the doubts they kindle. Rather, cosmology is a
pregnant prospect that the world might be the way the deity describes
it, precisely because the supplicant is shown to have misrecognized or
misunderstood what reality is truly like (cf Willerslev 2004).
To generate this perplexity, Hindu mediumship enlists elementary
features of the organization of talk-in-interaction and the dissolving
shadows of dreams. As conversational analysts have theorized, con-
versations are organized into “turns at talk” defined by “conditional
170 Suspect Others

relevance” (Sidnell 2010). When a speaker says something, the addressee

assesses it in terms of its situational applicability or the degree to which
it aligns to the expected conventions of the interaction. In daily con-
versation, people frequently face “problems of hearing, speaking, and
understanding” (Sidnell 2010, 110). In quotidian talk, co-participants
rely on “repair,” “an organized set of practices through which partici-
pants … are able to address and potentially resolve such problems”
(Sidnell 2010, 110).
Repair is structured to remedy the causes of misunderstanding. This
can be either self-initiated by the speaker or other-initiated by a fellow
participant. Repair enables greater intersubjective attunement between
co-participants in the unfolding of a communicative event. This creates
reflexive awareness of what is happening to smooth out a shared frame-
work of participation and interpretation (Sidnell 2010, 111). As seen
above, Hindu mediumship warps the expectations of conversational
repair to destabilize and engulf supplicants’ understandings of what is
occurring during interactions with possessing deities. This creatively
distorts the impulse to repair and other context-embedded under-
standings to subtly transform the phenomenology of communication
in ways that resonate with the disorientation of dreams. Each time Priya
attempted to engage Vinod’s goddess to ensure she understood what
was being communicated, the goddess frustrated her. Facing away from
Priya and me, with eyes tightly closed, Vinod’s body swayed aggres-
sively, while the goddess blithely interrupted or otherwise disregarded
us to instead make sweeping declarations about intimate aspects of
Priya’s life. Just as in a dream, the structure of the interaction left Priya
submissive and incapable of answering the goddess as an autonomous
agent fully in control of what should be inaccessible private knowledge.
As they demonstrate that the intuited rules of reciprocal intelligibility
do not apply in mediumship, Hindu mediums redefine their suppli-
cants’ expectations about the knowledge conveyed through revelatory
speech. Accordingly, the elusive and allusive complexity of dreams pro-
vides evidence that human agency and self-knowledge are as incomplete
as Hindu mediumship reveals them to be. As with dreams, the “para-
dox of interpretability and uninterpretability” (J.W. Du Bois 1986, 327)
in mediumistic interactions creates an ontological opening. If dreams
provide a more penetrating description of reality than waking life, and
this reality is most effectively revealed in mediumship, supplicants’
misunderstandings of manifesting deities prove that mediums enact a
fundamental epistemological asymmetry between humans and gods.
Unsatisfied repair, then, is an “affordance” (Keane 2015) of interaction
that enables discrepancies in mediums’ and supplicants’ capacities to
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 171

frame what is happening between them in ways that also let mediums
reveal the ontological division between deities and humans. Medi-
ums’ citations of dreams confront supplicants with their own doubts
about their capacity to understand the unresolved or evasive mean-
ings of their own seemingly self-contained psychic experiences. Within
mediumship, these doubts are provoked in tandem with rudimentary
challenges to supplicants’ everyday understandings of themselves as
authorities about who they and the people closest to them actually are.
When combined, the twin affordances of the epistemic uncertainty of
dreams and the thwarted intersubjective equivalence between medi-
ums and supplicants produce perplexities that reveal how the deities
inhabit even the most intimate moments of human existence.
Here is another example of these dynamics in action. Kissoondial
manifested Shiva for the festival of Mahashivratri. An Indo-Surinamese
man came to consult with the god. Through a translator, Kissoondial’s
Shiva diagnosed the man as suffering from sorcery perpetrated by a
friend from the time when he had lived in the Netherlands who lusted
after the man’s wife. Having established the cause of the supplicant’s
misfortunes, Shiva next revealed that this ruined relation was present
within the man’s physical sensations. Pointing at the man’s stomach,
Shiva demanded: “My child, what is happening?” Fixing the man with
a reproachful glare, Shiva then looked at the translator: “Inside, some-
times when he eats … terrible things happen. Sometimes he does not
rest or sleep good at night. Have very bad dreams for himself. Seeing
short man (bakuu), little people, evil spirit.” Once Shiva was assured
that the man understood what he told him, with direct eye contact and
a determined expression, he confronted him head on: “What [do] you
believe in?” At first taken aback by so direct a question, the man recov-
ered his composure and replied, in halting English, “I believe in God.”
Shiva nodded and, with a nurturing tone, asked, “Do you love me?”
“Yes,” responded the man, without any outward reluctance about con-
flating the medium seated in front of him with the supreme being.
As with Vinod’s Kateri Ma, Kissoondial’s Shiva invokes dreams and
pain in tandem to reveal that his knowledge contains the secret details
of the supplicant’s life. After situating himself within the viscera of the
man’s corporeal imagination, Shiva then demands that the supplicant
recognize him as the deity. This forces the man to – at least situation-
ally – declare his acceptance or refusal of the deity’s authority within
the medium and over the details of the supplicant’s life. Because I did
not encounter the man at the temple again, in this instance Shiva’s affec-
tive brinkmanship appears to have been only momentarily effective.
Whatever the ultimate success of mediums in demanding enduring
172 Suspect Others

devotion, at the very least their uncanny performances raise the trou-
bling intuition that the fabric of ordinary appearance has, in fact, been
torn to reveal buried interconnections between dreams, pain, and inter-
personal struggles. When subject to this uncertainty, the supplicant can
hardly avoid giving affirmative answers to divine commands.
In sharp contrast to the egalitarian ethos of much of Hindu sociality,
the citation of dreams within the interactive configuration of medium-
ship attempts to ensure that human supplicants never attain intersub-
jectivity with possessing deities (see Hanks 2013). Instead, possessing
deities speak at supplicants to emphasize that there are stringent onto-
logical limits to what unaided humans can really know. Dividing the
supplicant from their self as it is described by the medium’s manifest-
ing deity creates new knowledge of what the self is (Stephen 1995). This
places supplicants in a position to reflect on themselves in the same way
in which they normally reflect on their relations with others. As they
do so, the mediums’ deities challenge the supplicants’ “first person”
(Shoemaker 1990) awareness of the content of their own conscious-
nesses. Supplicants are never permitted to share in its entirety the same
world that the deities know; they are only granted slivers of experience
that tentatively expose the threatening sublimity of divine proximity.
Despite this epistemic chasm, the deities are discernably anthropo-
morphic. They can be assumed to understand the fears and desires of
their supplicants. When a medium ascribes a dream to a supplicant,
they concurrently render the supplicant transparent to the deity but
opaque to their own consciousness. Conversely, the deity becomes more
transparently divine, minimizing the sense that the medium is either
dissimulating for personal advantage or is possessed by a mendacious
evil spirit (maya devi). As in dreams, the figure of the supplicant as the
unquestioned knower of the social and somatic ground of their self-
knowledge is “reversed” by the possessing deity and the cosmology he
or she makes manifest (Wagner 1986). Within a mediumistic consulta-
tion, the process of this reversal is precisely what enacts a “difference in
perspective between beings inhabiting different ontological domains”
(Kohn 2007, 12).
Such ontological divisions are possible because the contradictions of
dreams, like those of pain, create an omnipresent sense of irony (Fer-
nandez and Huber 2003; Lambek 2003). Just as irony distances meaning
from agency to make puzzles of one’s own and others’ intentions and
actions, in dreams and in mediumistic consultations alike, supplicants
discover that they are, in important respects, alien to themselves. Such
estrangements have important implications for how devotees reflect on
their accountability and that of others in the events of their lives. In
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 173

this respect, Hindu mediumship makes the paradox that dream experi-
ence is both transparently real to the sleeping dreamer and opaque to
the awakened conscious self fundamental to the ontological framing of
face-to-face mediumistic revelation. Within this matrix, dreams, like the
deities who interpret them, attest to an imperative for self-doubt. Medi-
ums, however, also seek to restrict this reflective impulse to the consid-
eration of specifically stipulated avenues of relatedness and personal
identity. Though they use dreams to pull the rug out from under the
seeming coherence of the individual consciousness, mediums quickly
step in to staunch self-fragmentation and impose strict paradigms of
devotional responsibility of which they are fully in control.
As Wittgenstein said, “The argument ‘I may be dreaming’ is senseless
for this reason: If I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well
and it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning” (1969,
49e). As Wittgenstein well knew, once dreams are granted a lease on
reality, they forever aggravate doubts about the translucent intelligibil-
ity of quotidian existence. Through dreams, Hindu mediums strengthen
the existential parallel between medium and supplicant produced by
pain. Human supplicants are revealed to be opaque to themselves in
the same way that other people are opaque to them. The deities, how-
ever, see through this opacity, making the self of the supplicant trans-
parent – but only from the external perspective of the deity. Dreaming
and waking, self and other, are merged in this epistemic standpoint,
and the inscrutability of dreams verifies that the self can only truly be
known through relations with less fallible spiritual agencies. Everyday
scepticism is banished because, once within this epistemic frame, the
supplicant is left with only doubt about his or her ability to disprove a
reality that exceeds human epistemic capacities. From within this rev-
elation, there can be no doubt; in fact, it presumes that humans exist in
an eternal existential aporia in which the conviction of having transpar-
ent self-knowledge is always waiting to be exposed as a misleading
illusion. This is the core revelation of Hindu mediumship – that the self
is only intelligible as a revelation of invisible others who speak from
realities beyond it.

Ndyuka Dreams

Ndyuka conceptions of the self as composite and polyphonic imply

that people are in some sense always possessed, and dreams are one
important avenue by which Ndyukas arrive at this understanding of
their subjectivity. Interestingly, because of the active emphasis Ndyukas
place on the role of dreams in everyday life, dreams appear to play a
174 Suspect Others

less salient role in Ndyuka mediumship. One young Ndyuka woman

from Sunny Point explained that dreams are

your akaa traveling to see the things that you wouldn’t be able to see nor-
mally. This means that you must consider what you see in your dreams.
Often a dream is like a proverb (odoo) that you must think about carefully
if you want it to surrender its meaning. Such a dream is good when you
consider what it is trying to reveal. But dreams originate from good spirits
(bun yeye) as well as bad (takuu yeye).

Even Ndyukas who said that they could not explain the origin of
dreams thought that dreams were nevertheless critical for discern-
ing clandestine influences like the hidden intentions of bewitching
relatives. Dreams thus require stringent analysis. Without elucida-
tion, they may become a theatre of deception in which the manifest
meanings of people, objects, and events are purposefully obscured
or misleading (Thoden van Velzen 1991, 1995). Dreams consequently
invite interpretation and must be told to others to be fully under-
stood. Because dreams are messages from one’s bun gadu or akaa, they
cry out for decipherment. That their translation mirrors ancestrally
imparted and collectively comprehensible proverbs is not accidental.
As in Sa Elana’s dream with which I began the chapter, dreams are
most often addressed to the dreamer’s social relations and therefore
require collaborative exposition. Frequently, it is only other people
or spirits who have the key to a dream’s meaning. Here is how Da
John put it:

You tell other people about everything in a dream to learn what it means.
When you tell others, it is to help you understand the correct (yoisti) sig-
nifcance that the dream communicates. You have things that appear in
your dreams that help you understand what will happen.

The freedom with which Ndyukas relay their dreams belies their con-
stant warnings to mistrust others. Dreams spur people to make seem-
ingly private experiences public concerns. In offering their dreams to
others, dreamers distance themselves from their dream selves, choosing
instead to narrate themselves as passive transmitters of events of relat-
edness that entangle them from beyond their waking awareness (see
Herdt 1987; Keen 2003; Roseman 1991).
I was with the septuagenarian Basiya Da Antony on the porch of his
tidy Sunny Point home when his middle-aged daughter Sa Elana, whom
I introduced at the start of the chapter, approached us from her house
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 175

on the opposite side of the rutted dirt street. At the time, Da Antony
was worried about a maternal kinsman who had flown in from their
natal Tapanahoni village to receive medical treatment at a Paramaribo
hospital. Greeting Elana, Da Antony immediately related a dream from
the previous night. In the dream, he had been attacked by a large black
dog, but had beaten it back and then driven it away. Together, father
and daughter worked out that Da Antony’s dream was an auspicious
omen about either the protracted hoarseness from which he was suffer-
ing or the eventual success of his kinsmen’s treatment. When her father
was finished, Sa Elana responded with a dream of her own. In it, she
and her sister Agnes (a convert to Pentecostalism) were on their way to
deposit an offering of food at the cemetery (beli peesi or gáanman kondée)
of her ancestral village.1 Agnes sat in the prow of their canoe, shining a
powerful flashlight ahead of them, while Elana huddled close behind
her. When they arrived at the cemetery’s boat landing, the flashlight
illuminated a very dark woman squatting on the riverbank. According
to Da Antony, this woman was his grandmother – Elana’s nenseki, and
the dream was a message that Elana needed to pour a libation at their
village’s ancestral shrine (fáaka tiki).2
The future orientation of dreams as warnings – the most common
fixture of dream interpretation the world over (Lohmann 2007) – is
pronounced for many Ndyukas. In the same breath in which Sa Ela-
na’s eldest daughter, Kapon, told me that dreams seldom come true,
she related a very affecting account of one that did. Some years before,
Elana’s youngest daughter had drowned in an open cistern. A week
before her sister’s death, Kapon had a dream in which she fought
a Sáamaka girl with whom she had been quarreling. In the dream,
Kapon struggled with the girl until she pushed her into a river to
die. The night before her sister’s death, Kapon was overcome with an
intense melancholia that led her to sit by the same cistern in which
her sister would drown the next day. It was only Sa Elana’s inter-
vention that had gotten her to abandon her watch in anticipation of
the unspecified tragedy that would follow. Kapon felt that the dream
had clearly predicted what had happened. Nevertheless, she had not
understood the signs. “Neither a subjective product of the narrator
nor wholly objective,” Kapon’s dream constituted “a third element
standing in uncertain relation” to her own life as the teller of her
dream (Groark 2009, 713).
Da John told me about a dream he had had in which he saw a large
man pounding awaa (Astrocaryum segregatum) palm fruits in a mortar.
He could not understand the meaning of the dream, and therefore con-
sulted a friend. His friend explained the dream by interpreting the man
176 Suspect Others

as an Ampuku forest spirit and the fruits as the members of John’s matri-
line (bée). The dream revealed that Da John’s lineage was being pun-
ished by this avenging spirit, who was warning them that they would
soon have to give him due ritual acknowledgment if they did not want
to be crushed like the fruit in his mortar.
Each of these dreams divulges relations in which the dreamer is
existentially ensnared. Da Antony’s dream addressed either his own
illness, which he attributed to a bewitching rival for his title as a lin-
eage basiya, or the well-being of a close matrilineal relative. Elana’s
dream disclosed the continued need to propitiate an ancestral spirit
incarnate within herself, while Kapon’s alerted her, however vaguely,
to the fate of her little sister – a death later ascribed to the bakuu
demons set upon the extended family by a maternal great uncle.
Likewise, by identifying a common threat to collective familial exis-
tence, the significance of Da John’s dream is expanded to involve the
entirety of his lineage. In each instance, dreams reveal the individu-
ated dreamer as a switchboard for relations that must be communally
confronted to ensure the health and security of all those whom the
dreamer cares about.
Dreams therefore engulf Ndyukas in the complications of the rela-
tional self. This is vividly depicted in dreams of drowning or float-
ing as though lost on a vast and deep body of water. These dreams
are often interpreted as demands for recognition from the place spirit
(gadu fu a peesi) – the third agent in the commonly cited three-spirit
model of the Ndyuka self (Vernon 1985, 1993). As noted in chapter
1, the gadu fu a peesi is the spirit of the ground on which a person is
conceived that is resident in every person. To own a place – including
the human body – is to belong to it by being in a relation of mutual
recognition, support, and respect. Such aqueous dreams, with their
sensation of floundering desperately in unfathomable depths, show
what happens when the gadu fu a peesi withdraws the assurances that
come from belonging to a place. When a person has this type of dream
they are supposed to feed the gadu fu a peesi by dumping food on the
ground. Feeding reaffirms that the dreamer recognizes their depen-
dence on, and derivation from, the ancestral relations that bind them
to their place of birth.
These anecdotes attest to the frequency with which Ndyukas reported
encountering spirits in their dreams. Though spirits routinely material-
ize in dreams, Ndyukas also said that, to avoid frightening people, they
did not normally assume their true forms. Da Mangwa’s Ampuku spirit,
for example, took the guise of a white horse or a giant. Despite the inter-
pretive difficulties posed by these transmutations, Ma Tres and other
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 177

mediums nonetheless described dreams as the main channel through

which spirit relationships are revealed:

Wenti will come to you in dreams; if the spirit needs to show you that it
is an Ampuku or an Ingii, then you will see it like that. With all of its talis-
manic chords (dyemba) on, with everything. And if it is a Papa, it will also
show itself while you’re asleep … When it is an Ingii, then you will dream
of a pingo (white-lipped peccary: Tayassu pecari). That means that, if you
dream about peccaries often, or if you frequently dream about Amerindi-
ans, when you go to hunt in the forest early in the morning you will kill
a peccary. That’s how the spirit will show itself, come and show exactly
who it is. Every kind of wenti will reveal itself while you’re asleep. Tell you
exactly who they are.

Though Ma Tres’s account of how spirits unveil their identities in

dreams is formulaic, other mediums gave more personal accounts
about the dreams that alerted them to their spirit relations. Da Tomiki
is a middle-aged urban Ndyuka obiyaman. During my fieldwork, Da
Tomiki healed at a large, if rather discreet, shrine along the asphalted
road between Paramaribo and Paranam, the former headquarters of
Suriname’s bauxite industry. With dayglow detail, he enthusiastically
recounted the dream that he had during the 1986–1992 Surinamese civil
war – a dream that announced his entry into mediumship.
In the dream, the then-teenaged Da Tomiki saw a brilliantly white
sloth (loili, sloths of the families Bradypodidae or Megalonychidae) on an
unfamiliar road. He ran to catch it, but the sloth escaped with unex-
pected speed. As he chased the animal, all of a sudden, he found his
way blocked by a light-skinned giant dressed in a traditional Ndyuka
loincloth (kamisa). Da Tomiki tried to run around the giant, but, which-
ever way he went, he found his path obstructed. The giant asked Da
Tomiki if he believed (biibi) in him. To this question, Da Tomiki twice
replied “no.” And why should he? He didn’t even know who the man
was. The man asked a third time. Da Tomiki said “yes” and succeeded
in running between the man’s legs. Behind the man, he found himself
in a sort of prison with high walls and guard towers manned by numer-
ous armed policemen. At the centre of this complex was an open-air
cement-floored shrine (wenti osu) identical to the shrine in which Da
Tomiki was then relating the dream to me. Entering this prison sanctu-
ary, he again encountered the giant. Now dressed in dazzling white, the
giant led Da Tomiki to a soaring golden throne and ordered him to sit.
The throne was so lofty that the ground beneath it disappeared from
view. On taking his place on the throne, Da Tomiki woke up. According
178 Suspect Others

to Da Tomiki, the light-skinned giant was his tutelary Ampuku forest

spirit. Six months after the dream, the spirit came and “cried out from
his head” to officially announce himself to Da Tomiki’s family. The
dream was a declaration that Da Tomiki’s relation with the spirit was
preordained and had to be heeded.
Dreams confirming the legitimacy of spirit possession were a fre-
quent topic among all the Ndyuka mediums I spoke with. Such proofs
are necessary because spirits materialize in many variant forms across
the full spectrum of human sensations, ideas, and emotions. Spirits are
thus like dreams, Da Tomiki said, forever protean and always requiring
further understanding.
Because Ndyuka mediums are frequent dreamers, an important
aspect of mediumship is learning to decode the specific messages that
their polymorphous spirits convey across diverse dream settings. The
metamorphic polysemy of spirits within dreams equally applies to
waking reality. Da Tomiki illustrated a lesson about how to determine
valid possession in others with a story of an incident that had occurred
while he was visiting a remote forest camp in the company of a female
cousin. Going to bathe one morning, he thought he saw his cousin sit-
ting in the middle of the river on a rock that was impossible to access
without a boat. He called to her but she did not acknowledge him in
any way. Hurrying back to camp, he encountered this same cousin com-
ing down the trail and wearing completely different clothes. Da Tomiki
explained that the doppelgänger was in reality a spirit who had bor-
rowed his cousin’s features for some unstated aim that he had failed to
comprehend.
The propensity of spirits to blur the boundary between dreams and
waking life is an accepted quality of living with them. People in Sunny
Point said that, asleep or awake, it is the feet that “carry” (tyai) a per-
son through the world. If a person wants to remember their dreams, they
should then refrain from washing their feet on awaking so as not to clean
away the residue of their akaa’s nocturnal travels. Similarly, Da Robby
taught me that dreams about animals alert the dreamer that the dream
animal is a vehicle for a place’s spirit. All the animals who live within
a spirit’s domain belong to it and can be used by it to communicate its
wishes. Whether a person dreams of a jaguar, or sees one late at night,
the meaning is the same: the animal is the “boat or car” (boto ofu wagi) of a
spirit present in that location. This ability to transcend the boundaries of
dreaming and waking is what permits spirits the comprehensive view of
human existence from which they assert their priority over human affairs.
To the degree that they carry the mercurial and phantasmagoric quid-
dities of dreams into conscious reality, spirits are practically identical
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 179

with the dreams that reveal them. As we saw with Da Boonmila’s brag
about spirit mobility in chapter 3, Ndyuka spirits use the motility of
dreams to reveal the impotence of human knowledge about them (cf
Pedersen 2011). As in other traditions of mediumship, Ndyuka dreams
are important because they impart vital relational knowledge in ways
that also expose elementary restrictions on human awareness (Espirito
Santo 2009, 2015). These epistemic limits inject additional meta-inter-
pretive risks into the events of everyday Ndyuka life. An anomalous
occurrence, like the sighting of an albino animal, might be completely
banal, or it might represent an omen that connects the maze of a per-
son’s dreams to ancestral relations with spirits demanding collective
ritual attention.
For Ndyukas, as for other African-descended peoples in the Ameri-
cas, “knowing has consequences that go beyond its internalization as
‘information’” (Espirito Santo 2009, 9). Within this framework, there is
little difference between dreams and spirit possession, and spirits freely
use both conduits to accost humans and make them messengers or
charge them with wrongdoing. And though an accused person protests
their innocence in all good faith, the spirit’s very appearance shows that
it knows the truth of what happened and will hold the guilty to account,
whatever the motives for the transgression. In dreams and possession,
the living must therefore learn to see themselves from the perspective of
spirits or, more accurately, come to recognize their incomplete capacity
to assume this ontologically restricted viewpoint without first acknowl-
edging that spirits already teem within their lives.

Dreams in Ndyuka Mediumship

Unlike Hindu mediums, who epistemically outflank dreamers with

oblique citations of their supplicants’ dream lives, the Ndyuka medi-
ums I observed only addressed dreams when entreated by dreamers
themselves. Within these accounts, a presupposed continuity between
dreams and waking life is strongly apparent. This continuity, how-
ever, equally assumes an epistemic division of labour that demands
analysis. Dreams are real but only when checked against everyday
events and the interpretations of more knowledgeable spirits and
humans (sabiman).
It is mid-afternoon, and a mother and daughter, Ma Abeni and Sa
Adyuba, have arrived to consult Da Sako and Pa Kodyo. Da Sako had
previously exorcized them of a vengeful ghost, but now the women
want to talk about additional problems that they have encountered
since the earlier treatment. After some formalities, Da Sako asked Ma
180 Suspect Others

Abeni about “those dreams you were having [about a forest spirit], how
do you feel after having cleansed yourself with leaves?”3
“Yes, well, I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel bad like before. Because yester-
day when [I was dreaming] someone [the spirit, in this case the ghost of
Ma Abeni’s sister] came to my house, they found a closed door. When
I went outside, they didn’t want to come inside. Then I slammed the
door gbwalaaan! I picked up a very long machete and looked for some-
thing to knock it against gbap! but couldn’t find anything. I struck it
on the ground, gbip! and said, ‘You want to come into your head.’ You
see? Then I said, ‘You want to come into the head from which you were
removed?’ I slammed the door, gbalaan! and [the spirit] was left outside
in the backyard. So, now we don’t feel so bad!”
“Surely,” replied Da Sako.
Ma Abeni continued: “Then we said, ‘We’re not finished.’ That means
that there were a lot of spirits … But it was the one from the forest, that
was the one we knocked over to the other side. The father (Pa Kodyo)
had talked with us about [the spirit] of one side [the side she had shut
out in her dream], but a little something is still there [and remains to be
exorcized]. But you know yourselves that, when you do something …
then you want to do it completely, on all sides. You must knock the thing
to the ground [to expel it]. So, we don’t feel bad; the father here will tell
us what the spirit is, like he did for the previous one; whether it is the
first one we expelled [that has come back], or the second one.”
“And if it’s the other one?” questioned Da Sako.
“Then if it is the other one, you’ll help us. Kwolon! (completion
idiophone).”
“In the dream,” according to Groark (2009, 707), “the self is split into
a profusion of dream alters, each of which serves to bind and contain
experiences of activity and passivity, wilfulness, and subservience, in
culturally and personally distinct ways.” Ma Abeni’s dream testimony
implies that the multiplicity of Ndyuka selves extends equally to spir-
its, who, like humans, are also composite entities containing multiple
“sides.” Unlike other African-derived ritual complexes in which such
sides are extensively theorized (see D.H. Brown 2003; McNeal 2011),
Ndyuka mediums do not often focus on the spirits’ own multiplicity.
Such multiplicity does, however, show spirit and human realities to
be recursively mirrored in Ndyuka practice so that each perspective
reflects the image of the other in order to explain itself.
Reiterating Ma Abeni’s narrative, Da Sako interpreted what she had
just said: “That’s the way it is. Listen, Pa Kodyo, they have shared
their issue. A ghost [koosama] was possessing her. It was one of her sis-
ters. We helped with that. But there was a forest spirit present where
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 181

we washed her. So, after we expelled the ghost, the forest spirit was
annoyed (fuufeli). But there is still something else that is bothering them,
that’s the other thing [implying a bakuu demon].”
Their expressions of affirmation now mingled with surprise, both Ma
Abeni and Sa Adyuba let out a long “Hmmmmm” in response to Da
Sako’s explanation of their problem.
Da Sako continued, addressing Pa Kodyo: “Then tell us what you
see to be the matter. See what you can do to help them with the issue.
If you can’t help, we will wash them with Ampuku medicine to finish
the treatment with the aid of an additional obiya recipe. After that, we
can see what we need to do about the other spirit. Yes, something else
is there bothering them besides the [first] spirit.”
“I hear, Da Asaimundu,” Pa Kodyo replied. “But help me understand
the story better. I understand the forest spirit. I understand about the
ghost. But I don’t understand the other thing …”
“Yes, the other thing.”
“Is it a little animal (pikin meti, a bakuu)?”
“Yes, it is a little animal that is annoying them. They’ve dreamed
about it a number of times at night.”
Ma Abeni interjected: “That means that when the ghost came, it
brought with it this other thing.”
Da Sako confirmed this: “Yes, it came with the other thing.”
Having grasped the problem, Pa Kodyo now provided a complete
account: “When a witch’s spirit possesses people, it doesn’t leave little
animals (bakuu). The difficult, ugly side of a ghost, that’s the little ani-
mal. I can solve this problem, got it? I’m not lying, ok? When you hear
a person in your sleep, it is a spirit that has come to possess you. It’s not
leaving a little animal!”
“It [the ghost] will bring it [the little animal] with it.” Da Sako affirmed.
“That’s its force (tranga), you hear? Mmmm. That’s a ghost’s force.
When a person sleeps, it will come and announce itself. That’s true!
Then we have to take them to the forest to exorcize the spirit. That we
have done already. But to remove the other side [of the spirit], we’ve got
to exorcize it really thoroughly. Then we can find more help. Pa Kodyo
will heal you, along with [Da Sako’s spirit] Da Asaimundu. That’s what
we can do.”
Da Sako concurred with this plan while Ma Abeni and Sa Adyuba sat
by, still listening carefully. Pa Kodyo went on: “But we can’t wash them
here. They’ve got to go to the deep forest. Then we have to wash them so
as to solve the source of the problem. If the spirit is there to come [take
possession], then it can come. We won’t exorcize it. We won’t chase it
away. But if the smell of the medicine bothers you … it will leave.” With
182 Suspect Others

a final jab at the offending spirit present within Ma Abeni, Pa Kodyo

finishes his diagnosis by admonishing it even more directly: “And we
won’t have any food or drink for you!”
Da Sako asked the women if they have understood: “Do you hear?
Then that’s the way we’ll try to do it.”
“Yes, father,” Ma Abeni replied.
“This is what we’ll do until we’ve solved the issue, then we’ll put it
[the spirit] to one side.”
Pa Kodyo re-articulated Da Sako’s assessment: “It is not the other
thing [a forest spirit or bakuu] that created the dream. It’s [the ghost]
who is fighting with Ma Abeni in her sleep … But when it appears, it
appears in the guise of something else. Mmmm. When I want to solve
a problem, I’ll do it for real.”
As though the truth had dawned on her for the first time, Ma Abeni
started to exclaim, “Than that’s who …,” but Pa Kodyo interrupted her:
“As long as you come to us here, I can solve your difficulties.”
Ma Abeni persisted, however: “The day before yesterday this young
girl here (indicating Sa Adyuba) washed with the leaves you gave us.
Then it is something [to do with] this mother here (indicating Ma Tres),
this dream. We came here so that we could tell you about it.”
“To divine about the dream,” stated Da Sako.
Ma Abeni offered further clarification: “when … soon afterwards she
tells me, ‘Mama it’s them that I dreamed.’ It wasn’t me who told her my
dream, I didn’t disclose what I saw to anybody; the people that I saw [in
my dream], one was of mixed African and Indian descent (dogla). And
one of them was sitting down, and the other was standing. But they
came to both me and her (pointing at Sa Adyuba). That’s why we came
here, to find out what it is.”
There followed a brief exchange in which Pa Kodyo declared his
“horse’s” (asi, Ma Tres’s) affection for Ma Abeni because she had
told him about a dream that concerned his medium. In return, Ma
Abeni requested Pa Kodyo’s protection. At the same moment, Sa
Adyuba finally spoke up to affirm that her dream had been identi-
cal to the one her mother had just recounted. This meant that the
same spirit was appearing in both their dreams. They would there-
fore require the same treatment. Pa Kodyo directed them to Da Sako,
whose patron spirit, Da Asaimundu, revealed a new obiya recipe for
them to bathe with. As the daughter wrote out the ingredients that
Da Sako listed, Pa Kodyo distributed daubs of perfume to everyone
in the room. After briefly asking Pa Kodyo if her daughter in the
Netherlands was well, Ma Abeni wrapped up the consultation with
a promise that she would sponsor a new expedition to the forest so
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 183

that Pa Kodyo could permanently expel the spirit who was troubling
her dreams.
This interaction exhibits some basic features of the role of dreams
in Ndyuka mediumship. Unlike Priya’s interview with Vinod’s Kateri
Ma, the women actively converse with Pa Kodyo and Da Sako, to help
them “co-construct” (Schieffelin 1985) a shared diagnostic reality. Cen-
trally, as when Pa Kodyo invokes his “horse” Ma Tres’s affection for Ma
Abeni, we see how the ironic stance of mediumship multiplies the rela-
tionships, and thus the reserves of social support, that sufferers rely on
for relief. Dreams are similarly ironic because they distance the subjec-
tive unity of everyday consciousness from the diverse experiences that
throng mental life. Emphasizing this distance authorizes spirits like Pa
Kodyo to populate their patients with ever more agents and relations
(Espirito Santo 2015; Wirtz 2014). Since they indicate spirit co-presence,
dreams like Ma Abeni’s are understood to be actual encounters with
disguised spirits who are ever on the cusp of further proliferation (see
Kohn 2007; Lambek 2003; Pedersen 2011).
From the outset, Ma Abeni easily relates to the events of her dreams
as a reality that is seamlessly fused with her waking life. Though real,
her dreams still need exposition from a spirit qualified to confirm the
unity of dreamed and waking events. To fulfil this role, Pa Kodyo
maintains the stance of an observer looking on from outside of what
he interprets. Ma Abeni’s dreams reveal the evidence that helps Pa
Kodyo splice her eerie nightly encounters into the relational web-work
of Ndyuka lineage-based sociality. Though the greatest portion of these
relations are hidden from the women’s everyday awareness, the con-
fluence of Ma Abeni’s and Sa Adyuba’s dreams attests to their ubiqui-
tous co-presence in all that they do. Mother and daughter both stress
that they dreamed the same dream without having disclosed any of
its details to one another. The fact that the dream interpenetrates their
normally distinct consciousnesses impresses both women with a strong
sense that they are mutually implicated in a single shared existence that
stems directly from their kinship.
Pa Kodyo does not attempt to breach this opaque space of familial
interconnection. Instead, he explains the dreams after the fact, as a doctor
weighs the course of a bacterial infection against the habits and features
of the pathogen that causes it. After carefully considering the fractal
multiplicity of spirit nature, Pa Kodyo is able to diagnose the dream as
an encounter with the ritually shattered ghost of Ma Abeni’s sister.
In describing the spirit’s fragmentation, Pa Kodyo also circumscribes
what is ontologically possible within the unseen spirit realm of which
Ma Abeni and her daughter are oblivious outside of dreams. Just as Ma
184 Suspect Others

Abeni’s dream reveals the internal complexity of the spirits possessing

her and her daughter, Pa Kodyo points to what their dreams highlight
about the unsuspected multiplicities present within the women. Because
these relations are glimpsed in their dreams, they resist the common-
sense interpretations that are afforded to waking consciousness. When
deeded over to Pa Kodyo to interpret, however, the distortions of dream
awareness create room within the women for an ever-wider array of
otherwise unsuspected beings like the “little animal” shed by the exor-
cized ghost. Epistemic discrepancies between alternating states of wak-
ing and dreaming are in this way developed into ever-subtler and more
numerous spirit identities.
As seen in Da Robby’s refusal to distinguish between the actuality
of dreamed and undreamed spirit animals, Ndyuka dreams contradict
any obvious division between “inner experience” and “outward expres-
sion” (Graham 1999, 725). Since sociality is intrinsic to the perplexities
of self-awareness, Ndyuka dream interpretations likewise refuse to
divide internal states from external relations or personal psychology
from social life (see Mittermaier 2011). Ndyuka mediums situate dreams
within a common reality of mutual implication and moral hazard that
embraces both humans and spirits. The impact of dreams emerges from
the space that dreams make for the agency of others within the self
and the effects that this has on people’s perceptions of their personal
autonomy. Even when she rejects her possessing presence, Ma Abeni
cannot remain unaffected by her sister, nor can Sa Adyuba resist the
inborn bonds of kinship with her mother that compel them to share
spirit relations. What the women seek from Pa Kodyo is a consistent
story about who these relations are and how they can be tamed without
the opacities of understanding that dreams would otherwise entail for
them as limited, living humans.
Ndyuka mediums and dream interpreters challenge the notion that
an individual dreamer might be bounded off from their waking rela-
tionships. In doing so, they expose a relational reality that anticipates
and decides the outcomes of the dreamer’s everyday conscious real-
ity (see also Graham 1994; Kohn 2007; Urban 1996). Private experience
is revealed to be counter-intuitively public, exposed to conditions of
spirit-knowing that antedate and exceed the dreamer’s own self-awareness.
Pa Kodyo is asked not simply to explain Ma Abeni’s and Sa Adyuba’s
dreams but to reveal exactly how they evince the relations that ulti-
mately delineate the women’s present and future possibilities. In this
way, possessing spirits show that, while humans are not necessarily
personally responsible for their sufferings, they are accountable for failing
to become aware of the relations that cause them.
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 185

In contrast to Hindu mediums who push supplicants to understand

that reality is ultimately an illusion to be overcome through devotion,
Ndyuka mediums approach dreams as a vantage point from which
spirits can demonstrate their privileged knowledge of a multidimen-
sional existence. Whether perceived by humans or spirits, all facets of
the world are equally real, and the interdependence of humans and
spirits is phenomenologically evident in the ironies of subjectivity (see
Willerslev 2004, 410). Human epistemic limitations, however, fracture
this shared reality into seen and unseen realms. While the invisible
spirit world is felt within human consciousness, humans require spirits
to fully elucidate exactly how they are responsible to what they sense
but do not understand.

Conclusion: Dreams, Irony, and the Subject of Accountability

Dreams incite people to reflect on the limits of self-knowledge.

Unleashing an otherwise equivocal dialectic of opacity and transpar-
ency, mediumship mirrors the ironic perplexities of dreams to galva-
nize the emergence of distinctive conceptions of self and responsibility.
In dreams and mediumistic consultations, supplicants discover that
they are frequently incapable of fully comprehending the significance
of the experiences of their own personal consciousnesses. Dream inter-
pretation and mediumship derive their authority from the limits that
they expose in the capacity of their supplicants to interrogate these
perplexities in themselves or in others. Mediums deepen the ironies
of self-reflection until they become existential doubts that neverthe-
less provide portals to invisible realms and relations. Out of this meta-
awareness – the particular way in which people learn to describe the
limits of their awareness – arise the differently complex selves that
Hindu and Ndyuka rituals instantiate. Irony is no longer a conscious
rhetorical attempt to confuse intent but rather an ontological exposure
of the restrictions of consciousness that interweave the uncanny and
the quotidian into revelations of an englobing and unseen spirit world.
The philosopher Richard Moran has argued that it is “unavoid-
able to think that, for a range of central cases, whatever knowledge
of oneself may be, it is a very different thing from the knowledge of
others …” (2001, xxxi). In different ways, Hindu and Ndyuka mediums
use dreams to overturn the apparent obviousness of this distinction.
Possessed mediums reveal that, as in dreams, real knowledge of one’s
self is often indistinguishable from third-person knowledge about oth-
ers. Mediumship interactively enlists the confabulations of dreams to
expose that auto-interpretations of first-person subjectivity are as open
186 Suspect Others

to doubt as speculations about others’ intentions. Once this standpoint

is entertained, human knowledge of self and other is depicted as only
authoritatively available through the intervention of spirits and deities,
who alone can see through misleading exteriors and into the obscured
contents of personal agency and motivation. In offering a seemingly
sealed theatre of opaque interiority that would be uninterpretable with-
out external intervention, dreams afford revelations of the estranging
relational foundations of personal subjectivity. Through dreams, people
are able to catch a glimpse of themselves as they “really” are from the
perspective of the deities and spirits, but only in such a way as to high-
light the ontological, epistemological, and moral distinctions that sepa-
rate them from these different orders of being (Kohn 2007).
This ontological framing empowers Hindu and Ndyuka mediums
to correct the apparent psychological “inwardness” (Taylor 1989) of
dreams and establish a prior shared, if normally unperceivable, domain
of interrelatedness. Alongside Hindu and Ndyuka dream telling and
interpretation, both traditions of mediumship attempt to translate the
opacity of dreams into distinctive regimes of moral transparency. The
oscillation of the obvious and the inscrutable in dreams corresponds to
the uncertainty that mediumship creates between the unverifiability of
a medium’s possession and the agitating bewilderment of supplicants’
mental and emotive lives (Lambek 2003). In either case, mediumship
absorbs the doubts that are aroused by the basic fragility and deceptive-
ness of supplicants’ self-knowledge into pervasive “ontological affects”
(Espirito Santo 2015). The dissolution of dream imagery is accompanied
by the insecurity of dream recollection, which renders the self opaque
without the interventions of spirit witnesses.
While much has been made of resonances between dreams and trance
as “altered states of consciousness” (Bourguignon 1972), what is more
important here are the ways in which the phenomenology of dreams
affords mediums moral authority over the relations that they reveal. By
undermining any simple assurances about the cogency of self-identity,
dreams bestow phenomenological validity on the relationally entangled
selves that are exposed by Hindu and Ndyuka mediums. As enlisted
in mediumship, dreams become what James Laidlaw, following Mary
Douglas (1980) and Max Gluckman (1972), calls a “mechanism for the
allocation of responsibility” (Laidlaw 2014, 201). In this respect, the
dreams invoked in mediumship provide “a discourse frame in which it
is understood that the speaker does not bear authorial responsibility for
the actions and experiences described” (Groark 2009, 716).
In juxtaposing antinomian freedom with passivity before the puz-
zling and bizarre, dreams disgorge an ironizing dialectic of possibility
 Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge 187

and constraint that structures the emergence of personal subjectivity

within the paradigms of accountability that mediums reveal. Dreams
are ironic because their denotations are both manifestly transparent and
frustratingly opaque to the dreamer. The ironies of dreaming heighten
intuitions that the agency of others inheres in even the most ostensibly
private recesses of personal consciousness. In interaction, spirit medi-
ums reframe both their own and their supplicants’ selves as ominously
unknown to conscious awareness, and thus more credibly described
from viewpoints beyond it. In both Hindu and Ndyuka mediumship,
dreams become indistinctly viewed but manifestly communal spaces
where the true motives of others are honestly impressed on passive
dreamers, who feel, but do not understand, the meanings of these expe-
riences. In such a world, the taken-for-granted appearances of waking
reality, like the outwardly good intentions of friends and family, are to
be suspected just as much as what is seen in fleeting dreams.
Mediums make sufferers’ dreams into collective moral concerns that
should be relevant to all the members of a sufferer’s family or commu-
nity. This means that, even when mediums use dreams to exonerate
their patients from personal accountability for their sufferings, misfor-
tune is nevertheless explained through sufferers’ irredeemable mem-
bership in the kin and ethno-racial identities to which they belong. This
is where the ontologies of the self propounded by Hindu and Ndyuka
mediums collide with widespread Surinamese racecraft. If dreams and
mediumship multiply perspectives, and therefore relations, within and
around the self, racecraft fights to foreclose them. The complex ways in
which racecraft both contradicts and complements the ritual paradigms
of the self that Hindu and Ndyuka mediumship reveal is the subject of
the next chapter.
Chapter Six

The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft

Located at the edge of Paramaribo’s suburbs, the estate is an orderly

grid of concrete houses and precisely paved roads stippled with the
shadows of imposing passing clouds. Outside one of these little homes,
the Ndyuka obiyaman Da Mangwa and I talked while watching the
sky succumb to the abrupt tropical dusk. As the darkness thickened,
Agidibo – Da Mangwa’s adult grandson Ba Ben’s possessing spirit –
summoned us inside. Entering the crowded shrine that dominated one
entire room in Da Mangwa’s small residence, we found Agidibo seated
on a stool, wearing a pangi, and lecturing his ritual assistant, André, and
a Hindu man in a lexical stew of spirit language, Ndyuka, and Sranan.
The Hindu man called himself Kumar, and he fidgeted nervously under
the spirit’s verbal onslaught. Kumar owned a grocery store in another
part of Paramaribo’s exurban sprawl. His wife had recently abandoned
him for another man. Despondent with shame and rage, Kumar had
sought out Ba Ben in the hope that a Maroon spirit might intervene
where others had failed.
The preceding chapters have examined how Hindu and Ndyuka
mediums harness opacities intrinsic in intersubjectivity and interaction
to “other” the self and make personal consciousness pulsate with inter-
ventionist spirits and deities. In contrast to preceding explorations of
the ritual paradigms of the self, this chapter describes “racecraft” – the
everyday ways in which Surinamese racialize others (Fields and Fields
2012; Palmié 2007). I explore racecraft as rhetoric – how it is that Suri-
namese use racial ideologies to persuade themselves that they are capa-
ble of knowing who ethno-racial others really are. Specifically, I argue
that a decisive aspect of the continued power of racecraft in Suriname
derives from the strategically superficial self-knowledge that it creates,
which permits those who rhetorically wield it the moral certainty of
pre-emptively “knowing” racialized others.
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 189

Given the suffocating hold that racecraft had over colonial Suri-
namese society, it is perhaps unsurprising that it still intrudes in most
aspects of contemporary Surinamese life. In Suriname, at least, racecraft
is primarily a means for justifying suspicions about ethno-racial oth-
ers so as to validate discrimination against them. A theory of heredity,
racecraft proclaims that the moral character of other ethno-racial popu-
lations is predetermined by ancestry and easily discerned from phe-
notypical appearance. People are to be known by what they look like,
not how they actually behave. To accomplish this, Surinamese racecraft
makes what was contingent in the history of an ethno-racial population –
when and how their ancestors came to Suriname, in what way they
received rights from the colonial state, or the degree of their perceived
similarity to Europeans – into congenital disparities forever dividing
Suriname’s ethno-racial groups. Drawing from this history of racializa-
tion, racecraft perpetuates deeply felt structures of political, economic,
and social exclusion that, de facto, segregate Suriname’s populations
from each other.
In Suriname, as elsewhere, the European architects of racial slavery
intentionally designed racecraft to “cut the network” (Strathern 1996) of
existing or potential social relations and instal regimes of colour-coded
domination (see also W.E.B. Du Bois 1999 [1935]; Goetz 2012; Mills 1999;
Morgan 1975). Originating in the colonial policies that legally imposed
white supremacy on enslaved and indentured Africans, Asians, and
Amerindians, racecraft necessarily constrains “the ability of dominated
communities to play with signifiers and to circulate their [own alterna-
tive] signs” of responsibility and belonging (Briggs 1996b, 462). Race-
craft hijacks often minor human physical and cultural differences and
weaponizes them into symptoms of race – an invisible substance that
is held to account for inborn moral and physical disparities between
racialized populations (Fields and Fields 2012; Palmié 2007).
Explaining foiled relations even as it spoils them, racecraft is fun-
damentally ironic. Like mediumship, racecraft distances how others
appear from who they actually are to disrupt otherwise intuitive habits
of intersubjective understanding (Fanon 1986; Gilroy 2002; Harrison
2006; Husserl 1989). Both mediums and racists1 call attention to these
ironies to declare that they can make transparent what is potentially
opaque about others – their intentions, motivations, desires, moral
inclinations, and so on. Despite these parallels, the conception of
knowledge of self and other in mediumship is, in many respects, the
inverse of that of racecraft. If racecraft deploys ancestry to reduce all the
diverse members of a racialized group to a single, immutable identity,
mediumship uses ancestry to multiply the identities contained within
190 Suspect Others

the self (Matory 2009b). If racecraft stresses that others can be known
in essence through their physical appearances, spirit mediumship
emphasizes that such appearances are fundamentally misleading.
If racecraft creates suspicions about others that justify racist self-
certainties, mediumship creates doubts about the self to undermine
suspicion of mediums and thereby proclaim that neither bodies nor
selves are fully known without the intervention of spirits and deities
who can see through what is deceptive about both (see Beliso-de Jesùs
2016; Lambek 2003).
To better understand these ironies, I start by finishing my account
of Kumar’s failed consultation with Ba Ben’s spirit, Agidibo. Their
encounter reveals the power of racecraft within the wider Surinam-
ese epistemic economy of personal doubt and interpersonal suspicion.
Kumar’s interaction with Agidibo was tense and viscerally spiked
with suspicion. The spirit hectored Kumar, speaking to him in tones
that veered between insinuation and mock sympathy. The spirit com-
pounded these slights by talking so as to bar Kumar from any reply. As
with most events of formal Ndyuka speech, André answered each of
Agidibo’s statements with ceremonial feedback affirmations (piki). This
created a taut dialogical loop that was difficult to interrupt. Judging
from Kumar’s nonplussed reaction, this communicative method only
compounded his unease. Only after Kumar begged him in whispers
for scraps of explanation did André offer him sporadic and haphazard
translations of what Agidibo said.
“When God (Masáa Gadu) created the world,” Agidibo proclaimed,
“he made it good (bun), but living human beings (libisama) are bad.”
Agidibo is a bakuu demon who was domesticated by the power of Da
Lanti Wenti, Da Mangwa’s possessing spirit. Though Ndyukas nor-
mally treat bakuu as exclusively malignant and in need of exorcism, in
line with Creole practices, Agidibo had been rehabilitated to redress
humanity’s wickedness. Agidibo didn’t personally like humans, but
God had compelled him to help them. Since the beginning of time, he
boasted, he had spoken through thousands of bodies to aid poor sense-
less humans in comprehending themselves and their wider reality.
Only spirits, Agidibo said, can pierce deceptive physical appearances
to actually know what others hide from the world. He can, he boasted,
peer into the earth to root out the malefic instruments buried by witches
or hear the poisonous thoughts masked behind affable words. Turning
to André, Agidibo asked the name of the soccer player who had recently
won the Golden Shoe prize, awarded to Europe’s top goal scorer. “Lio-
nel Messi,” André replied – naming the Argentine striker who was then
the hero of Surinamese men. Agidibo grunted recognition. His skill at
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 191

ridding humans of the evils they inflicted on one another was even
greater than Messi’s goal scoring!
At this point, Agidibo broke off his soliloquy of self-acclaim to
address Kumar’s problem. The man who had seduced Kumar’s wife
had sold Kumar’s soul to a “devil” (didiibi) – in response to which Da
Mangwa loudly exclaimed “Bakuu!” After Kumar’s wife’s lover buried
his “thing” (sani, implying a sorcery object) in Kumar’s yard, the bakuu
had seized Kumar’s body so that he became physically and emotionally
impotent. This made his wife easy prey for his rival’s advances. With
Agidibo’s assistance, Kumar would now be able to discern the obvi-
ous signs of these occult assaults: Hadn’t Kumar’s employees recently
become more difficult to manage? Weren’t they now demanding more
money from him, even as they ridiculed him behind his back?
Kumar continued to fret uncomfortably. Chasing affirmation, he
looked at me anxiously, then admitted the truth of what Agidibo
described. His workers were greedy; they even insisted that he give
them free soft drinks. Staring intently at Kumar with a knowing smile,
Agidibo told him that he had witnessed the evil with his very own eyes.
He had seen a large vulture stretch its rancid wings and hide something
on Kumar’s land. Now, they must go and dig it out.
Kumar continued to nod in fitful confirmation. His eyes darted
uncomfortably around the room but shied away from any particular
person’s scrutiny. Agidibo handed him an object. Four centimetres
tall, it was composed of plastic Mickey and Minnie mouse figurines
bound face to face with mould-blackened rags.2 Shoving it forcefully
into Kumar’s hands, Agidibo fixed him with a resolute expression that
somehow also seemed streaked with sarcasm. He told Kumar that the
object would solve his misfortunes, reunite him with his wife, and pun-
ish her lover. When Kumar retained his look of hesitation, Agidibo
turned to André; Kumar could, of course, consult a Haitian (feared for
their mercenary sorcery) or a Hindu pandit; whatever others claimed,
however, none was more powerful or trustworthy than him.
Still pressing the bound toys into Kumar’s palm, Agidibo made him
swear that what he said was true and that he would honour his obliga-
tions no matter what happened. Before becoming possessed, Ba Ben had
instructed one of the many young children who lived in Da Mangwa’s
compound to buy two large bottles of beer with Kumar’s money. After
Ba Ben used some of the beer for the opening libation, Agidibo steadily
drank from the bottles for the duration of the consultation. At every
opportunity, he looked lovingly at the label of the bottle he was drink-
ing from, stroked it, and made knowing faces at Kumar. Kumar held
the bound toys firmly, and André took a large swig from the second
192 Suspect Others

beer and sprayed both of Kumar’s hands three times. To seal the “oath”
(sweli), Agidibo emptied the remaining beer into a single large calabash,
sprinkled it with kaolin clay, and handed it around the room for every-
one to take a binding sip.
Now, Agidibo declared, Kumar’s “gun will cock” (goni sa kaka). Da
Mangwa half raised a limp finger and laughed. In a feigned whisper,
he leaned over to say to me, in a voice clearly audible to Kumar, that
“Women must get pleasure in this world. Without that no woman will
stay.” Kumar glanced at us, but Agidibo addressed him directly: his
problem required “heavy” (ebi) work, and Kumar had to be willing to
compensate him appropriately.
The work would be divided into three stages: first, they would go
to Kumar’s property to locate and destroy the buried sorcery. Second,
they must visit a cemetery at midnight to collect grave dirt. Third, they
needed to “exorcize” (wasi paati) Kumar by bathing him in medicinal
solutions to expel the evil spirit and restore his sexual and social potency.
Before gaining the visibly frightened Kumar’s consent, Agidibo asked
who would come along to help him? Da Mangwa acted scared; there
was no way he would come! When I volunteered, Agidibo held up a
clenched fist, looked meaningfully at Kumar, and declared that I was a
“real man” (túu túu mannengée).
His description of the required ritual work done with, Agidibo told
Kumar that he must pay him 15,000 SRD (then around 5,000 US dollars
and a very large sum of money for the average Surinamese). Kumar
looked aghast, and André, who had brought Kumar to seek Ba Ben’s
help, protested that this was far too expensive. With a reluctant, even
offended, expression, Agidibo conceded. He would be fine with 8,000
SRD. This price was no better; Kumar and André were incredulous
over so large a sum. Finally, with an audible sigh, Agidibo said that
he would be willing to settle for 3,000 SRD (equivalent to a profitable
month in the informal gold mines where so many young Ndyuka men
work). Kumar and André argued that that was still unduly burden-
some, but Agidibo made a show of not budging. Everyone inquired
what I thought Kumar should pay. I said that it should be no more than
what Kumar considered he might reasonably afford. With considerable
displeasure, Kumar agreed on the 3,000 SRD – but added that Agid-
ibo would have to wait for three months before he paid up. Agidibo
vocally begrudged this. He was too important for such a trifling sum.
If he didn’t do the ritual work soon, and at its full value, the demon
would kill Kumar. Kumar nonetheless insisted on late payment. On the
condition that he received a portion of the money in advance, however,
Agidibo finally relented.
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 193

Da Mangwa used the agreement as an oratorical opening. Addressing

the room, he launched into a speech about how “Master Jesus” (Masáa
Yesu) had sent the spirits to earth to assist Maroon people. Divinely
mandated mediators, the spirits taught Maroons about the true nature
of existence. While he was still mid-sentence, Da Mangwa’s wife, Ma
Bobo, came in and cut him off. It was late she said, and we were keeping
her awake. Da Mangwa sheepishly agreed, and left for bed.
Agidibo quietly recapitulated the plan. We were going to begin
that very night. Ba Ben, André, and I, would drive to Kumar’s house
just before midnight to go to the cemetery. Anxious to leave, Kumar
assented. When he tried to get up, though, they restrained him – he
had to stay until the spirit left. Agidibo held up a beer bottle and sang
in spirit language. Grimacing with discomfort, Ba Ben then returned to
his human consciousness.
Ba Ben tried to stand but, with arthritic infirmity, his legs refused
to support him. André sprayed Ba Ben’s legs with the residual beer.
With Ba Ben’s mobility restored, all four of us piled into my car.
Visibly unhappy, Kumar sulked in the back seat as we drove to his
store. Continuing to massage his legs, Ba Ben repeatedly asked André
what was happening, where we were going, and what we intended
to do. André explained the “heavy work” Agidibo had called for at
Kumar’s house.
On arriving at Kumar’s, everything fell apart. We tried to go in, but
Kumar begged us to return another day. With a note of embarrass-
ment tinged with rage, Kumar stuttered out that he was too busy at the
present moment to undertake the ritual. André and Ba Ben protested.
The spirit had told them it was imperative that they do it immediately.
Kumar nodded; they could talk about it another time, but it was too late
and he had to work the next day. Unwillingly, Ba Ben and André con-
ceded, but not before demanding some rum. Looking furtive, Kumar
slunk inside and came back with a bottle. Ba Ben and André tried to per-
suade him to have a drink, but Kumar objected. He was sleepy and had
too many obligations in the morning. Driving back to Da Mangwa’s
house, Ba Ben grumbled about the absurdity of doing such dangerous
ritual work for greedy Indo-Surinamese like Kumar who refused to pay
even a fraction of the rite’s real worth.
Kumar did not call Ba Ben. The ritual never happened, and I had no
chance to ask Kumar why. It was clear, however, from what little Ba Ben
and André told me later, that Kumar was afraid of the ritual and averse
to paying the large sum that the spirit demanded. Hemmed in by doubt,
Kumar was driven away by the same ambiance of danger that had driven
him to search out Ba Ben in the first place. In an interaction layered with
194 Suspect Others

barely concealed racecraft, none of the actors, human or spirit, could

relieve the atmosphere of unyielding suspicion.

Surinamese Racecraft

A skein of insinuation and barely veiled abuse, Agidibo’s interaction

with Kumar repeatedly impugned Kumar’s masculinity and Hindu
ethno-racial propriety. It therefore quickly became a passive-aggressive
battle over whether it was racecraft or mediumship that had greater
ontological authority to define how what was happening in the interac-
tion was to be understood. The previous chapters showed that medi-
ums are powerful because they undermine self-knowledge in ways that
make all responsibility collective, while also placing this knowledge
beyond ordinary human awareness. Racecraft, though, works from
an ontology of accusation. It reduces people to their ancestry, giving
those who use it sweeping privilege to categorize and explain others,
genetically and morally, and thus hold them accountable for the ways
in which they are socially excluded. The failure of Kumar’s meeting
with Agidibo should be comprehended in terms of these competing
paradigms of suspicion, doubt, and responsibility.
Understanding the clash of these epistemic affects requires knowing
how Surinamese racecraft works. Like the citizens of so many contem-
porary nation-states, Surinamese are committed to the rhetorical equal-
ity of all ethno-racial groups even as they defend inequalities between
them. In Suriname, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, the “variation
produced by the incorporation of diverse groups in a strongly class-
structured” colonial society has produced enduring “political divisive-
ness, [highly unequal] economic privilege or privation, and contrasting
ethnic stereotypes” (Drummond 1980, 353). Though all of these divi-
sions are present in Suriname’s “plural society” (M.G. Smith 1965),
because that society is divided between six major ethno-racial popula-
tions, none of which constitutes a genuine majority, no one ethno-racial
group has been able to capture lasting political or social dominance
(Meel 1994, 1998; Ramsoedh 2012). In the breach, members of all Suri-
namese ethno-racial groups grasp for the dignity of a common human-
ity, an egalitarianism that, at best, provides only piecemeal “grounds
for a moral mediation of problems stemming from economic differen-
tiation and racial and cultural antagonism” (B.F. Williams 1991, 194).
The failure of such longed for ethno-racial equality is dispropor-
tionately the result of the phantom hierarchies of economic and cul-
tural deservingness that colonial white supremacy imposed, and by
which contemporary Surinamese remain haunted. In spite of frequent
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 195

declarations of ethno-racial pride, many Surinamese are therefore

apprehensive about the extent to which their own ethno-racial group
belongs in Suriname, or how much their “culture” is acknowledged
to have contributed to Suriname’s national “development” (Dutch:
ontwikkeling) (Marchand 2012; Ramsoedh 2001; see also Khan 2004;
Jackson 2012; B.F. Williams 1991 for Trinidad and Guyana). This tense
diversity has meant that, while racial grievances are ever present, out-
right communal violence has been relatively infrequent compared to in
other similar nations. The inability of the members of any of Suriname’s
ethno-racial identities to commandeer incontestable influence over the
terms of their inclusion, however, keeps the numerous racialized sus-
picions that Surinamese have inherited from the plantation past at an
insistent simmer.3
The post-colonial breakdown of an explicit, legally sanctioned racial
hierarchy has in this way so far failed to rid Surinamese of a ubiquitous
sense of “last-place anxiety” (Matory 2015). While purportedly equal
citizens of Suriname, Hindus and Maroons are pursued by the feel-
ing that they are responsible for securing a superior position for their
own ethno-racial group in an ideal ethno-racial order that is nonethe-
less impossible to achieve in reality. To make sense of this situation,
Maroons and Hindus accuse their ethno-racial others of the destructive
envy that they suspect has prevented their own group from attaining
the uncontested primacy within broader Surinamese society that they
hold to be their rightful due. In this way, the racecraft that inspires such
imagined hierarchies is also used to rationalize why these hierarchies
remain, in fact, unrealizable.

Maroon Racecraft

No matter what their backgrounds, most of the Surinamese I know can

supply anecdotes of overt ethno-racial prejudice against them. Con-
versely, Hindustani and Maroon Surinamese are also defiantly, if uneas-
ily, dismissive of other ethnicities’ stereotypes about them. Though
people’s perceptions of the prevalence of racism vary from endemic
to downplayed, the precise degree to which racism is recognized as a
problem largely hinges on at whom racecraft is directed and why.
In general, Maroons feel societal discrimination the most acutely.
Recent city dwellers and the fastest-growing segment of the Surinam-
ese population (Suriname Census 2012), Maroons are more likely to
suffer most from everyday struggles with hunger, housing shortages,
and gaining and retaining employment. Condescendingly domineering
Hindustanis and Creoles are a frequent topic for Maroons, who cite job
196 Suspect Others

ads that imply Afro-Surinamese need not apply as ample testimony of

widespread discrimination. Indeed, I heard anti-Maroon invective from
members of all non-Maroon Surinamese ethnicities. Hindustanis were
very often overt about their anti-Black feelings, but Afro-Surinamese
Creoles also freely stigmatized Maroons as foul-smelling, stupid, and
larcenous. Though these attitudes date back to at least the nineteenth
century, the Surinamese civil war (Binnenlandse Oorlog) of 1986–1992
that pitted predominantly Ndyuka guerrillas against the multiethnic
national military intensified chauvinisms about the inability of Maroons
to assimilate to coastal society. Older Maroons in particular must cope
with coastal people’s contempt for non-literate non-Dutch speakers,
something I witnessed at first hand when a mixed-race Creole doctor
refused to share a diagnosis of cancer with an elderly Ndyuka friend
and forced me to break the news to him because, he said, Ndyukas are
too ignorant to understand allopathic medicine.
In accordance with their ancestral resistance to enslavement, many
Maroons have inherited an ethos of suspicion towards Europeans
and the coastal Surinamese (bakáa) they associate with their ancestors’
exploitation (Price 1983; Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering 2004).
Ndyukas continue to feel that their humiliations on the coast are part
of an orchestrated campaign to deny them just standing in Surinam-
ese society. This is aptly demonstrated in the following story about the
early days of Sunny Point:

When it was time to go to school, at frst the school bus hadn’t been very
full. Then, only Kuli (the pejorative for Hindustanis) rode the school bus.
Black people (Báakaman) stood together in front of the project [Sunny
Point] in a group and the Kuli stood [in another spot] further along. When
the bus arrived, it drove past the Black people and only picked up the
Kuli so that they could arrive frst and learn and therefore earn greater
status in the country. They [Hindustanis] didn’t want Black children to
arrive frst so that they could keep their achievement behind that of eve-
ryone else in Suriname. Because when the Kuli are educated, then Black
people cannot become better than them. When Black people are unedu-
cated, the Kuli can keep them under pressure [to control them]. In this
way, the Kuli can direct the country in the ways best for them [at the
expense of everyone else].

This narrative illustrates Maroon vigilance towards all signs of “dis-

crimination” (disko). Surinamese of all backgrounds use analogous
accusations about the “envious” (bigi ain), “jealous” (dyalusu), and
“greedy” (gíili) traits of ethno-racial others to moralize their own
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 197

group’s animosities. Significantly, Maroon racecraft is premised on

what Maroons feel to be other ethno-racial groups’ resentment of their
superior deservingness to the Surinamese land. Maroons accounted for
prejudice against them as a conspiracy to deprive them of access to
scarce national resources such as mineral rights and education that are
rightfully theirs by virtue of their ancestors’ achievements. Benko, a
Ndyuka man then in his late thirties, held up Sunny Point as a case in
point. Hindustanis were jealous, he said, because Maroons had taken
over public land that Hindustanis had hoarded but done nothing with
(a contention that neighbouring Hindustanis roundly contested, having
formerly planted rice and vegetables where Sunny Point now stands). It
was Hindustani greed, Benko alleged, that caused the festering ethno-
racial tensions that plague Suriname.
Kumar’s encounter with Agidibo makes apparent how important the
themes of envy and jealousy are in Maroon stereotypes about Hindu
masculinity and kinship. Agidibo and Da Mangwa’s frequent insinu-
ations about Kumar’s impotence are in keeping with Afro-Surinamese
disapproval of Hindustani ethno-racial endogamy. In 2012, in an act
that commanded national attention, a Hindu man drove his three
young daughters off a bridge to drown in the Saramacca River because
of his wife’s suspected infidelity. My Ndyuka interlocutors viewed
this case as typical of the Hindustani propensity for jealous violence.
Ndyukas think that the covetous rage that is stirred up by Hindustani
men’s obsession with controlling their female relatives’ sexuality makes
them especially liable to commit domestic violence and suicide. If a
Black man attempted to have a relationship with a Hindustani woman,
Maroons expected that he would be threatened or even murdered by
the woman’s male kin.4 This violence, many Maroons imply, is over-
compensation for Hindustani men’s natural inability to sexually gratify
their women.
Whether framed as overt physical assaults or concealed sorcery, accu-
sations of criminality and witchcraft are another central ingredient of
Surinamese racecraft. Though the members of other ethnic groups allege
that most criminals, such as drug traffickers, are Maroons, Maroons
rejoin that the greatest number of Surinamese convicts are Creoles and
Hindustanis. Maroons openly ask how they could intentionally kill or
steal when they know that they are the targets of avenging kunu spir-
its. Not fearing kunu, Maroons reason, other populations are ethically
unrestrained and eager to act out their destructive impulses. Indeed,
Maroon mediums explained to me that it is Maroon ritual deference to
the avenging spirits of the landscape that guarantees Suriname’s very
existence.
198 Suspect Others

For Ndyukas, jealousy, envy, and greed are a triad of compulsions

synonymous with the witchcraft (wisi) and treachery that spawn
kunu. Many Ndyukas point to Hindustani wealth to demonstrate that
Hindustanis are the source of bakuu demons. For Maroons, bakuu are
always imported, symptoms of the threat of ethically and ethnically
unrestrained urban life and the dangers of venal commerce.5 Many
Ndyukas whisper that a particular Hindustani Muslim shopkeeper
on Saramacca Street in downtown Paramaribo – the area specializ-
ing in imported wares like the madras cloth, pots, and machetes that
have historically been most valued by Maroons – is the country’s
main bakuu distributor. Some Ndyukas go so far as to equate Hindu-
stanis with global fears about Islamist political violence. Connecting
the pandemic of bakuu witchcraft that is “killing” the Ndyuka home-
land to the war on terror, one Tapanahoni Ndyuka man in his twen-
ties directly blamed “Kuli” (Hindustanis) for the 9/11 attacks: “What
we [Ndyukas] can’t stand is fuck-upped Kuli terrorists!” Such nega-
tive associations are why Da Mangwa thought it proper that Kumar
should be attended to by Ba Ben’s domesticated bakuu Agidibo rather
than Da Lanti Wenti, Da Mangwa’s own, far more dignified, Ampuku
spirit.
In keeping with both Ndyuka preferences for aniconic ritual para-
phernalia and the long-term authority of austere Dutch Reformed and
Moravian Protestantism over Surinamese life, Maroons hold that the
prominent role of statues in Sanatan Dharm Hinduism is strong evi-
dence for the Hindustani dalliance with bakuu. Ndyukas I know refused
to enter shops selling Hindu religious items for fear of “short people”
(bakuu), and I often heard Ndyukas denounce public statues of Hindu
deities as vectors of demonic activity.6 Rogério Pires, Marcelo Mello,
and I (2018) have argued that, in the tenacious aftermath of the per-
vasive social ignorance created by colonial racial capitalism, bakuu
license Surinamese and Guyanese to fill in what remains unknown and
unsettling about ethno-racial and religious others. Of all the spirits that
shadow Surinamese, it is only bakuu who freely traverse the confines of
de-facto ethno-racial segregation to colonize suspicions about spatially
proximate but socially distant others. In line with colonial Christian
prejudices against “idolatry” (Dutch: afgodendienst; Ndyuka: afokodéei),
Ndyukas consider Hindu reverence for images emblematic of Hindu-
stanis’ wider social threat, not only to the social position of Afro-
Surinamese, but also to the parameters of respectability and inclusion
in the Surinamese public sphere. Even as Maroons are themselves mar-
ginalized and maligned by these very same colonially inherited cultural
prejudices – and identical allegations about bakuu – the hegemony of
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 199

such presupposed moral hierarchies means that this kind of racecraft

is often the only readily available tool for ethno-racial assertion and
self-defence.

Hindu Racecraft

Given Hindustanis’ status as major landholders and business owners, it

is perhaps unsurprising that they express less overt anxiety over racial
discrimination, and are more likely to approvingly cite Suriname’s eth-
nic harmony, than Maroons. Hindus nevertheless bristle when they
hear members of other ethnicities refer to them as Kuli. As described
in chapter 1, Hindustani ethno-racial pride is founded on the assertion
that it is Hindustanis who have worked the hardest and done the most
to develop Suriname. Even in the face of considerable Hindustani pov-
erty, Hindus take pride in the prosperity of a minority of their number
and hold it up as proof of their exceptional place in Surinamese society,
as measured in industry, agriculture, and wealth in conspicuous prop-
erty such as houses and cars. My Hindu interlocutors were accordingly
sensitive about Afro-Surinamese claims to enjoy prior rights over Suri-
namese land and resources – claims that Hindus zealously denounce as
expressions of Afro-Surinamese indolence and treachery.
Though the colonial policy of granting individual Hindustanis land
has given them a structural advantage in Surinamese society vis-à-vis
Maroons, it is typical of Suriname that the same discriminatory tropes are
applied reversibly between populations. Against the Afro-Surinamese
stereotypes of them, and in continuity with the clichés of anti-Black
racism, Hindustanis associate Afro-Surinamese, and Maroons in par-
ticular, with predatory sexual appetites that are fixated on Hindustani
women.7 Hindus describe Afro-Surinamese as greedy, stupid, and lazy,
incapable of adequate foresight or personal responsibility, and thus
prone to criminality. Such suspicions are part of a consistent Hindu dis-
course that “Black people have ruined Suriname, even more so since
Dyuka started to come to the city.” Other Hindus claim that problems in
other Caribbean countries like Haiti are the result of their being exclu-
sively inhabited by “Kafri” (Sarnami: Black people).
These stereotypes are key tropes of Hindu exceptionalism, and Hin-
dus clearly know that they offend Afro-Surinamese. Hindus even find
a mythic warrant for anti-Black prejudice in the sacred and highly
influential Ramayana epic. In the narrative, the god Ram recovers his
wife, Sita, from her captor, the rapacious demon (rākas) king of Lanka,
Ravan. A number of Hindus told me that, despite his fearsome reputa-
tion, Ravan was born as a fair-skinned Brahmin. After attaining a boon
200 Suspect Others

of invincibility from the god Brahma, flush with potency and seduced
by hubris, Ravan embarked on a fiendish campaign to subjugate the
universe. In the course of Ravan’s outrages against the natural moral
order (dharm), his evil deeds and desires turned him phenotypically
Black. Some Hindus even said that Afro-Surinamese were the direct
descendants of Ravan’s demonic minions.
In this telling, Blackness is a physical stain of corrupt intent that is
implicitly associated with immoral magical practices. Afro-Surinamese
obiya is coded into popular Hinduism in the same way. It is accorded
efficacy but – in contradistinction to the honest spiritual and worldly
toil to which Hindus credit their own economic success – is equated
with an emblematically Afro-Surinamese pursuit of socially corro-
sive personal gain and gaudy wealth.8 Such mythologized racecraft
equates Hindu prosperity with universal virtue and insinuates that
Afro-Surinamese success is easily dismissed as a transgressive aber-
ration potentially authored by bakuu (see Putnam 2012 for the pan-
Caribbean context).9 Whatever the exact accusation, Hindus character-
ize Maroons and other Afro-Surinamese as inherently untrustworthy
and potentially dangerous. Added to allegations of cocaine traffick-
ing and theft, occult rumours10 widen the purported moral distance
that separates Maroons from Hindus so as to justify their continued
social exclusion from both interpersonal intimacies and economic
opportunities.11

Envy, Respect, and Racecraft

Maroons and Hindus are uniformly agile with the rhetoric of racecraft.
Nonetheless, in a pitched battle waged with zero-sum arguments, nei-
ther side can ever hope to persuade the other of anything but their bad
faith. Ironically, as seen in the reciprocated Maroon and Hindu accusa-
tions that the other is the source of bakuu, even as they deprecate one
another for “ruining” the country, they adhere to a common ethical
episteme that attests to an equivalent moral rootedness in Surinamese
society. Sharing the same meagre tools of racialization, each popula-
tion is left both outraged and resolute in their insistence on the other’s
inborn collective moral failings.
This irony is best illustrated in a quotation and an anecdote. Anjali,
whom we met in the introduction and chapter 1, has lived her whole
life in a predominantly Afro-Surinamese Paramaribo neighbourhood.
The excerpt recorded here is from an interview in which I spoke with
her about her own practice of spirit mediumship. After having made
a series of quasi-ecstatic proclamations about the irresistible power of
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 201

divine love, Anjali took a darker tone and began to assail Afro-Surinamese,
and Maroons (here referred to by the pejorative Dyuka) in particular.

A Dyuka can’t make a joke (krap) of me! It can’t happen! You know so
yourself, right? A Dyuka was there with you, came to your bedside, he
had no idea how to make you recover. But that’s the evilest thing, under-
stand? Dyuka and Black people are the most-evil humans. You will learn
that from me, got it? Dyuka and Black people, they’ll eat your food, drink
your drinks, but they don’t love you. They love this [making a gesture of
rubbing money in her palm] … money! But when I work, I don’t ask for
money!

Anjali cites a specific example to work racecraft against the moral dis-
positions of Afro-Surinamese. In the incident invoked, Anjali’s daugh-
ter Priya asked her to treat me for a protracted throat infection that I
had come down with following an overnight trip to a Cottica Maroon
village with the late Ndyuka medium Da Maku. He was a difficult per-
sonality, and I returned from the trip discernibly exasperated. A day or
two later, I fell sick. During my illness, Da Maku visited me to inquire
after my health and give me an unrelated ritual object. But Anjali and
her daughter saw Da Maku as both the cause of my illness and a failed
healer. Though they never said so outright, both women suspected that
my suffering was caused by his sorcery, most likely motivated by envy
for my close, and hypothetically financially beneficial, relationship with
them.
Along with its near synonyms, jealousy and greed, envy (Ndyuka:
bigi ain/dyalusu; Sarnami: jaran) is among the primary affects through
which Hindus and Maroons understand the moral rot that they feel
permeates Surinamese society. At home, on the street, and in schools
and offices, my interlocutors accounted envy so bad that even banal
conversations are thought to burn with hidden hatreds. As described in
chapter 2, for Hindus and Maroons, covetous desires for what one does
not have directly impinge on the well-being of others. As with personal
reputation, Surinamese think of good fortune as a vulnerable resource
that must be defended against others’ deliberate or unconscious envy.
These ideas are best represented in common Hindu and Maroon
apprehensions about witchcraft (Ndyuka: wisi; Sarnami: ojha) and the
evil eye (Ndyuka ogíi ain; Sarnami: najar), but even compliments may
reveal unconscious resentments over social disparities capable of induc-
ing illness and death. Maroons say that a tree will die from repeated
admiration, and people are censured for failing to leaven their praise
of others with the criticisms that will ensure that they remain suitably
202 Suspect Others

humble (saka fasi). Hindus hold that looking at what someone else owns
with any degree of desire is sufficient to ruin it and cause the owner
sickness. Infants and gardens are accordingly symbolically marred with
black marks or strategically hung trash to protect their growth from the
withering influence of a covetous gaze.
When set against the background of the plantation past, misgiv-
ings about the injurious reach of envy as “a private part of the human
soul” (Nietzsche 1996, 181) disclose pervasive anxieties about the risks
of social interdependence throughout the Caribbean (Crosson 2020a;
B.F. Williams 1991; Wilson 1973). Accusations of envy assimilate the
unavoidable psychological obscurity of others to make them into oth-
erwise inscrutable witches or racialized rivals whose real purposes are
suspected by, but disguised from, ordinary human awareness. Like
spirits, envy is invisible and must be descried through evidence that can
be as transparent as a quarrel or as opaque as a stray word or facial tick.
Though Surinamese imply that envy is at the root of most social con-
flict, its effects are just beyond the ordinary cognizance of the envious
and the envied alike. Though readily asserted, envy generally resists
any conclusive demonstration (see Evans-Pritchard 1937, 119; Hughes,
Mehtta, Bresciani, and Strange 2019).
As witnessed in Anjali’s denunciation of Maroon greed, simple spite
is seldom seen as sufficient motivation for crimes like sorcery, and most
accusations reverberate with unstated charges of envy (see also van
Wetering 1996). The social metastasis of envy leads possessing Hindu
deities to advise their devotees that they don’t need to do anything to
others for them to want to harm them. Attributing envy to others makes
their otherwise unknowable moral dispositions immediately intelligi-
ble, and once this envy is revealed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to
repair the reputational wound that has been opened.
These fears are critical to the egalitarian expectations shared by
nearly all the Surinamese I got to know. Because people’s fates are
permeable to the thoughts and feelings of those around them, Hindus
and Maroons do what they can to insulate their personal dignity and
freedom from the hazards posed by envious relations. People caution
those close to them to realize that even minor inequalities in property or
skill can provoke acidic antipathies. Such sympathetic warnings denote
respect (Ndyuka: lesipeki; Sarnami: ādar) – the affective recognition of
another’s integrity through the active repudiation of attempts to com-
pel and control them. One aspect of this ethos is an aversion to coercive
magic like love potions (Ndyuka: koloi), but it also includes censure for
all manner of examples of disregard for the feelings of others. Mor-
ally upright persons are supposed to take satisfaction in their social
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 203

responsibilities in ways that avoid active encroachment on others’

private affairs. Self-respect arises from the security of knowing one’s
own particular relationships, talents, and accomplishments and with-
standing attempts by the envious to degrade and discredit them. While
there are all manner of ways in which people, especially older men, are
anticipated to exert influence and even coercive violence over women
and juniors, Hindus and Maroons largely agree on this ethics of non-
interference in other people’s lives.

The Clashing Suspicions of Racial Revelation

Surinamese are ironically unified in their suspicions about the envy and
resentment of ethno-racial others. Old and young, Hindu and Maroon,
native Surinamese and Guyanese migrants, everyone complained that
others have forgotten what is right and now live for the gratification of
personal desire at the cost of larceny, witchcraft, and murder. That mem-
bers of purportedly distinct ethno-racial groups accused each other of
mirrored moral pathologies illustrates a common Surinamese commit-
ment to an egalitarian ethics of mutual respect. People were expected
to acknowledge others by analogy to their own implicit dignity, and
perceived failures to reciprocate this respect are thought to vindicate
racialized deprecations and exclusions.
For Anjali and her daughter, my sickness and its healing testified to
basic Hindu virtue against Afro-Surinamese vice. Anjali’s statement
makes this all too obvious. In contrast to the spirit of universal charity
that Anjali said motivated her to heal, Maroons, and indeed all “Black
people,” are condemned as essentially duplicitous. This tendency
means that no one of African descent ever merits the respect on which
the Surinamese ethics of egalitarianism is based. Though Black people
might perform the full appearance of humane care, Anjali insists that
such concern is inevitably a ruse to dishonestly appropriate others’
hard-gained success. In defence of Surinamese conceptions of equiva-
lent recognition, Anjali asserts that she can see through these hidden
intentions. Indeed, she demands to be trusted precisely because of her
racial foreknowledge. Hadn’t she healed me, after all?
Anjali’s animosity towards Black people, alongside Afro-Surinamese
vilification of Hindustanis, shows why race possesses a performative
reality that is neither wholly fact nor fiction (Hartigan 2013; M’Charek
2013; Wirtz 2014). A meta-ethics of relatedness, racecraft pre-empts the
prospect of moral and affective care between certain types of racialized
people and monopolizes tropes of difference and similarity that have
powerful consequences for personal well-being. Because race emerges
204 Suspect Others

out of colonial regimes that sought to make European dominance visi-

ble, it forces a body’s materiality to stand for some qualities at the occlu-
sion of others (Fanon 1986; Smedley 2006). In skin tone, hair texture,
and eye or nose shape, people tend to regard the lessons of race as all
exterior and in plain sight. In line with its origins in the enslavement of
Africans, race keeps identity skin deep, an apparently simple question
of immediately legible surfaces (Mullings 2005; Goetz 2012).
This is certainly the case in Suriname; but, as is true elsewhere in
the Caribbean, racial categories also involve considerable nuance and
ambiguity (Birth 1997; Khan 1993; Mintz 1971; Palmié 2002; Thomas
2004; Wirtz 2014). Hindus and Afro-Surinamese express an array of
colourations and other phenotypical features. While “Black” (Sranan:
Blaka) is used as a synonym for people of African descent, Hindus
readily admit that their own complexions are often as dark as or even
darker than those of Afro-Surinamese.12 A bodily aesthetics that is
closely associated with Bollywood is the background against which, on
average, dark-skinned Hindus evaluate themselves. Alongside the con-
spicuously alabaster exteriors of numerous Hindu deities, Bollywood’s
fixation on stereotypically European (Sranan: Bakra) features such as
light skin and straight hair and noses permits a minority of phenotypi-
cal features to become emblematically Hindustani. This identification
is so successful that relatively common South Asian traits like wavy
hair have come to be considered testimony of hereditary difference.
When a friend of Priya’s daughters who was of Hindustani and Afro-
Surinamese (dogla) parentage visited the family, Priya’s brother-in-law
Rahul used the opportunity to try and shame her. Urging me in her
presence to speculate on her true ethno-racial identity, he listed Creole,
Tamil, and “Dyuka” – pointedly omitting Hindustani even though she
is likely assumed to be so by most Surinamese unfamiliar with her par-
entage. As is always the case, race is never simply on the surface of the
skin (Holt 2009).
All this illustrates how race “epidermalizes” (Fanon 1986, 13) the
extent to which a person, as a token of an ethno-racial category, deserves
to be acknowledged, cared for, and believed. Racecraft seizes upon
the polysemous materiality of bodies to instantiate a distinct regime
of interpersonal opacity and transparency. In the interest of specify-
ing an evident connection between physical traits and essential moral
character, certain facets of appearance and personality are emphasized
and others ignored. This is typical of the epistemology of Surinamese
racism. People who otherwise share moral principles are aggressively
limited to an adumbrated account of physical and moral traits. The
multifaceted materials of a genial greeting or hospitable smile become
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 205

impoverished, reduced to a rigid index of racial dissimilarities. In this

way, racecraft works against intersubjective attunement – the human
propensity to communicate so as to collaborate in shared aims and per-
spectives (Duranti 2010; Husserl 1989; Schutz 1967); it sabotages mutual
recognition and then converts this failure into further proof of others’
undeserving racial essences.
In convergent ways, W.E.B. Du Bois (1987); 1999 [1935]), Frantz
Fanon (1986), and Cedric Robinson (1983) have all exposed race to be
a blunt instrument for institutionalizing asymmetries of ethical reflec-
tion between members of racialized populations. Racecraft somatically
encodes a meta-ethics of social division that coerces racialized per-
sons to reflect on the moral implications of their intuitive reactions to
ethno-racial others within a historically overdetermined structure of
oppression. Anjali made it plain that Hindus who fail to suspect Afro-
Surinamese are dupes whose obtuseness threatens Hindu honour. She
insists that Hindus should refuse to interpret racial others by analogy
to themselves in any way that would suggest that they might share
common moral commitments (see Mills 1999, 2007). Disavowing the
possibility of genuine affinity makes race an active form of ignorance,
a denial that people of different racialized identities could ever have
the same goals and values (Gilroy 2002; Mills 1999). Such repudiations
employ outright suspicion of others’ intentions, thereby enabling race-
craft to impede relations of positive intersubjectivity.
At this juncture, the ironies pile up. Anjali insisted she deserved my
trust precisely because she knows whom not to trust. Maroons, how-
ever, repeat this same rhetoric nearly verbatim about Hindus. This
means that Anjali’s accusations are always racially reversible. As with
Anjali’s invective, Maroon denunciations are rooted in suspicions of
envy and sorcery, of which bakuu are a key vector. Hindus and Maroons
blame each other in order to depict themselves as the exclusively righ-
teous victims of the other’s ethno-racial envy. Whereas Hindus impute
the scourge of bakuu to the immoral covetousness of Maroons and
their “primitive” affinity with the undeveloped land, Maroons decry
bakuu as incarnations of Hindus’ avaricious and aggressive quest for
economic supremacy. Whether bakuu accusations are directed against
Maroons’ stronger historical rights to Surinamese territory or Hindus’
greater affluence, it is implied that bakuu are the implement with which
each group’s rivals extract their envious revenge (Pires, Strange, and
Mello 2018).
Whatever their value to those who tell them, persecution narratives
are strenuously rejected by the ethno-racial groups that they accuse.
Like witchcraft, racial accusations therefore expose a shared affect of
206 Suspect Others

ressentiment: “vengefulness based on envy and impotence” (Fassin 2013,

253). As an epistemic affect, ressentiment is what it feels like to know
that one has been intentionally maltreated and to also know that those
responsible for it will never admit any wrongdoing (Nietzsche 1996).
Ressentiment is the negative fulfilment of Surinamese egalitarian-
ism, and a tenacious influence in a post-plantation society divided by
race, ethnicity, religion, and class. Racecraft co-opts this sentiment of
indignation to imagine an unassailable moral hierarchy of incontest-
able ethno-racial distinction. Against the sense that ethno-racial oth-
ers have perverted the ideal ethics of both hierarchy and egalitarian-
ism, ressentiment is the desire to extract a final consummation of moral
accountability that will fully vindicate one’s own indignant feelings of
unjust persecution. Ressentiment imagines this as a retribution in which
perceived victimizers are punished in such a way as to extract a full
confession of the metaphysical depths of their guilt. Such longed-for
vengeance upholds the accusers’ basic sense of social worth, while pro-
viding definitive verification for the social expendability of the accused.
Precisely because racialized attacks on the moral character of ethno-
racial others cause such antagonism, feelings of victimization are equally
effective at propounding ethno-racial self-awareness as an ethical ideal.
In condemning others to genetic determinism, racists declare that their
own lines of descent confer them with both collective dignity and the
right to self-determination. This is precisely how Surinamese egalitari-
anism is enmeshed in Surinamese racecraft. People can announce that
they epitomize an egalitarian ethic precisely because they hold them-
selves to exemplify its values against undeserving others.
Ressentiment also nurses a notion that a moral social hierarchy can
be fairly extracted from a victim’s moral deservingness to amends
(see Jackson 2012 for Guyana). In reality, the moral hierarchy that such
ethno-racial revenge aspires to is simply impossible in contemporary
multiethnic Suriname. The feeling nonetheless defends the justness of
ethno-racial fantasies of moral vindication. Absent the power to compel
rival ethnic groups to admit malfeasance and forfeit their rights and
political priorities, Surinamese ressentiment is an ungratifiable yearn-
ing to make one’s own ethno-racial group’s perceived victimization “a
moral reality” for the alleged victimizer, “in order that he [sic] be swept
into the truth of his atrocity” (Améry 1980, 70, quoted in Fassin 2013).
Within the affective structure of ressentiment, a person can only rec-
ognize the consequences of their own racism at the expense of confess-
ing to a collective culpability that would corroborate their ethno-racial
rivals’ feelings of moral superiority. Envy thus appears built into the
ideal of moral hierarchy that is the forever frustrated origin and goal
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 207

of Surinamese racecraft, a reminder of the necessity of competition for

cultural and economic power that was mainlined into present-day Suri-
namese consciousnesses by the injustices of the white supremacist past.
Within this social context, envy is reduced from a legitimate reaction
to inequality to “a static subjective trait: the ‘lack’ or ‘deficiency’ of the
person who envies” (Ngai 2005, 21). Similar to racecraft, accusations of
envy pre-emptively condemn, and both types of indictment cast doubt
on those who question the “objective” necessity of social inequalities
that have been constructed at their expense.13 Consequently, like race-
craft, envy contains within itself “a model of the problem that defines
it” (Ngai 2005, 21, see also Hughes 2020). Accusations of envy are there-
fore, simultaneously, a defence of the ethics of equality and a moral
exemption from its principles.
Equivalent Hindu and Maroon warnings about the envy-driven
deceptions of racialized others effectively reconcile widespread Suri-
namese acceptance of the ethics of respect that grounds Surinamese
egalitarianism with presuppositions about the moral inevitability of
racialized hierarchy. To prove their own ethical exceptionalism, Hindus
and Maroons must both advocate for a single shared ethical standard,
which, paradoxically, only confirms their comparable moral rootedness
in Surinamese society. Accordingly, because Maroons and Hindus each
blame the other for having obstructed the country’s development, each
population is incredulous when confronted by their rivals’ deployment
of the same tropes of racecraft against them.

Intimacy and Interracial Envy

In an intensification of the irony of mirrored ethno-racial denunciations,

Surinamese accusations of envious avariciousness are applied as readily
among members of the same racial group as they are between different
ethno-racial populations. Relations that are difficult to avoid because of
kinship or residential proximity are liable to give rise to charges of envy
and sorcery. In fact, Hindus and Maroons are, in my experience, more
likely to accuse a member of their own family of sorcerous envy than
they are to blame a specific person from another ethno-racial group.
Whether Hindu or Maroon, the targets of intra-kin-group witchcraft
blame their victimization on the moral failings of witches driven by
predatory emotions of envy and greed who target family members
in retaliation for their relatively greater success. For instance, when a
young Maroon man generally considered “crazy” (Ndyuka: lawlaw;
Sarnami: pāgel) hung a knife bound to a metal ring in front of Anjali’s
daughter Priya’s house, Priya immediately suspected that it was a sign
208 Suspect Others

that she was being bewitched by a brother-in-law whom she felt envied
her family’s prosperity. As such, even though the worst envy is generi-
cally attributed to the perversions of witches who are often ethno-racial
others, envy remains a familiar impulse, the consequences of which are
felt more acutely among those well known to one another than across
ethno-racial social frontiers.
While both Hindus and Maroons stress the moral necessity of kin
solidarity, they also agree that ruined relations between people are a
morally appropriate outcome of interpersonal conflicts spurred by
envy. To be moral, however, such affronts to family unity and the ethics
of respect need to be perceived as legitimate reactions to unfair “mis-
treatment” (Ndyuka: misáandi, Sarnami: natija). Because “people know
relations by the actions that signify and create them” (Stasch 2009, 17),
allegations of envy transform how people reflect on their relationships
with those around them. Rather than adhere to some preordained social
cohesion or hostility, Maroons and Hindus strive to revise their ethical
self-knowledge against other people’s responses to them, racist or oth-
erwise. When a person discovers that they are a victim of the malicious
envy of a close relative or friend, they nearly always react with indigna-
tion – “Why me? What have I done to them?” – and a strong desire for
restitution (see also Evans-Pritchard 1937; Favret-Saada 1977). Claims
to have uncovered envy accordingly call into question not only the reli-
ability of the relationship between the envied and the envier but also
the routine epistemologies that lead people to imagine that others are
predictably knowable in the first place.14
Though envy and racecraft kick up many of the same resentments,
envy accusations cut across different valences of sociality, repurpos-
ing inter-ethnic animosities for domestic conflicts and, conversely,
turning interpersonal aversions into racializing stereotypes. Ironi-
cally, it is this intimate familiarity that gives envy its critical rhetori-
cal role in validating ethno-racial difference: since everyone claims
to recognize envy in others but disclaims it in themselves, envy is
easily invoked to protect the propriety of social and political sus-
picions about those one distrusts. The affective and epistemological
manoeuvre of pre-emptive self-victimization permits witches and
ethno-racial others to hover as “anti-selves” capable of simultane-
ously objectifying moral divisions within and between ethno-racial
populations (Harrison 2006; Taussig 1987). Suspected plots by such
intimate nemeses warrant racecraft to transmute the many uncertain-
ties and ironies of everyday intersubjectivity into the sort of epis-
temic entitlement that lets Anjali declare that she already knows the
concealed contents of Afro-Surinamese minds.
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 209

This situation creates an impasse. What are, to accusers, always literal

statements about the essential proclivities of those they accuse become,
for the accused, a sign that they are right to racialize their opponents
as exactly the sort of mendacious, envious, and sorcerous people they
suppose them to be. Rather than expose any potential hypocrisy, Hindus
and Maroons take the equivalence of their denunciations to validate their
charges about the others’ duplicity, further exacerbating their reciprocal
alienation. If racecraft purports to make the danger of ethno-racial oth-
ers phenotypically visible, the capacity of ethno-racial others to act con-
trary to ethno-racial stereotypes about them is part of what makes them
threatening. This is why Anjali proclaims that a Maroon can never make
a “joke” (Sranan: krap) out of her. Anjali indicts Maroons for behaving
in ways that contradict her racecraft. Rather than disproving her preju-
dices, these instances are taken as confirmation of the innate tendency of
Maroons to conceal their true purposes. Conflicting evidence – like Da
Maku’s visit to wish me a speedy recovery – must be the opposite of how
it appears and thus inevitably substantiate ethno-racial prejudices. No
matter how it is rebutted, racecraft convicts only the accused and never
the accuser: it is always racialized others who are the real racists.
These characteristics enable racecraft to effectively quarantine the
danger of being ethically implicated in the lives of ethno-racial oth-
ers. That the physical features of Maroons or Hindus supposedly
make them morally transparent to racists absolves racists of the ethi-
cal need to take seriously those whom they racialize. To mull over
another’s moral viewpoint is to admit that they matter beyond the one-
dimensional principles of ethno-racial antagonism. Racecraft posits
that the only important relations are those that dissolve the self into
the abstractions of ethno-racial identity. Racists are empowered by this
collective narcissism to collapse the complexities of personal subjectiv-
ity into communal identities premised on the inevitability of negative
intersubjectivity between racialized populations. This “denial of rela-
tionality” (Hoagland 2007) asserts that racialized others are constitu-
tionally untrustworthy and therefore unwilling to take responsibility
for their enviously self-interested actions. Unlike other categories of
persons, such as children or the mentally ill, whose perceived unre-
liability demands some level of care, racecraft makes the suspected
moral dispositions of ethno-racial others into impregnable barriers to
empathic relations (Said 1978; Mills 2007). In Suriname, racecraft con-
sequently defines not only who should be cared for but also who gets
cared about within a hierarchy of ethno-racial value that continues to
posit its racist European originators as the default standard of human
worth (B.F. Williams 1990; Wynter 2003; see also Vial 2016).
210 Suspect Others

The resulting ressentiment empowers envy to bore a hole in shared

Surinamese egalitarian expectations. The morality of ethno-racial hier-
archy is rooted in the irony that the ethics of egalitarian respect can
be overturned in the name of its protection. Whether imputed to kin
or the members of other ethnicities, envy energizes fears of duplicity
that warrant an ethics of vigilant suspicion. Surinamese perceive oth-
ers’ propensity to envy as pertaining across relations and interpersonal
animosities. From within a family, a temple, or a neighbourhood, accu-
sations of envy easily expand to disparage whole populations. In this
way, racial ideologies rhetorically magnify envy and “scale” it to collec-
tives that exceed more intimate identities of kinship or friendship (Carr
and Lempert 2016).
Hindu and Maroon wishes for the recognition of incontestable ethno-
racial distinctions are an ironic outcome of racial capitalism’s subver-
sion of the moral power of egalitarian ethics. Shared egalitarian values
concurrently strengthen Surinamese resistance to new forms of racial-
ized hierarchy yet corroborate surmises that, so long as their ethno-
racial group is ascendant, such a hierarchy is morally inevitable in a
class-stratified nation-state. This situation inflames the mutual ressenti-
ment that keeps all sides locked in the stalemate that historical white
supremacy has left to post-colonial Surinamese politics. At the cost of
“defending a form of dignity that is increasingly censored and … unin-
telligible” (Fassin 2013, 253), Surinamese certainties about racialized
moral stratification make accusations of envy into a means for secur-
ing a place of primacy within an actually unachievable, and ultimately
morally repugnant, social order.15

Mediumistic Ironies

Though these ironies should be familiar to anyone who has dealt with
post-colonial racecraft, Anjali’s own biography adds further complica-
tions. As already mentioned, Anjali is a spirit medium. Her spirits, how-
ever, are conspicuously multiracial and even include some of Maroon
origin. While possessed, then, a Hindu medium like Anjali can, at least
temporarily, become the racialized others, or even a whole multiracial
society, that she professes to find otherwise suspect.
Ironically, in contradiction to racecraft, Anjali can only be inhab-
ited by this spiritual multiplicity because mediumship severs physi-
cal appearance from identity. The spirits and deities that mediums
manifest outstrip the limits of human knowledge to transcend suspi-
cions based on visible exteriors. This provides them, even when they
are themselves racialized, with an epistemic position beyond race.
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 211

In dividing corporeal exteriors from invisible agency, mediumship

actively unsettles any certainty that duplicity is readily read from the
surface of the skin.16 Mediums therefore amplify the ironies of identity
that racists work so stringently to deny. Physical facades that would
otherwise communicate race are revealed to conceal a multitude of
spirit and divine agents whose ability to take control over human
bodies confirms their superior authority over human lives. Mediums
make these relations transparent to reveal themselves and others as
opaque palimpsests of agencies and relations that exceed any notion
that persons are indivisible individuals. Even if ethno-racial enmities
and apprehensions over respectability make these “altered solidari-
ties” (Crosson 2015) relatively marginal, when possessed, mediums
like Anjali who otherwise traffic in racecraft nonetheless enact a very
different ontology of interethnic interrelatedness (see Espirito Santo
2015; Matory 2009b; Palmié 2013; Wirtz 2014).
In this way, mediumship can generate relations of ritual responsibil-
ity that span the identitarian differences erected by racecraft. Instead of
sweeping stereotypes about whole populations, spirits’ disembodied
perspectives direct mediums to concentrate on the problems of specific
persons and families. Indeed, though spirits such as bakuu demons are
pre-emptively racialized, in practice, Hindu and Maroon mediums
almost always treat intimate intra-ethnic betrayals rather than inter-
ethnic enmities. For them, the envy that inspires witchcraft is best
explained by poisonous habits of interpersonal competition among
kin and neighbours who cannot help but feel slighted by inequalities
between them and those with whom they identify most closely.
To return to Agidibo’s consultation with Kumar, we can now appre-
ciate the encounter as a conflict between two coextensive yet incom-
mensurately ironic practices of self-revelation. In it, the “otherness” of
the sacred (Csordas 1994; 2004) encounters the otherness of racializa-
tion. Whatever else happened, opposed revelations of ethno-racial and
ritual suspicion and responsibility collided to doom inter-ethnic coop-
eration, illustrating how competing explanations of personal crises can
coalesce into different visions of moral community (Wirtz 2005). Kumar
was torn between contrary revelations of responsibility that forced him
to choose either racialized suspicion or possible occult restitution for
his damaged personal honour. In exchange for Kumar’s acceptance of
Agidibo’s authority to define his selfhood in line with a Ndyuka rela-
tional ontology, the spirit promised him absolution for his failure to sat-
isfy the expectations of Hindu masculinity. Against Agidibo’s appeals,
however, the suspicions of Surinamese racecraft turned Kumar’s
doubts about how to understand the intentions of Afro-Surinamese into
212 Suspect Others

a contest between two racialized populations over moral belonging and

respectability.
Though ultimately scuttled by the injurious stereotypes that men-
aced it, Kumar’s consultation also held out alternative possibilities for
inter-ethnic relatedness. Even as mediums reduce human subjectivity
to a composite of transgenerational relations of collective accountabil-
ity, they also work to exculpate sufferers from personal responsibility
for these relationships. Analogously, accusations of envy and the witch-
craft with which it is deeply associated offer accusers the opportunity to
adjust the ethical expectations and obligations that they owe to others,
especially kin.
In what appears to be a desperate attempt to recover his self-respect,
Kumar sought spirit help outside the strictures of the Hindu respect-
ability that had betrayed his honour as a householder-patriarch. Kumar
wanted Agidibo to parry the severe blow to his dignity that his wife’s
infidelity represented and give him back exclusive control over his
family’s future. Kumar was thus attempting to harness what Hindus
assume to be intrinsically dangerous Afro-Surinamese practices for the
moral ends of Hindu genetic religion. From this perspective, what might
otherwise be criticized as Kumar’s pusillanimity was a brave attempt
to wrest masculine self-determination back from the fellow Hindu for
whom his wife had left him. And indeed, Agidibo supported this nar-
rative by placing the blame on Kumar’s sorcerous Hindu rival, thereby
excusing both Kumar and his errant wife.
Kumar’s turn to racially inflected occult solutions to recapture control
over his wife, however, could easily ricochet to maim his personal and
ethno-racial respectability. Within the conceits of racecraft, his trust in
Afro-Surinamese spirits required him to subvert some of the convictions
of Hindu moral exceptionalism. This forced Kumar to choose between
the authority of ideals of ethno-racial distinction and the power of alien
spirits. Resuscitating moral rectitude from his experience of personal
impotence required Kumar to admit to an uncomfortable degree of
ethno-racial powerlessness. This double bind played no small part in
the doubt and mistrust that was palpable throughout the interaction.
Kumar alternated between hope and suspicion before finally panick-
ing over the money Agidibo demanded. Despair could drive him only
so far before he felt that he was simply being taken advantage of by
instinctively treacherous ethno-racial others.
Ironically, judging from Da Mangwa’s disparagements, Kumar’s
search for redress from Ndyuka spirits only confirmed Ndyuka stereo-
types about Hindu men as immorally domineering and sexually dys-
functional. Rather than simply acquitting Kumar by convicting his rival
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 213

of occult aggression, the Ndyukas in the room suspected that Kumar’s

desperation for power over his wife necessarily came at the expense of
his moral integrity. This intensified their suspicion of his motives. Con-
sequently, while Agidibo releases Kumar from personal accountability
for his sufferings, he also demands an opulent fee to prove Kumar’s
trust. Seeing only a hectoring and impoverished young Maroon man
demanding money, Kumar is pulled between magical escape from per-
sonal disaster and the affront the consultation presented to his own
respectability. From this vantage, either Agidibo’s success or Ba Ben’s
deceit undermines Kumar’s masculine rectitude as an astute bearer of
Hindu ethno-racial moral exceptionalism.
Agidibo and Kumar each require the other to accept their ethi-
cal transparency. Beneath the opaque surfaces of slippery words and
hidden thoughts, Kumar confronted Agidibo’s potential reality in an
attempt to assess the sincerity of his human “horse” (asi), Ba Ben. If
Ba Ben was not responsible for what Agidibo said, the relation would
be one of genuine ontological asymmetry and, whatever the medium’s
race, would validate the epistemic imbalance between humans and
spirits. If this were the case, Kumar would then have no choice but
to doubt his own authority over himself; he would also, however, be
released from responsibility for his misfortunes. In exchange for such
ontological recognition, Agidibo would reduce Kumar’s rival to an
empty husk of bitter envy. Secure knowledge of his rival’s metaphysi-
cal guilt offers Kumar the return of his honour as a moral Hindu house-
holder in control of both his personal and ethno-racial destiny. This
knowledge would also vindicate his transgressive choice to seek occult
solutions from Maroons.
Were Kumar to find Agidibo fraudulent, however, Ba Ben would be
merely human, a simple cheat who contravened egalitarian principles
of mutual respect to exploit a vulnerable ethno-racial other. If this were
so, Kumar was sanctioned to interpret Ba Ben strictly in terms of Hindu
stereotypes about Afro-Surinamese as envious and sorcerous frauds.
As I saw with Hindu visits to other Afro-Surinamese mediums, Kumar
might easily revise his consultation with Agidibo into a testament to
his guardianship of Hindu distinction. In this telling, Kumar would
say that his session with Agidibo was nothing but a cynical lark that
highlighted his astute Hindu scepticism and exposed the contemptible
stupidity of Maroon greed.
Reciprocally, Agidibo needed Kumar’s recognition to be efficacious
beyond ethno-racial boundaries. As we saw in chapter 3, many Afro-
Surinamese view monetary payments as a crucial measure of spirit
efficacy. More than material advantage, the exchange of money is an
214 Suspect Others

“ontological effect” of trust in the medium’s transparent conduction

of spirit power (Espirito Santo 2009). For Kumar to pay for the anti-
sorcery rite would have acknowledged Agidibo as a spirit with genuine
authority to contest both Kumar’s self-knowledge and the cogency of
Hindu exceptionalism. Needless to say, by falling back on the defences
of racialized suspicion, Kumar resorted to racecraft to guard against
any such radical re-evaluation of himself.
Racecraft and mediumship create distinct, if reticulated, regimes
of suspicion, doubt, and responsibility. Though frequently blurred in
practice, in the context of Agidibo and Kumar’s consultation, racecraft
and mediumship could not coexist in framing how the interaction
was to be interpreted. Kumar’s responsibility as a respectable Hindu
clashed with his responsibility as a victimized ritual supplicant. In
the final evaluation, racecraft and mediumship require contradictory
doubts about what self-knowledge is and how responsibility is to be
attributed. Within either framework, there should be no ambiguity:
either Agidibo is a semi-omniscient spirit or Ba Ben is a treacherous
Maroon fraud.
Situationally, at least, these differences compel Surinamese to select
among divergent objectifications of the collective self at different times.
The ironies of racecraft exclude intimacy and relational multiplicity.
Racial ideologies countenance no doubt, and racialized subjects must
fully incarnate the inassimilable difference presupposed by racecraft.
If racecraft instils alienating suspicions that impede positive interracial
intersubjectivity, the fractious perplexities of embodied thoughts, emo-
tions, and sensations permit mediums to internalize possession’s onto-
logical ironies and descry them in their supplicants. If racecraft reduces
people to transparent surfaces of hereditary determination, medium-
ship makes these surfaces confoundingly generative of very different
paradigms of self-knowledge.

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that, though contemporary Surinamese are

shrewd critics of one another’s racecraft, they nonetheless remain
beholden to racecraft as a default explanation for human difference.
However much the terms of the struggle have been altered by post-
colonial nationalist discourses, Hindus and Afro-Surinamese are still
locked in a contest for unachievable advantage within a conjectural
hierarchy of racial deservedness. Within this hierarchy, racecraft is the
power to claim to know what another is thinking and still fail to see the
world through their eyes.
 The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft 215

Mediumship suggests that such insurmountable antagonism is

not inevitable. While racecraft and mediumship both mobilize irony
to generate and answer specific kinds of doubt and suspicion, they
also produce very different ways of reflecting on and acknowledg-
ing relatedness with and between people. In mediumship, the opacity
mediums attribute to others is turned back on the self. By making
transparent what is invisible in the minds of others, mediums make
themselves and their patients epistemically opaque. Mediums per-
form their own subjection to otherwise invisible relations to reveal
the shallowness of human self-knowledge. Reflexively, these revela-
tions transfer supplicants’ personal agency and collective destinies to
the control of the diverse deities and spirits that mediums embody.
Synchronously internal to the bafflements of human subjectivity and
outside its deficiencies, spirits and deities act as witnesses to human-
ity’s ignorance, helplessness, and dependency. This process dissolves
“skin-bound” bodies into relational composites swarming with the
invisible gods and spirits that make the self different from the ego and
the body that it inhabits.
In racecraft, this process is reversed. In parallel with the ways in
which suspicions of envy short-circuit the ethics of Surinamese egali-
tarian respect, racecraft derives its authority from the rhetorical power
of pre-emptive blame and absolution. The central irony of racecraft is
that it transforms ignorance of others into morally exonerating insight.
Racecraft seizes on many of the same ironies of intersubjectivity as
mediumship but with an inverted aim. Rather than a misleading sur-
face that exposes hidden relational depths, racecraft makes the epider-
mal opacity of others into a transparent sign of impossible-to-conceal
racial essences. Racists are enabled to reflect on themselves as virtuous
targets of others’ deceptions and to assert the ethical transparency of
their own self-knowledge as an incarnation of ethno-racial moral dis-
tinction. Reflexively, racecraft reveals those who work it to be potential
victims rightfully defending themselves from predatory others. Moral
fault lies with the envious and not the envied, and it is not the racist
but the target of racecraft who is responsible for their own denigra-
tion. Recursively then, racecraft makes racists opaque to the scrutiny
of ethno-racial others, and thus supposedly ethically immune from the
need to imagine themselves from the morally compromised perspective
of those whom they malign.
Racecraft must deny all the ironies of race – like the fundamental
humanity that unites racists and those they racialize – to retain its coher-
ence; mediumship, though, ostentatiously embraces the ironies that
mediums enact. Unlike the ironies of race, the ironies of mediumship
216 Suspect Others

enable people to become others who, while no less racialized socially,

deliver disembodied perspectives that are manifestly disruptive of
everyday human identities and expectations (Hartikainen 2018; Matory
2009b; Wirtz 2014). However practically unstable this ontological mul-
tiplicity might be, it nevertheless creates a captivating alternative to the
epistemic atrophy of racecraft.
Conclusion

“So, do people ever know themselves (sabi denseefi)?” I asked the Ndyuka
medium Da Espee. “Never!” he exclaimed. “They might think they do
but they really can’t!” Self-knowledge has a matter-of-fact quality that
resists introspection even as it invites it. In performing knowledge that
is beyond the human capacity to know, mediums dissolve the division
between self and other, human and spirit. Da Espee’s declaration pithily
captures this feeling of suspension between knowledge and ignorance,
first-person and third-person; this is what enables mediums to simulta-
neously reveal a patient’s self and render it captivatingly opaque.
By othering the self, mediums convert interpersonal suspicion into
self-doubt. This book has described the interactive process by which
mediums achieve this transposition of knowledge of self and other
and make it elementary to reality. Adjusting the opacity and transpar-
ency apparent in all intersubjectivity, mediums channel suspicions into
doubts that afford distinctive paradigms of self-awareness. Whether
practised by Hindus or Ndyukas, mediumship reveals a self that is at
once socially identifiable and inaccessible apart from in pain, dreams,
and ritual intercession. Mediums embody the irony of this self in their
possession performances, which model the knowledge that is revealed
when the self is yielded to beings beyond it. Mediums’ spirits and
deities put these ironies into words, naming the relations of heredity,
mutuality, and belonging that matter to who a person is or should be.
Through devotional obligations to Hindu deities, feeding the place of a
Ndyuka person’s birth, or rooting out cursed connections with bewitch-
ing kin, mediums reveal the self to be an unstable aggregate that people
must sustain by recognizing their responsibility to the unseen relations
that both compose and confound their self-awareness.
The self that mediums objectify is thus a problem of responsibility.
To focus on responsibility is to show how cosmologies are anchored
218 Suspect Others

in the ways in which liability is allocated and distributed. Inhabitants

of other cosmologies can only experience these worlds in whole or in
part because they feel responsible to them. A “quality of participation
in a dialogue” (Hill and Irvine 1992, 1), responsibility is an outcome
of incessant attempts to define what makes persons and collectives
accountable for what they do and say, and what happens to them and
others as a result. According to the philosopher Richard Moran, “People
are held responsible because they are able to reflect on the complic-
ity of their own agency in events. At the same time, there exist many
exceptions to this pure sense of reflexive authority” (Moran 2001, 113).
Mediums describe the manifold relational self to point to specific ontol-
ogies of responsibility that are founded on exceptions to transparently
self-reflexive authority like the doubts aggravated by being in pain or
dreaming described in chapters 4 and 5. If one’s self is another, self-
doubt becomes suspicion. Such epistemic interventions separate the “I
of discourse” (Urban 1987) and the “I of reflection” (Kant 1974) from
the multifarious ideas and sensations that roil embodied consciousness.
Though the shallow considerations of everyday experience bestow the
self with an apparent unity of apperception, mediums illuminate the
numerous fissures within self-awareness and transform personal expe-
riences like pain and dreams into relational crossroads of the invisible
world.
Without a single, unitary consciousness, the subject of responsibil-
ity becomes dispersed. The person is a switchyard, accountable only
for appropriately channelling the interlocking spiritual relations that
they instantiate. How this feeling is achieved, however, is a key differ-
ence between Hindu and Ndyuka mediumship. As was seen with Sa
Nyoni in chapter 4, Ndyuka mediums suspend their patients’ personal
responsibility by reducing them to specific ancestral or accursed con-
temporary relations. This ultimate derivation of Ndyuka selves from
relations that are at once integral and estranged is what is enacted in
mediumistic rites. As seen in Ba Markus’s exorcism in chapter 3, the
spirits of Ndyuka mediums take their patients apart to reassemble the
relations that make them. Patients are reduced to mute entities who,
apart from their ritual patronage, are passive conductors for the spirit
relations that simultaneously contain and constrain their potential for
future flourishing.
In contrast, as we saw with Guru Kissoondial in chapters 2 and 4, the
devotional emphasis of Hindu Shakti rituals stresses active emotional
surrender. The failure to see oneself as an avatar of Hindu genetic reli-
gion is a failure to recognize the self as a refraction of the divine across
its many incarnations. This is a personal fault. While, like Ndyuka
 Conclusion 219

mediums, Hindus also transfer immediate accountability for their

patients’ misfortunes to a variety of malevolent spirits and bewitch-
ing rivals, this spiritual vulnerability is viewed as a symptom of stub-
born ignorance of the true nature of the self, the only remedy for which
is pious labour at unmistakably Hindu rites of supplication. Devotees
must learn to work to abandon themselves to the divine agencies that
ultimately direct their destinies, and to do so in ways that maximize
their commitment to the emblems of Hindu identity.
Mediums, whether Hindu or Ndyuka, induct their patients into these
different paradigms of responsibility and push them to experience the
concomitant ways in which these paradigms serve both to establish
and to defeat personal agency. In mediumistic rituals, responsibility
is at once entirely individualized and a property of the collectivities
that compose the self. To be responsible in this context, a person must
become aware of the intrinsic multiplicity that they include. Mediums’
patients are therefore liable for their failure to acknowledge that their
true selves are parts of ancestral collectives or mythological occur-
rences whose causal influences are otherwise cloaked by the coruscat-
ing distractions of the everyday ego. That patients are accountable to
their own otherness, however, also implies that they are not consciously
responsible for their own misfortunes. Whether patients are afflicted
by a troubled akaa, an overlooked nenseki, a resident bakuu, an envious
neighbour, or a neglected deity, the locus of responsibility is someone
else whose agency is just beyond the reach of quotidian human proofs.
People must accordingly acknowledge their ritual obligations and
disavow having intentionally created the conditions for which they and
others suffer. In this regard, the different selves revealed in Hindu and
Ndyuka mediumship disclose inescapable ironies found in all accounts
of responsibility. On the one hand, as is best illustrated by Ndyuka
avenging kunu spirits, there is a clear attempt to subject people to their
collective histories. On the other, displacing responsibility on to oth-
ers who are just beyond everyday awareness opens up space for the
autonomy of the conscious person to be distinguished from the myriad
other agents of whom they are otherwise an expression. In both Hindu
and Ndyuka accounts, however, this autonomy is not the self-righteous
justification of choices freely made but instead the certainty that the
full weight of the ancestral past or divine destiny is assimilated into a
person’s present-day actions. When Ndyukas are alerted to the inde-
pendent needs of their souls, the same spontaneity of the will that is
the essence of the Kantian notion of individual freedom becomes evi-
dence that the self is a matrix of inescapable relationships (Kant 2012).
In this context, autonomy implies perfect attunement to the relations
220 Suspect Others

that enable a person to act with the ethical certainty that they are har-
monious mediums for the collectivities that they incarnate.
Within existence as mediums reveal it, the self is really only tan-
gible when it is ensnared by obstructions and incapacities such as
unprompted desires, pains, nightmares, and interpersonal strife. Rather
than being elementary to the character of the self, such afflictions are
regarded as signs of the enmeshment of personal agency in the superor-
dinate agency of others. Revealing their patients’ fragmented responsi-
bility for what is unknown in themselves and what they therefore fail to
know about others, mediums intervene in the invisible relational knots
that interlace all existence. The conscious self of ordinary awareness is
a residue of these interlocked relations. During my time in Suriname,
I heard both Hindus and Ndyukas exclaim, “Why me? What have I
done?” when it was revealed to them that they were being bewitched. It
is the mediums’ work to objectify and eclipse this perplexity that comes
with finding out that you are the mystified target of others’ duplicitous
aggressions. Enveloped in this spectral vulnerability, the self becomes a
resonating chamber for hidden treacheries or vibrates with the intensity
of the exploits of spirits, deities, and the dead.
This interplay of self-revelation and concealment swells with epis-
temic affects. Feelings well up when what has resisted articulation
becomes concurrently pronounceable and open to contestation. Epis-
temic affects are the sensations of risk that come with having to commit
to knowledge. They are at the root of the reassurance that is derived
from the assignment of responsibility, but they also induce apprehen-
sion about who has the authority to securely attribute it. The Hindu
and Ndyuka selves I describe in this book attain their slippery quiddity
from this dialogically produced friction between feeling and knowing.
Emphasized by Surinamese opacity claims and enacted by mediums,
the danger of being affected by others is accentuated until it slips its evi-
dential moorings and becomes a generic peril freely distributed among
all of life’s episodes. Against such diffuse fears, mediums work to descry
the smudged relations of intention and effect, interdependence and its
aftermath, from which distinctive Hindu and Ndyuka selves emerge.
The capacity of mediums to rouse these elemental selves imbues them
with authority. Spirit mediums sprout the seeds of the exogenous agen-
cies contained within both the Surinamese landscape and the thoughts
and feelings of their patients and then tie them to what is inexplica-
ble about the accidents, maladies, and altercations through which life
unspools. As in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,”
mediums unveil a usurping reality that is dizzyingly past imagining
and yet totally restricted by the limits of human inventiveness. In this
 Conclusion 221

way, spirits can turn evidence against them into the strongest warrant
for their existence.
Conversely, the epistemic asymmetry between mediums and their
patients represents a severe challenge to the egalitarian ethics of mutual
respect that are, in different ways, so important to both Hindus and
Ndyukas. Mediums therefore show why assertions of authority over
interpersonal opacity and transparency are critical to how reflexivity
creates social consciousness, and social consciousness, reflexivity. The
conditions that lead people in Suriname to regard suspicion of others
as imperative likewise provoke them to question how accurate their
suspicions actually are. Such compounded epistemic doubts demand
redress. When mediums and other agents of revelation promise to
unveil what is unseen, though, they deepen those very suspicions
about who is acting and why. Instead of giving themselves entirely
over to the ontologies revealed by mediums, Hindus and Ndyukas
continually amend the personal relevance of dueling sources of revela-
tory authority. Ordinary Hindus and Ndyukas live their lives within
variable degrees of intersubjective uncertainty. In the wake of a fam-
ily quarrel, for instance, knowledge of who a person is relative to a
newly combative sibling might suddenly collapse. The best of friends
can become enemies overnight, or a dream might overrun a person’s
conviction about what they thought was a sure thing. It is only when a
person is felled by misfortune or called out by an accusation that they
demand a definitive explanation of their agency in an event. Whatever
the metaphysical implications, for Hindus and Ndyukas alike, the feel-
ings of accusation and exoneration, of being made answerable to others
or of being relieved from that liability, are the most important reason for
objectifying the self.
When contrasted to racecraft, Surinamese mediumship highlights
how deeply questions of responsibility are imbricated in the affective
management of intersubjective transparency and opacity. In different
ways, mediums and racists diffract appearances to expand or diminish
ontologies of the self that are afforded by the materiality of the human
body. By making bodies suspect and subjecting them to doubt, racecraft
and mediumship illustrate how much of what people reflect on about
themselves and others stems from the ways in which epistemic fram-
ings define what is happening in an interaction. When mediums reveal
the hidden intentions of others, people are forced to question what they
know about themselves – and thus what they can be held responsible
for. Unlike mediumship, which can exonerate, racial accusations can
only convict. Since racecraft asserts knowledge of other minds based
on physical features alone, racists learn to deny contrary evidence
222 Suspect Others

and focus exclusively on what they proclaim is preordained by their

own ethno-racial categories. Blame is unilaterally aimed at racialized
others and decried when redirected at themselves. This creates a nega-
tive intersubjectivity that pre-empts potentially reciprocal sociality in
favour of supposedly self-evident hierarchies of racial difference.
As methods for modifying the relative transparency or opacity of
self and other, racecraft and mediumship make responsibility percep-
tible by defining what is discernible about it. As meta-epistemic prac-
tices, both stoke ontological doubts that resist any definitive disproof
(Bubandt 2014; Fields and Fields 2012; Lévi-Strauss 1963). Mediumship
and racecraft accentuate different ontologies of personal and collective
responsibility to commandeer the expressiveness and phenotypical
diversity of human bodies. This process magnifies epistemic insecurity
and then offers to resolve it. Such practices depend on and multiply sus-
picions about who belongs, whether in respectable Surinamese society
or on Surinamese soil. Responsibility is foundational to the legitima-
tion of such belonging, to persuading oneself and others of the moral
appropriateness of a person’s membership in a collective and of collec-
tives’ rights to particular places. Belonging implies never having to be
suspected. People belong because they are responsible, and they are
responsible because they belong. In a post-colonial context like Suri-
name, contemporary Surinamese struggles to justify ethno-racial and
religious self-knowledge within the terms of racial capitalism’s moral
rhetoric emphasize just how much Surinamese belonging remains
defensive, tied to historical conditions under which the exploited were
blamed for their own exploitation.
At the same time, the need to contest knowledge of self and other that
is common to mediumship and racecraft exposes a further irony: that
Surinamese people generally live their lives as though they belonged
until they are challenged about this belonging. As we saw in chapter 1,
for Hindus and Ndyukas alike, their certainty in being Surinamese and
having rights to the land is indubitable until it is unsettled by adver-
sity or opposition. From this perspective, belonging is taking the condi-
tions for being who one is, where one lives, for granted. People belong
because they get on with their everyday existences in ways that do not
constantly compel them to reconsider who they are and what rights
they have to be where they live. The power of affliction and accusa-
tion in mediumship and racecraft is that these risks can force people to
second-guess this otherwise effortless participation in reality as they
find it. While the results are very different, mediumship and racecraft
challenge knowledge of self and other to keep personal and collective
identities uncertain and vulnerable.
 Conclusion 223

The irony that self-knowledge is attained through the realization that

humans are fundamentally ignorant of themselves thus mirrors the
puzzle of Surinamese belonging. Hindus and Maroons struggle with
the contradiction that “respectable” inclusion into the nation requires
relinquishing critical facets of the differences that define them. Their
awareness of distinct ritual responsibilities to the Surinamese land-
scape forces Hindus and Ndyukas to confront their ambiguous status
as interlopers in a country in which they feel at home but are never-
theless denied irrefutable acceptance. While the tragedy of Ndyuka
landownership provides a deeper connection to their adoptive home-
land, the perpetual threat of spirit punishment means that any sense
of Ndyuka belonging to place comes at the cost of existential security.
Likewise, Hindu sacrifices to autochthonous spirits may renew the
Hindu sense of proprietorship but also trouble Hindu self-perceptions
that they have an exceptional moral position in Surinamese society. In
each case, the revelation that belonging to the land comes with perhaps
unmeetable responsibilities towards it discloses just how brittle this
belonging actually is.
Racecraft is one way in which Hindus and Ndyukas are able to
equivocate on such potential responsibilities towards ethno-racial oth-
ers, but it also raises doubts about the right to belong to Surinamese
land or society. Enlightenment thinkers codified colonial racecraft and
erected epistemic barriers that shielded them from their own contra-
dictions. Buffered by such chauvinism, the idealized unitary European
self was kept safe as the sole example of individual responsibility and
used to demand liberty for a carefully qualified subset of humanity
(Trouillot 1997). But, because racecraft highlights its own transparent
self-interest, this double standard has perhaps done the most to under-
mine the strength of liberal arguments for human freedom – an irony as
clear in the present as it has ever been. Such exceptions freed Europe-
ans from responsibility for choosing to dominate those they conquered
and enslaved. Declaring themselves the exclusive mediums of the uni-
versal, European colonialists could disparage other paradigms of self-
knowledge as laughable errors of ignorance or fanaticism, to be written
off or subsumed in the European a priori (Matory 2018; Pietz 1987).
If Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Kant wished to consolidate
a unitary knowledge of the self that was insolubly connected to private
property and their racialized, gendered, and religious identities, prac-
tices like ritual possession that punctured these ontological boundaries
had to be ruled out of the scope of serious consideration (Johnson 2014).
These theories of the autonomous self depend on the denial that self-
knowledge is, foremost, a dynamic and dialogical relation with others.
224 Suspect Others

The autonomous subject is in this way shielded from its origins in the
capacity of European violence to enforce the arbitrary hierarchies that
Enlightenment theorists otherwise disavowed (Mills 2017). The search
for transcendental license for human freedom thus required refusing to
consider how self-knowledge is contingent on the full array of interac-
tions that afford it.
Spirit possession, however, enacts the dissolution of any such sover-
eign identity. Even though a particular medium may consolidate their
social power, the very fact that their identity is in question creates a
myriad of counter-claims that can always dissolve this authority back
into the wider social field from which it emerges. Indeed, as H.U.E
Thoden van Velzen and Wilhelmina van Wetering (2004) have expertly
demonstrated, this cresting and cratering of medium-led prophetic
movements has been the pattern and force of Ndyuka history.
The methods people use to frame the self and make it transparent
or opaque to different paradigms of responsibility are therefore fun-
damental to sociality. How knowledge of others is attained and by
whom is always directly linked to the creation and maintenance of both
equality and hierarchy. Though Ndyuka mediums can avow decisive
knowledge over others, the suspicions this gives rise to also permits
their epistemic authority to be challenged and revised. Similarly, while
Hindu ritual knowledge has inherited a deep reservoir of hierarchi-
cal metaphysics, theological monism and mediumship can combine in
ways that enable almost anyone to give voice to the divine.
While much of Enlightenment criticism challenged the self-interested
arbitrariness of traditionally revealed authority, racecraft – which is, at
least as regards biological racism, an Enlightenment-era shibboleth –
remains dependent on just this sort of selfish decree. The history of
racecraft has therefore been the story of the expansion and contraction
of purportedly “natural” categories and qualities to justify changing
regimes of exploitation. This contradiction – that race is purportedly
immutable and fixed but is nevertheless constantly shifting to meet new
historical circumstances of oppression – is strongly felt in contemporary
Surinamese struggles to belong. The more Surinamese rely on racecraft
to defend their hoped-for position in Surinamese society, the greater the
sense that there is no such society to belong to or defend. Similarly, in a
context in which the government is incapable of recognizing the many
ways in which it remains founded on these same historical logics of
hierarchy and exploitation, what does it mean for Surinamese to belong
to a state that supposedly embodies their will and yet which must for-
ever dismiss crucial aspects of themselves to maintain its legitimacy?
 Conclusion 225

The suspicions that result from such continuous collective self-doubts

are firmly tied to the ironies of European social thought and colonial
governance. European philosophers such as Kant used the “natural”
freedom of “universal” reason to reveal racial hierarchies that conse-
crated European superiority (Eze 1997; Mills 1999). While Europeans
derived individual freedom from their transparent ability to rationally
doubt themselves, the denial of self-reflection to non-Europeans per-
mitted their reduction to racialized masses constitutionally opaque to
themselves (Johnson 2020; Matory 2018; Pietz 1987). Impenetrable to
self-reflection, the subjects of European aggression were barred from
the freedom that thinkers like Kant or Hume otherwise accorded to “all”
humanity. For European theorists of human liberty, the philosophical
talent for recognizing one’s own intrinsic self-opacity gave Europeans
permission to define non-Europeans in the most exclusionary terms.
Even when these prejudices patently undermined the “natural” rights
at the core of Enlightenment ethics and politics, the self-proclaimed
transparency of such judgments made these contradictions opaque to
those who articulated them.
At once the highest accomplishment of reason and the subject of
the most vexing doubts, self-knowledge is accordingly a circum-
ference without a centre. The self remains a composite that emerges
from interactions that provide the epistemic frames that direct atten-
tion to who or what a self or selves may be. To return to Da Espee’s
opening quotation, racecraft reveals precisely how European preten-
sions to self-knowledge have significantly made sure that, in failing to
know others, white supremacists have never really known themselves
either. The complex and contradictory selves revealed by Hindu and
Ndyuka mediums provide an important contrast to such imaginings
of self-mastery. However idiosyncratic and ironic, the selves that medi-
ums uncover show an awareness of just how collectively fraught self-
awareness always actually is.
This page intentionally left blank
Notes

Introduction

1 Throughout this book, for the sake of simplifying the complexities of

Surinamese identity, I use “Afro-Surinamese,” “Maroon,” and “Ndyuka”
relatively interchangeably, even though each term denotes important
distinctions: “Ndyuka” is the name of a specific Maroon nation; “Maroon”
is the umbrella term for all descendants of escaped enslaved people; and
“Afro-Surinamese” denotes the entirety of Suriname’s Afro-descended
population. Likewise, when I speak about Hindus, I am referring to both
Surinamese and Guyanese Hindus who live in Suriname. When I am
describing pan-regional cultural phenomena I use “Guianese” in place of
the national adjectives “Surinamese,” “Guyanese,” and “French Guianese.”
2 Except where I was explicitly instructed by a person to use their name, all
names in this book are pseudonyms.
3 Terminological note: I have employed the colloquial English terms “god”
and “spirit” to refer to the “metapersons” (Sahlins 2016) with whom
Surinamese live and struggle. I do so simply out of convenience, fully
aware of the many ways in which these words are conceptually laden and
misleading. However problematic, these words capture enough of what
Surinamese mean to remain useful.
4 The fieldwork was done in three summer-long instalments in 2007, 2008,
and 2009, and then over two stints of five and eleven months in 2012 and
2013. A month of follow-up research that is also included in this book was
also done in 2018.
5 These are the relative percentages at the 2012 Surinamese census:
Hindustani (27.4%); Maroons (21.7%); Creoles (15.7%); Javanese (13.7%);
Mixed Race (13.4%); Amerindians (3.8%).
6 As of the 2012 census, the population consists of Hindus (22%); Muslims
(13%); Catholics (21%); Pentecostals (11%); Moravians (11%); other
228 Notes to pages 7−17

Christian denominations (4%); Javanism (0.08%); Winti (2%); Other/No

Faith/No Answer (11%).
7 As between iconoclastic Arya Samaj reformists and orthodox Sanatan
Dharm Hindus.
8 Throughout the book I employ different spellings to represent Ndyuka
and Sranan. “Wenti” is the Ndyuka spelling and “winti” the Sranan one.
The difference in the first vowel also flags the differences in practice and
ideology between Maroon and Creole ritual.
9 In 2015, Alcoa, the major US aluminium producer, closed its refinery,
which had been the largest single employer in Suriname.
10 Since my fieldwork from 2007 to 2013, this has only become worse with
the collapse of oil prices, the withdrawal of corporate giant Alcoa in 2015,
and rampant inflation.
11 In 2018, this came to a head in a succession dispute over the Sáamaka
paramount chieftaincy in which one of the three rival claimants took
the unprecedented step of being enstooled in Paramaribo by Suriname’s
wildly unpopular president and former military dictator, Dési Bouterse.
12 Kwinti, Matawai, Sáamaka, Ndyuka, Páamaka, and Aluku.
13 The poverty experienced by nearly half of Surinamese makes disparities in
wealth between people and populations a particularly sore issue in need
of explanation, and it is often reasoned that the more affluent have gained
their prosperity from illicit magic (Dutch: toverij).
14 As normally used, a “self” is “the particular being any person is, whatever
it is about each of us that distinguishes you or me from others, draws
parts of our existence together, persists through changes, or opens the
way to becoming who we might or should be” (Seigel 2005, 3). The self
mingles free will and determinism. Whether stabilized as a soul or souls
to explain continuities or inconsistencies over the life course or between
lives, or dispersed as a social or cognitive confabulation, the self remains a
perennially contentious problem equally defined by historical persistence
and conceptual heterogeneity.
15 Indeed, Marilyn Strathern (2020) has directly connected Locke’s notion
that personal identity is fundamentally grounded in the continuity of
memory – and therefore accountability on the Christian day of judgment –
with the transformation of the concept of “the relation” into a set of
transcendental properties in contemporary English language usage.
Locke’s definition is as follows: “in this alone consists personal Identity,
i.e. the sameness of rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can
be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches
the Identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was then; and ’tis
by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that
Action was done” (Locke 1975, 2.27.9). In this way, an ultimately Christian
 Notes to pages 18−22 229

metaphysics of personal identity is constructed out of the principles

of philosophical “reflection.” Of course, this emphasis on the self as a
“rational Being” is an expression of the “Philosophy of Reason” that was
to come under assault in the late eighteenth century by Romanticism
with its cult of feeling and exaltation of the mysterious creativity of the
unplumbed passions.
16 In this way, Ndyuka and broader Afro-Surinamese ritual practices are part
of a wider tradition of objectifying and propitiating the polyphonic self
that is found throughout the African Atlantic. This can be seen in ideas
about the tibonanj and gwobonanj, as well as the creation of receptacles for
the soul (govi) in Haitian Vodou (Richman 2005), or the cult of the “head”
(orí) in Yoruba-derived Orisha traditions, or the chi (personal god) and
aka ikenga (right hand) in Igbo ritual, or the components that animate
and empower Kongo Minkisi, and their Cuban counterparts, Palo Nganga
(Matory 2009b; Ochoa 2010; Palmié 2006).
17 Trust: Ndyuka: fitoow; Sarnami: bharosa, but more frequently Dutch,
vertrouw. Belief: Ndyuka: bíibi; Sarnami biswās. Doubt: Ndyuka, pantan,
but more often the Dutch twijfel; Sarnami: dhubda kare. Suspicion: younger
Ndyuka used the Dutch beschuldigen; Sarnami: badhaam kare.
18 For the sake of elucidating the epistemic atmosphere (Eisenlohr 2017) of
contemporary Suriname, I gloss the complexity that Surinamese often
compress into statements about belief and trust with the more precise
vocabulary of suspicion, doubt, mistrust, scepticism, and aporia. Though
I take seriously Beatty’s (2005) warning about translating emotions across
social contexts, this list best approximates what Hindus and Ndyukas say
and do when confronted by these feelings.
19 Suspicion and doubt tend to break two ways in the existing scholarship.
In the first, they are atavisms of moral systems of the “limited good”
(Foster 1965). In this view, suspicion is the result of social servitude
to the conditions of tradition and subsistence within zero-sum moral
economies. Whether viewed as a mode of resistance indicative of incipient
class consciousness (Hobsbawn 1965; J.C. Scott 1985, ), or a function of
social despondency (Banfield 1958; O. Lewis 1969), suspicion is implicitly
opposed to the kinds of freely granted trust that are supposed to define the
social contract of modern liberal democracies or an ideal liberated future
(see Keane 2003, 2007). In the second approach, rather than a symptom of
domination by hidebound tradition, suspicion and doubt are the outcome
of modern anomie and alienation (Stasch 2009). In this view, political
economy and scientific progress have torn apart historic communal
solidarities and faiths. Here, modernity means that everything is in doubt
and everything must be suspected as possible tools of systemically self-
interested self-deception (Ricœur 1970). Both approaches span what Webb
230 Notes to pages 23−30

Keane (2003, 2007) has dubbed the “moral narrative of modernity” –

the conviction that history is the story of the progressive, if also tragic,
liberation of human subjects from the immediate determinations of their
social and material circumstances. Suspicion and doubt sit awkwardly in
this narrative. On the one hand, they are essential to break free from the
arbitrariness of tradition and the dictates of the environment. On the other,
they corrode the modes of trust that enable self-possessed liberal subjects
to assert their autonomous agency.
20 In line with the massive scholarship on the subject, as I understand it
here, race exists for no reason other than the historical legitimization of
hierarchies of exploitation that Europeans created through conquest,
the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and plantation capitalism (Curran 2013;
Mills 2017; Hesse 2007; Smedley 2006; J.E. Smith 2015; Wolfe 2016 ).
Though stemming from an ancient theological tradition (Anidjar 2016;
Carter 2008), race is insistently “modern” and a product of the European
Enlightenment’s worst contradictions. Modern conceptions of race
emerged from juridical attempts to render slavery a heritable status no
matter how much Europeans became genetically intertwined with those
they enchained.
21 Questions about Caribbean self-knowledge play out with special
complexity (Brathwaite 1971; Burton 1997; Glissant 1997; Mintz and
Price 1992; Romberg 2014). The self-knowledge of Caribbean peoples has
often been portrayed in both scholarship and literature as having been
warped by enslavement and colonialism (Fanon 1986; Naipaul 1967).
Caribbean peoples are depicted as compromised by too many relations
from too disparate origins, mixing blood, languages, and religions with the
pernicious inauthenticity of the endlessly dominated. As Deborah Thomas
(2004) has noted, these discourses owe much to the ethno-racial logics of
European nationalism and presume that racial and cultural homogeneity
are a prerequisite for the transparent identities from which stable nations
are built.
22 All recordings were done with the same small, though plainly visible,
digital recorder. It was unmistakably a microphone, and recordings were
only made with the active consent of particpants.

1. Settlement and Self-Doubt

1 Jaganath Lachmon was leader of the VHP (Vooruitstrevende

Hervormingspartij (Progressive Reform Party), formerly Verenigde
Hindoestaanse Partij (United Hindustani Party), the major Hindustani
ethnic party, and the Hindustani person most closely associated with
negotiating the terms of Surinamese independence.
 Notes to pages 33−42 231

2 Though far from the only concern dealt with in oracular divination,
questions around how to confront the vexed question of relations between
humans and lineally mediated local spirits remain important. Perhaps
because of the urban milieu in which I worked, the repercussions of
territorial trespasses against spirits only explicitly accounted for a minority
of cases (which were dominated by concerns over witchcraft and bakuu).
These concerns were implicitly strongly present, however, something
made clear by the fact that Ampuku mediums accounted for the majority of
the Ndyuka oracular-healers with whom I worked.
3 This is technically the same with personal property, which, though
notionally reverting to the lineage at death, is almost always distributed to
the deceased’s children.
4 Certain trees, particularly the kankantii (the silk cotton, Ceiba pentandra) and
the nkatu (strangler fig, Ficus citrifolia), termite mounds (kantasi), and soil
(doti, goon) of the forest are seen as the spirits’ houses, just as the kankantii –
which dwarfs everything else in the forest – is the spirits’ kuutu house.
5 One story I was told even held that human reproduction is only possible
because of a primordial murder of a woman by one of the first men.
6 When there would be no other hunters in the forest.
7 Indeed, all the major anti-witchcraft campaigns that have roiled Ndyuka
since the late nineteenth century have worked by seizing, cleansing, and
redistributing witches’ personal property.
8 In a major 2007 ruling, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled
that Suriname must recognize Sáamaka Maroon authority over their
traditional territories. The judges determined that the Sáamaka and other
Maroons have the inalienable right to “freely determine and enjoy their
own social, cultural, and economic development, which includes the right
to enjoy their particular spiritual relationship with the territory they have
traditionally used and occupied … in accordance with their customary laws
and traditional collective land tenure system” (cited in Price 2012, 235).
9 This was still the case when I was doing fieldwork in spite of the
2007 Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling in the case of The
Saramaka vs Suriname that Sáamaka Maroons had an inalienable right
to “freely determine and enjoy their own social, cultural, and economic
development, which includes the right to enjoy their particular spiritual
relationship with the territory they have traditionally used and occupied …
in accordance with their customary laws and traditional collective land
tenure system” (cited in Price 2012, 235).
10 This aspiration to have spirits legally recognized by the state clashes with
the reality that knowledge about spirits has traditionally been exclusive
and proprietary. The dense thicket of prohibitions that surround spirits
ensures that they remain in restricted relations with particular kin groups.
232 Notes to pages 43−64

Rivalries between clans, lineages, and families (osu, wan mama pikin) make
knowledge of the identities of others’ avenging spirits a powerful threat,
insinuations of which are used to press political advantage in inter-clan
and inter-lineage negotiations.
11 Spirit efficacy is integrally tied to cash’s protean power. As one Ndyuka
police officer explained, “People know a true mediumistic healer because
they demand a lot of money.”
12 Just as the resources around villages have steadily diminished as
population has increased, necessitating that Maroons look to more distant
hunting grounds, Maroon prospectors act as wage foragers, repeatedly
moving on when gold is exhausted.
13 These are most prominently the Volle Evangellie Church based in the
Netherlands, God’s Bazuin Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Moravian
(E.B.G.S, Herrenhutters), and the Catholic Church.
14 Aisha Khan (2004) gives a superb treatment of another version of this
problem for Indo-Trinidadian inclusion in Trinidad.
15 This should not, of course, be understood as without a complex Indian
past in which urban forms of elite ritual, intellectual, and devotional
practices had to contend with the complex field of popular practices
closely tied to livelihood, sovereignty, and kinship across an often highly
mobile and continually redefined territory (Singh 2012; F.M. Smith 2006).
16 Such disclaimers are typical of Surinamese Hindu ideas of masculinity as
personifying shrewd control and cautious incredulity.
17 Priya similarly told me that the spirit had compelled a boy in a
neighbouring household to attempt suicide by drinking insecticide.
This was punishment for his mother’s having abandoned her deceased
husband’s sacrificial obligations. When the boy’s mother finally performed
the rite at Anjali’s behest, the boy recovered with surprising speed.
18 Frequent rumours about politicians’ patronage of occult ritual specialists
attest to the pronounced sense that the state is not sufficiently potent and
that real control is to be found elsewhere.
19 The name also testifies to the probable derivation of elements of the ritual’s
logic from Afro-Surinamese sources.

2. A Fragmented Unity: Hindu Selves, Doubt, and Shakti Ritual

1 Bhakti refers to a variety of devotional movements that have been evolving

in South Asia and its diaspora for more than two millennia (Lorenzen
1995; Prentiss 1999). It centres on devotion to a favourite deity, often as
the personification of the supreme being/reality (Paratman/Brahman)
(Biardeau 1981; Kelly 1991; Prentiss 1999). Bhakti above all cultivates an
intensity of identification with the deities and involves concerted efforts
 Notes to pages 64−75 233

to dedicate personal action to them. Apparent in this chapter’s opening

quotations from the Gita, bhakti effects encompassment. It is a ritual labour
of emotional absorption in which people come to recognize their complete
agentive subordination to the deities and, through them, to an ideal moral-
cosmological order of existence. Despite many points of commonality
between Afro-Surinamese and Indo-Surinamese ritual, it is this final
soteriological focus on affectively rich existential encompassment that
makes the relations cultivated by bhakti-based Hindu practices so distinct.
Much of this emphasis on bhakti comes from the deep influence of northern
Indian devotional movements on all forms of Caribbean Hinduism.
Vaishnavism – the worship of Vishnu as the supreme reality – has been
especially popular in Suriname (van der Veer and Vertovec 1991: 153–4),
but it is always balanced by the worship of Shiva and Shakti (the goddess),
particularly in her incarnation as the demon-slaying Durga. Most of the
Hindus I worked with professed a preference for Shiva, though, as they
would say, all gods are ultimately one god (Bhagwan).
2 The fragility of this assurance, however, is exposed by people’s fear about
the talk of others. The line between gossip (nindara, batiāi, talk name, talk
story), slander (badnām kare), and sorcery (ojha) is ill-defined, and talk
about others often slips into suspicions that they are committing acts of
malfeasance. Whether or not sorcery is employed, others’ talk runs the
risk of degrading self-regard to cause suffering. The extent of these fears
was apparent in how passionately Guyanese and Surinamese people
of all ethnicities broadcast their disregard for others’ talk about them.
In everyday conversation, popular music, and Facebook posts, people
proclaim their impregnability to what people say, even as they constantly
monitor those around them for affronts to personal dignity like “eye-
pass” (Jayawardena 1962; Sidnell 2000; B.F. Williams 1991). Religious and
ethnic identities can offer one defence against the perfidy of others’ talk.
The authority of tradition can assure people of their moral rectitude and
self-worth as representatives of valid ethical communities, independent of
human evaluation.
3 Sarnami: āpan, or srefi in Sranan, also glossed as jiw or atma, life or soul in
Sarnami.
4 All this compels the decoration of children and fields with visual
distractions – a large black dot drawn on a baby’s forehead and refuse
like broken sandals or plastic bottles suspended from poles in agricultural
plots.
5 Made from sweetened milk, tulsi, and other herbs.
6 A round frame drum played with two thin sticks.
7 In a practice that is in my experience peculiar to Suriname, when mediums
underwent possession, they stood with their backs towards the temple’s
234 Notes to pages 76−96

main deity images. In other Shakti temples, including the seed temple
for Guyanese-style mediumship in Suriname, it is imperative that
possessed mediums remain directly under the gaze of a temple’s main
goddess to maintain continuous connection with the shakti that streams
from the deity’s eyes (darshan) (see Eck 1996; Gell 1998). At the Sri Shakti
Mandir, members made no attempt to keep this line of sight clear –
something assiduously policed in other Shakti temples. Indeed, to consult,
supplicants had to stand between the medium and the large Durga image
that stared out from the opposite side of the room.
8 Sindur, turmeric, sacred ash (bibhut), cloves, small limes, camphor, and a
bronze butter lamp (diya).
9 House washing was the only ritual performed by Sri Shakti Mandir
personnel that engaged with supplicants’ problems beyond the confines
of the temple. Normally, the temple was the sole centre of ritual activity.
Devotees practised many elements of their devotional regimens at home
or by the seaside, but would only directly interact with the deities and
accomplish the most significant quotient of their ritual obligations at the
temple. This exception, no doubt, was connected to the centrality of the
home as a primary site of conceptualizing Hindu identity and dignity and
the forces that threatened it.

3. Mediated Selves: Ndyuka Knowledge, Suspicion, and Revelation

1 A vibrant conception Ndyukas share with other Afro-Caribbean/Atlantic

ritual complexes like Haitian Vodou or Jamaican Revival Zion.
2 The traditional titleholder Kabiten Maku maintained humans have as
many souls as we have physical/emotional states and faculties.
3 In a variation of a story about nenseki I heard repeatedly, Da Robby told me
about a relative’s son who was murdered with a knife. After his death, the
young man’s mother gave birth to another boy with what appeared to be a
knife scar in the exact place where her murdered son had received the fatal
thrust.
4 Roy Wagner influentially described this figure as the fractal person,
“an entity whose relations (external) with others are integral (internal)
to it” (1991, 159). For Wagner, this model of personhood is fractal
because it insists on maintaining “sociocentricity” across scales – that is,
people reiterate the same relational assumptions in thinking about the
composition of skin-bound persons as for territory-bound clans.
5 If his plans for the future were correct, the spirits would make his right
bicep spasm in confirmation.
6 Much of this seems to have its origins in the Gáan Gadu cult that found
the majority of Ndyukas guilty of witchcraft posthumously until the early
 Notes to pages 97−106 235

1970s. As Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering (2004, 133) put it, “Gáan
Tata’s priests constantly exhorted the faithful to search their hearts for
feelings of envy, for hatred, resentment, and long-harboured grudges. And
the faithful must have obeyed, for how else but through the horror that
most of us feel upon critically examining our own thoughts, would these
decent, normal people have continued to believe that literally anyone and
everyone of those they lived among and knew might prove to have been
capable of the most depravedly hostile behaviour imaginable?”
7 Ampuku forest spirits (busi wenti/gadu) possessed nearly all the female and
male Ndyuka mediums in whose rituals I participated.
8 The word obiya (more usually spelled obeah) is of uncertain provenance
but is found throughout the Dutch and anglophone Caribbean. Unlike in
Suriname where – whatever the inroads made by Christian condemnations –
obiya is often understood as something positive, in the English-speaking
Caribbean, including Guyana, obeah is synonymous with witchcraft
and superstition – still the limit of alterity for the politics of defining
“respectable” religion (Crosson 2015, 2020b; Forde and Paton 2012;
Handler and Bilby 2001; Khan 2013; Paton 2015; Rocklin 2015).
9 Each of the different species of spirit is, in turn, subservient to one of the
Ndyuka “deities” (gadu). These include Tata Ogíi, the autochthonous ruler
of Suriname’s rainforests; Sweli Gadu, the ancestral African god of oaths;
and Agedeonsu and Tebu, the giant serpents who protect the Ndyuka’s
homeland along the Tapanahoni River. The Ndyuka deities differ from
their subordinate spirits only in that they have moral authority over the
well-being of the whole Ndyuka nation rather than only specific families
and lineages. Like their spirit followers, these deities have a special
connection with whichever of the major Ndyuka clans have inherited their
shrines and oracles.
10 The swelling diversity of Ndyuka spirits complements the unique spirit
characters exclusive to each Ndyuka medium. Though lineal inheritance
is attested to be critical to valid spirit embodiment, in practice spirits
are restricted to a single living medium. This guarantees that spirits
either reproduce as a class or expire as the peculiar conditions of their
mediumship decline – as happened to earlier spirit types like Javanese
(yapanesi) and the ghosts of European soldiers (soldati) killed in the First
World War.
11 Suriname has a significant Haitian community, and Haitians are
stigmatized as practitioners of black magic.
12 As far as can be assessed, amanfu arose in the revolutionary ritual
movement that the Pinasi clan iconoclast Wensi led against his uncle, the
Tata Ogíi medium Dominiki, in the 1930s (Thoden van Velzen and van
Wetering 2004, 177–87). During the Surinamese civil war of 1986 to 1992,
236 Notes to pages 106−42

Amanfu mediums played an assertive, if short-lived, role in making war

obiya for the largely Cottica Ndyuka Jungle Commando.
13 Bruderschap en eenheit partij: Brotherhood and Unity Party.
14 According to Ndyuka convention, all the children of a father share in his
name. Thus, when Da John has assembled with his twenty-eight brothers
and sisters, they will respond collectively when addressed by their father’s
given name.
15 Ndyukas make a salient distinction between the leaves collected in the village
(kondée, ganda) and the forest (busi, gáan busi). This is not a purely binary
distinction, however, since they also distinguish between varying stages of
transition between gardens (which represent an interstitial space) and full forest.
16 The term bui makes this starkly evident. Derived from the Dutch word
for the manacles (boeien) used to shackle slaves, bui refers to arresting or
binding someone or something.
17 Like the leaves used in obiya, alcohol is associated with the contrasting
qualities of different drinks – sweet or bitter, pleasingly fragrant or
abrasively strong. Each class of spirit has its own favoured drinks, which
represent the characteristics of that spirit and which they trade with mortal
humans for pleasure or retribution. Alcohol also gets people drunk – a sure
sign of its transformative potency. Like alcohol, cloth symbolizes spirit
identity and possesses properties that are both iconic and highly malleable,
and different patterns of the madras cloth that is synonymous with Afro-
Surinamese ethnicity are branded with the names of their associated spirit
species. Besides displaying the gratitude of previous patients, the specific
materiality of these offerings establishes the tastes that prove a medium’s
spirit’s membership in an accepted spirit species like Ampuku or papa. As
witnessed in Da Kwasi’s aborted possession, failure to adhere to these
norms of spirit identity is often the difference between a spirit’s being
officially enstooled or ignominiously ejected.
18 Suriname has no minimum wage.
19 This is a standard trope of Ndyuka prayers, one which succinctly
expresses living people’s position within a lineage.

4. Painful Interactions

1 The name of the up-river Ndyuka village where Da Sako was born.
2 A particularly dangerous location.
3 This mirroring is threefold: between the client and her or his afflicting
spirit, between the client and the medium, and between the medium and
her or his possessing spirit.
4 It is apparent that this emphasis coexists with discourses of lineally
mediated suffering that stress pain as a sign of a family’s corporate
 Notes to pages 145−57 237

obligation to inherited deities, as retained as part of a broadly racializing/

ethnicizing focus in Indo-Surinamese and Guyanese Hinduism.
5 This tension between generic impersonal context and vibrant, often
violent, accounts of sorcery, personal malevolence, and vengeful deities
accords with the division of ritual labour between largely hereditary and
institutionally approved pandit ritual specialists and inspired mediums. It
also resonates with critical concerns about correct knowledge and public
versus private ritual performance.
6 Or the waxing and waning of the moon in the Puranas.
7 Madrasi is the collective Guyanese term for all people of southern
Indian origin whose ancestors disembarked from the port of Madras
(now Chennai).
8 I don’t want anything, Father, only for my pain to be relieved.
9 When you come to me, when you arrive, there is no pain.
10 I just want to be rid of the pain.
11 These pains will be relieved; slowly but surely you will find that you are
relieved of them before you die.
12 But it is already too late because what is left in me that is without pain?
13 Sitting on the floor with reduced noise, this interaction was one of the very
few in which I noted down where participants were looking.
14 In practice, individual or collective mantra recitation involves a
performance of the elementary “poetics” of divine encompassment
(Jakobson 1960; Yelle 2003; Fleming and Lempert 2014). Mantra “may
well be the most characteristic Hindu ritual gesture” (Alper 1989,
262). Mantra is of Vedic origin; though the speech genres referred to
by the term have changed, the notion that mantras are the “essential
and efficient element in all ritual” remains consistent across Indic
traditions (Padoux 2017, 478). Etymologically, the Sanskrit word
“mantra” signifies “a means or instrument of thought, this thought being
intense, concentrated, efficient” (Padoux 2017, 478). At present, much
of the power of mantra is explained through the “sonic” metaphysics
developed by the various “orthodox” astika traditions to explain the
authority of the Vedas (Beck 1993). These identify mantra with nada –
“the primeval subtle phonic vibration which is the substrate of verbal
enunciation … founded on the idea of the particular nearness to the
godhead of prelinguistic utterances” (Padoux 2017, 485).
15 This focus on the condensing potency of sound belongs to an ancient
tradition of sonic absolutism in Brahminical ritual that identifies the world
with the efficacy of Sanskrit in ritual speech (Yelle 2003). Long integrated
into Bhakti devotional practice, in contemporary varieties of popular
Hinduism this predominantly takes the form of reciting the mantras of
the deities.
238 Notes to pages 175−95

5. Dreams at the Limits of Knowledge

1 Ndyuka cemeteries are carefully segregated, located in dense jungle along

the river, and are short but symbolically significant boat rides away from
villages.
2 I inquired if Elana’s dreams were always so vivid, and she told me that she
also dreamed of her mother’s possessing an Ampuku spirit, who appeared
to her in the guise of a young man with lustrous black skin.
3 I have omitted Da Sako’s formulaic responses of “Eeyee” (surely) and “A so
a de” (That’s right) for the sake of concision.

6. The Revealing Ironies of Racecraft

1 By racist, I simply mean a deployer of racecraft. As I use it here, I am not

advancing any moral judgment against Surinamese who use racializing
rhetoric. Rather, the term signals the pragmatic ways in which Surinamese
of all ethno-racial extractions resort to racecraft as it has been inherited
from the colonial past to make sense of their current social reality.
2 Such repurposed commodities are common in Surinamese rituals, as they
are in other African-derived Caribbean traditions, perhaps particularly
Haitian Vodou (Cosentino 1995). Da Mangwa and his family, however,
were notable for the freedom with which they used such figurines. While
most Ndyuka mediums repurposed consumer goods like hats, clothes,
walking sticks, machetes, and diverse beverages and tobacco products –
found objects that complemented an extensive array of organic materials –
their altars were overwhelmingly aniconic (as can be seen in the images in
chapter 3). Indeed, one Ndyuka friend with whom I visited Da Mangwa
loudly denounced the presence of such “dolls/figurines” (pobiki) on his
altar after we left.
3 Javanese and Chinese – the other two major Asian populations in
Suriname – occupy a more complex role in the national imagination.
While older Chinese labourers were largely absorbed into Creole society,
recent Chinese migrants have consolidated control over Surinamese retail,
construction, and extraction. This has led to intense resentment but also
stereotypes about the superior business acumen of Chinese, sometimes
couched in religious terms, as well as widespread fear about Chinese racism
and uncleanliness. Javanese, on the other hand, occupy an intermediate
position. Javanese are perceived as the most uncontroversially assimilable
by other Surinamese ethnic groups, and both Hindus and Ndyukas spoke
to me of the desirability of a Javanese wife. In this regard it is significant
that Javanese food has become the generic street food of Suriname, readily
consumed by all ethnicities without comment on its origins.
 Notes to pages 197−200 239

4 At the same time, and in contradiction to general Maroon approval of

exogenous relationships, Maroons previously prohibited sexual relations
with Hindustanis for fear that these relations would incite a lineage’s kunu.
5 Vernon (1985) and Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering (2004) have
convincingly shown that bakuu have changed appreciably over time,
migrating from the familiars of European gold miners to the property of
Hindustani merchants.
6 Though Hindus were frequent targets of Maroon suspicion, Maroon
traditionalists also held up Hindus’ preoccupation with preserving their
religious identity as a positive model for Afro-Surinamese. As in so many
parts of the world (Meyer 1999), the evangelical Christian sects that cast
lengthening shadows over Maroon sociality warn converts to decisively
break from tradition, going so far as to condemn even simple herbal
treatments as idolatrous. Though the Pentecostal churches that dominate
in places like Sunny Point adhere to the prosperity gospel, the discrepancy
between Maroon poverty and Hindustani and Chinese wealth is often
noted and sometimes ascribed to these peoples’ unyielding adherence
to tradition. According to Da Ekspidisi, God gave each nation (nasi) a
unique culture (kulturu) that people were responsible to God to follow.
Just like in traditional Ndyuka villages, Da Ekspidisi noted, Hindus
erect flags (jhandi) at which they make offerings. Even as Christians urge
Ndyukas to throw away these and other ancestral practices, Hindus keep
and worship their flags and are the wealthiest people in Suriname. Here,
Maroon traditionalists and their Creole peers are attempting to reverse
the distinction between culture and religion worked out by Creoles in
the nineteenth century so as to achieve accord between what was seen
as the social betterment provided by Christianity and their enduring
allegiance to ancestral ritual obligations. Ethno-religious exceptionalism
of the Hindu variety is held up as an example of the universality of divinely
ordained ancestral differences that account for collective success or failure, a
determinant of both corporate unity and the self-respect held to guarantee it.
7 Interestingly, there appears to have previously been a widespread Ndyuka
prohibition on having sexual relations with Hindustanis.
8 Despite these seemingly fearsome associations, Hindu Surinamese were
also inclined, along with Afro-Surinamese Creoles, to ridicule Maroons
and allege that they are too rustically ignorant for their rituals to have
power. One Hindustani woman spoke about how Maroons were so
“stupid” that they could not even tell the difference between regular eggs
and “forgotten” eggs, central ingredients in Afro-Surinamese obiya rituals.
9 Indo-Guyanese also fit uncomfortably in Hindustani discourses. Recent
monolingual arrivals and comparatively more impoverished, Indo-
Guyanese occupy a structural position in Suriname analogous to Maroons.
240 Notes to pages 200−10

Unlike Maroons, however, and despite initial Hindustani hostility,

Guyanese who grow up in Suriname tend to eventually integrate into
Indo-Surinamese society. Surinamese of all ethnicities, though, still
continue to cast Guyanese as thieves with a reputation for mantra tantra
(black magic). They imagine Guyana as a nation of unending racial strife, a
ghetto sunk in unrelenting crime.
10 Stories are told of Maroon-owned bakuu streaking through the night over
Sunny Point as balls of blazing fire.
11 In Guyana, Surinamese Maroons have assumed folkloric proportions
as lurid bakuu masters. Many Indo-Guyanese imagine Maroons to be
monsters with grotesquely misshapen heads who drag fantastically
distended bare breasts behind them in the dirt, and rumour them to use
“obeah” to instantaneously kill anyone who offends them (Pires, Strange,
and Mello 2018). Guyanese living in Guyana tend to view bakuu as bought
in Suriname by fellow Indo-Guyanese. In Suriname, daily contact with
Maroons tempers tales of visible monstrosity. For both Hindustanis and
Guyanese Hindus living in Suriname, bakuu assume characteristics more
like the Amerindian spirits discussed in chapter 1. Similar to the role
of Afro-Surinamese in the imaginations of many Hindus, bakuu, once
abandoned by their masters, are held to haunt the landscape to trouble
Hindu attempts at completely domesticating it.
12 Despite this acknowledgment, whiteness is nonetheless granted unspoken
preference, as is clearly expressed in the variety and abundance of skin
lightening products sold in every grocery store.
13 “‘The nature of things,’ said Rousseau, ‘does not madden us, only ill will
does’” (Berlin 1999).
14 In whatever ways in which inter-ethnic concepts like the evil eye are
manifested in social life, envy’s wayward effects fan suspicions that
humans lack sufficient self-awareness about the limits of personal
agency. Some Ndyukas say that a lineage’s avenging kunu spirit will, in
seeking revenge for the wrongs done to it, transform an innocent lineage
member into a cannibalistic witch. Beyond the fading gore of dimly
remembered dreams of massacre, the unconscious witch will have no
awareness that they nightly devour their closest kin. Given such self-
opacity, ordinarily harmless cravings and misunderstandings gain potency
as indicators of self-knowledge’s troubling restrictions and offer the
threatening insight that avowedly blameless persons might be inhabited
by the same selfish urges as their “enemies” (Ndyuka: feyantiman).
15 Racecraft construes the failure of the members of other racialized groups
to recognize their own inferiority as an additional justification for the
inevitability of ethno-racial divisions and suspicions. This self-absorbed
ignorance, however, exposes a further irony – the humanity that racists
 Notes to page 211 241

share with the ethno-racial others whom they malign. Pointing out this
hypocrisy is often the most damning indictment with which the targets
of racecraft can strike back against racialized exclusion (Appiah 1994;
Gilroy 2002). Those who spin racecraft to claim piercing insight into the
consciousness of others are accordingly always on the edge of being
exposed as racists, ethically opaque to themselves, and consequently
morally subordinate to those they disparage.
16 It is common for both Hindus and Ndyukas to imagine the racial
appearances of spirits and deities. Thus, Pa Kodyo is an Amerindian, as
is Tata Ogíi, the “king” of Suriname’s rainforest, while Gáan Gadu, the
historically potent patron of a pan-Maroon oracle cult based in Ndyuka, is
said to be European.
This page intentionally left blank
Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Alper, Harvey P. 1989. “Introduction.” In Understanding Mantras, ed. Harvey P.
Alper. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Améry, Jean. 1980. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of
Auschwitz and Its Realities. 1st German edition 1966. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Anidjar, Gil. 2016. Blood: A Critique of Christianity. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1994. Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood
Connections. Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Delivered at University of
California at San Diego, 27 and 28 October.
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in
Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
– 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
– 2011. “Thinking about the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics.” Cultural
Anthropology 26(4):657–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01118.x.
Babb, Lawrence A. 1975. The Divine Hierarchy. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
– 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakker, Freek L. 1999. Hindoes in een Creolse Wereld: Impressies van het
Surinaamse Hindoeïsme. Zoetermeer: Meinema.
Banfeld, E.C. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. New York: Free Press.
Bateson, Gregory. 2000 [1972]. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
244 Bibliography

Battaglia, Deborah. 1995. “Problematizing the Self: A Thematic Introduction.”

In Rhetorics of Self-Making, ed. Deborah Battaglia, 1–15. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 2003.Voices of Modernity: Language
Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Beatty, Andrew. 2005. “Emotions in the Field: What Are We Talking About?”
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11(1):17–37. https://doi.org
/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2005.00224.x.
Beck, Guy L. 1993. Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press.
Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M. 2014. “Santería Copresence and the Making of
African Diaspora Bodies.” Cultural Anthropology 29:503–26. https://doi.org
/10.14506/ca29.3.04.
– 2016. Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Berlin, Isaiah. 1999. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Biardeau, Madeleine. 1981. Etudes de mythologie Hindoue. Paris: Ecole française
d’Extrême Orient.
Bilby, Kenneth. 1997. “Swearing by the Past, Swearing to the Future: Sacred
Oaths, Alliances, and Treaties among the Guianese and Jamaican Maroons.”
Ethnohistory 44(4):655–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/482884.
Birth, Kevin. 1997. “Most of Us Are Family Some of the Time: Interracial
Unions and Transracial Kinship in Eastern Trinidad.” American Ethnologist
24(3):585–601. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1997.24.3.585.
Blier, Suzanne Preston. 1995. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bloch, Maurice. 2011. “The Blob.” Anthropology of this Century (1): http://
aotcpress.com/articles/blob/.
Boddy, Janice. 1988. “Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural
Therapeutics of Possession and Trance.” American Ethnologist 15(1):4–27.
https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1988.15.1.02a00020.
– 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern
Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
– 1994. “Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality.” Annual
Review of Anthropology (23):407–34. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an
.23.100194.002203.
Borges, Robert. 2016. “Ritual Language Formation and African Retentions in
Suriname: The Case of Kumanti.” Oso: Tijdschrift voor de Surinamistiek en het
Caraïbisch gebied [Journal for the study of Suriname and the Caribbean region]
35(1–2):225–45.
 Bibliography 245

Bourguignon, Erika E. 1972. “Dreams and Altered States of Consciousness in

Anthropological Research.” In Psychological Anthropology, 2d ed., ed. Francis
L.K. Hsu, 403–34. Homewood, IL: Dorsey.
Brathwaite, Kamau. 1971. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brenneis, Donald. 1987. “Performing Passions: Aesthetics and Politics in an
Occasionally Egalitarian Community.” American Ethnologist 14:236–50.
https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1987.14.2.02a00040.
Briggs, Charles. 1996a. “The Meaning of Nonsense: The Production of Embodiment,
and the Production of Power in Warao Healing.” In The Performance of Healing, ed.
C. Laderman and M. Roseman, 185–232. New York: Routledge.
– 1996b. “The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the ‘Invention of
Tradition.’” Cultural Anthropology 11(4):435–69. https://doi.org/10.1525
/can.1996.11.4.02a00020.
Brown, David H. 2003. Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-
Cuban Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, Vincent. 2010. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of
Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Browne, Randy M. 2011. “The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah: Power, Authority, and
the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean.” The William and Mary
Quarterly 68(3):451–48. https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.68.3.0451.
Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian
Island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Burton, Richard D.E. 1997. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the
Caribbean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Campbell, Corinna. 2020. The Cultural Work: Maroon Performance in Paramaribo,
Suriname. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Cannell, Fenella. 2010. “The Anthropology of Secularism.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 39:85–100. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.105039.
Carey, Matthew. 2017. Mistrust: An Ethnographic Theory. Chicago: HAU Books.
Carlin, Eithne B., and Jacques Arends, eds. 2002. Atlas of the Languages of
Suriname., 249–64. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Carr, E. Summerson, and Michael Lempert, eds. 2016. “Introduction: Pragmatics
of Scale.” In Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life, 1–24. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Carter, J. Kameron. 2008. Race: A Theological Account. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Case, Frederick Ivor. 2000. “The Intersemiotics of Obeah and Kali Mai in Guyana.”
In Nation Dance, ed. Patrick Taylor, 40–53. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
246 Bibliography

Cassam, Quassim. 1994. “Introduction.” In Self-Knowledge, 1–18. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Choenni, Chan S.B. 2014. “Ethnicity and Politics: Political Adaption of
Hindustanis in Suriname.” Sociological Bulletin 63(3):407–31. https://doi.org
/10.1177/0038022920140305.
Cook, Joanna. 2018. “Paying Attention to Attention.” Anthropology of this Century
22(May). http://aotcpress.com/articles/paying-attention-attention/.
Cosentino, Donald J., ed. 1995. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles:
UCLA Fowler Museum.
Crosson, J. Brent. 2014. “Own People: Race, Altered Solidarities, and the
Limits of Culture in Trinidad.” Small Axe 45:18–34. https://doi.org
/10.1215/07990537-2826434.
– 2015. “What Obeah Does Do.” Journal of Africana Religions 3(2):151–76.
https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.3.2.0151.
– 2019. “Catching Power: Problems with Possession, Sovereignty, and African
Religions in Trinidad.” Ethnos 84(4):588–614. https://doi.org/10.1080
/00141844.2017.1412339.
– 2020a. “‘Don’t Study People’: Disentanglement and the Dangers of Studying
Others in Trinidad and in Anthropology.” Anthropological Quarterly
93(1):1093–1123. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2020.0017.
– 2020b. Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Csordas, Thomas. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic
Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press.
– 2004. “Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of
Religion.” Current Anthropology 45:163–85. https://doi.org/10.1086/381046.
Cunha, Olívia Gomes da. 2018. “In Their Places: The Cottica Ndyuka in
Moengo.” In Ethnographies of U.S. Empire, ed. John Collins and Carole
McGranahan, 247–79. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Curran, Andrew S. 2013. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in the
Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Damsteegt, Theo. 2002. “Sarnami as an Immigrant Koiné.” In Atlas of the
Languages of Suriname, ed. Eithne B. Carlin and Jacques Arends, 249–64.
Leiden: KITLV Press.
Danziger, Eve, and Alan Rumsey. 2013. “Introduction: From Opacity
to Intersubjectivity across Languages and Cultures.” Language &
Communication 33(3):247–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom
.2013.07.004.
Dasti, Matthew R., and Edwin F. Bryant, eds. 2014. Free Will, Agency and
Selfhood in Indian Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Bibliography 247

Davis, Natalie Zemon. 2011. “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of

Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname.” Law and History Review 29(4):925–84.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0738248011000502.
De Boek, Filip. 2012. “Etre en danger et être un danger. Exclusion et solidarité
dans un monde d’insécurité spirituelle.” In Sorcellerie et violence en Afrique,
ed. Bruno Martinelli and Jacky Bouju, 85–105. Paris: Karthala.
de Bruijne, Ad, and Aart Schalkwijk. 2008. “The Position and Residential
Patterns of Ethnic Groups in Paramaribo’s Development in the Twentieth
Century.” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 79(3–4):239–71. https://doi.org/10.1163
/13822373-90002508.
De Klerk, C.J.M. 1951. Cultus en Ritueel van het Orthodoxe Hindoeïsme in
Suriname. Amsterdam: Urbi et Orbi.
– 1953. De immigratie der Hindostanen in Suriname. Amsterdam: Urbi et Orbi.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2007. “On Spinoza.” http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.com
/2007/02/on-spinoza.html.
Descola, Phillippe. 1989. “Head-Shrinkers Versus Shrinks: Jivaroan Dream
Analysis.” Man, New Series 24(3):439–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/2802700.
– 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: NRF.
Devereux, Georges. 1979. “Fantasy and Symbol as Dimensions of Reality.” In
Fantasy and Symbol: Studies in Anthropological Interpretation, ed. R.H. Hood,
19–31. London: Academic Books.
Devische, René. 1993. Weaving the Threads of Life: The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical
Healing Cult among the Yaka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dew, Edward. 1978. The Diffcult Flowering of Suriname: Ethnicity and Politics in
a Plural Society. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
– 1994. The Trouble in Suriname, 1975–1993. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Dimmit, Cornelia, and J.A. van Buitenen. 1978. Classical Hindu Mythology.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1980. Evans-Pritchard. Glasgow: William Collins.
Drummond, Lee. 1980. “The Cultural Continuum: A Theory of Intersystems.”
Man, New Series 15(2):352–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/2801676.
– 2011. “Co-opting Intersubjectivity: Dialogic Rhetoric of the Self.” In The
Rhetorical Emergence of Culture, ed. Christian Meyer and Felix Girke, 52–83.
Oxford: Berghahn.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1987. Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The
Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays and Articles. New York: Library of
America.
– 1999 [1935]. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press.
Duranti, Alessandro. 2008. “Further Refections on Reading Other Minds.”
Anthropological Quarterly 81(2):483–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0002.
– 2010. “Husserl, Intersubjectivity, and Anthropology.” Anthropological Theory
10(1):1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499610370517.
248 Bibliography

Eck, Diana. 1996. Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Edwards, Walter F. 1979. “The Sociolinguistic Signifcance of Some Guyanese
Speech Acts.” International Journal of Socio-Linguistics 22:79–101. https://doi
.org/10.1515/ijsl.1979.22.79.
Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2017. “Suggestions of Movement: Voice and Sonic
Atmospheres in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices.” Cultural
Anthropology 33(1):32–57. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.1.02.
Espirito Santo, Diana. 2009. “Making Dreams: Spirits, Visions, and the
Ontological Effects of Dream Knowledge in Cuban Espiritismo.” Suomen
Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 34(3):6–24.
– 2015. Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Evans-Pritchard, Edward. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. 1997. “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in
Kant’s Anthropology.” In Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader,
103–32. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skins, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.
Fassin, Didier. 2013. “On Resentment and Ressentiment: The Politics and
Ethics of Moral Emotions.” Current Anthropology 54(3):249–67. https://doi
.org/10.1086/670390.
Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1977. Les mots, la mort, les sorts. Paris: Gallimard.
– 2015. The Anti-Witch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fernandez, James, and Mary T. Huber. 2003. “The Anthropology of Irony.” In
Irony in Action: Anthropology, Practice and the Moral Imagination, ed. James
Fernandez and Mary T. Huber, 54–85. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fields, Barbara, and Karen Fields. 2012. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in
American Life. New York: Verso.
Fleming, Luke, and Michael Lempert. 2014. “Poetics and Performativity.”
The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, 485–515. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Fokken, Margriet. 2018. Beyond Being Koelies and Kantráki: Constructing Hindustani
Identities in Suriname in the Era of Indenture 1873–1921. Hilversum: Verloren.
Forde, Maarit, and Diana Paton. 2012. “Introduction.” In Obeah and Other
Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, ed. Diana Paton and
Maarit Forde, 1–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fortes, Meyer. 1987. Religion, Morality and the Person: Essays on Tallensi Religion.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foster, George M. 1965. “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good.”
American Anthropologist 67(2):293–315. https://doi.org/10.1525
/aa.1965.67.2.02a00010.
 Bibliography 249

Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self:

A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and
Patrick H. Hutton, 16–49. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
– 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.
Freud, Sigmund. 1998 [1900]. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon
Books.
Fuller, C.J. 1992. The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gable, Eric. 1995. “The Decolonization of Consciousness: Local Sceptics and
the “Will to Be Modern” in a West African Village.” American Ethnologist
22(2):242–57. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00020.
Gainda, Raj. 1996. Graha Sjaanti: Een Hindoestaanse Hulpverleningsmethode.
Rotterdam: Hindi Instituut Nederland.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. On the Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 2002. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Glissant, Eduard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Gluckman, Max. 1972. “Moral Crises: Magical and Secular Solutions.” In The
Allocation of Responsibility, ed. Max Gluckman, 1–50. Oxford: Manchester
University Press.
Goetz, Rebecca Anne. 2012. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity
Created Race. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of
Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Good, Byron. J. 1992. “A Body in Pain: The Making of a World of Chronic
Pain.” In Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective, ed.
M.-J. DelVecchio Good, P.E. Brodwin, B.J. Good, and A. Kleinman, 29–48.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gowricharn, Ruben. 2013. “Ethnogenesis: The Case of British Indians in
the Caribbean.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55(2):388–418.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417513000078.
Graham, Laura. R. 1994. “Dialogic Dreams: Creative Selves Coming into Life
in the Flow of Time.” American Ethnologist 21(4):723–45.
– 1999. “Dreams.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(1-2):61–4. https://doi.org
/10.1525/jlin.1999.9.1-2.61.
Green, Edward C. 1974. “The Matawai: An Acculturating Afro-American
Society.” PhD diss., Catholic University, Washington, DC.
Groark, Kevin P. 2009. “Discourses of the Soul: The Negotiation of Personal
Agency in Tzotzil Maya Dream Narrative.” American Ethnologist 36(4):705–21.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01205.x.
250 Bibliography

Groot, Silvia W.de. 1977. From Isolation towards Integration: The Surinam
Maroons and Their Colonial Rulers: Offcial Documents Relating to the Djukas
(1845–1863) [Translation from the Dutch of Van isolatie naar integratie: De
Surinaamse Marrons en hun afstammelingen: Offciële documenten betreffende de
Djoeka’s (1845–1863). ’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1963]. The Hague:
Nijhoff.
Guicherit, Henna. 2004. “Stigmatisering Marronjongeren, een tikkende
tijdbom in de Surinaamse samenleving: Een interview met Mr. Steven
Alfaisi.” Siboga 14:3–7.
Guinee, William F. 1992. “Suffering and Healing in Trinidadian Kali Worship.”
PhD diss., University of Indiana, Bloomington.
Guyer, Jane I. 1996. “Traditions of Invention in Equatorial Africa.” African
Studies Review 39(3):1–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/524941.
Guyer, Jane, and Samuel M. Eno Belinga. 1995. “Wealth in People as Wealth in
Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa.” The Journal
of African History 36(1):91–120. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853700026992.
Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Hallowell, A. Irving. 1955. Culture and Experience. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Handler, Jerome S., and Kenneth M. Bilby. 2001. “Notes and Documents –
On the Early Use and Origin of the Term ‘Obeah’ in Barbados and the
Anglophone Caribbean.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave
Studies 22(2):87–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/714005192. Medline:18782932.
Hanks, William. 2013. “Counter Parts: Co-presence and Ritual
Intersubjectivity.” Language and Communication 33:263–77. https://doi.org
/10.1016/j.langcom.2013.07.001.
Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat. 2006. “Sovereignty Revisited.”
Annual Review of Anthropology 35:295–315. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev
.anthro.35.081705.123317.
Harr, Adam. 2013. “Suspicious Minds: Problems of Cooperation in a Lio
Ceremonial Council.” Language & Communication 33(3):317–25. https://doi
.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2011.08.003.
Harrison, Simon. 2006. Fracturing Resemblances: Identity and Mimetic Confict in
Melanesia and the West. Oxford: Berghahn.
Hartigan, John. 2013. “Mexican Genomics and the Roots of Racial Thinking.”
Cultural Anthropology 28(3):372–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12010.
Hartikainan, Elina. 2018. “A Politics of Respect: Reconfguring Democracy in
Afro-Brazilian Religious Activism in Salvador, Brazil.” American Ethnologist
45(1):87–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12601.
Heilbron, W. 1982. “Kleine Boeren in de schaduw van de plantage: De politieke
ekonomie van de na-slaverijperiode in Suriname” (“Peasant-farmers in the
 Bibliography 251

Shadow of the Plantation: The Political Economy of the Post-slavery Period in

Surinam”). PhD diss., Erasmus University, Rotterdam.
Herdt, Gilbert. 1987. “Selfhood and Discourse in Sambia Dream Sharing.”
In Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, ed. Barbara
Tedlock, 55–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herskovits, Melville, and Frances S. Herskovits.1936. Suriname Folklore. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Hesse, Barnor. 2007. “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies.”
Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(4):643–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701356064.
– 2011. “Marked Unmarked: Black Politics and the Western Political.” South
Atlantic Quarterly 110(4):974–84. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1382366.
Hill, Jane H., and Judith T. Irvine. 1992. “Introduction.” In Responsibility
and Evidence in Oral Discourse, ed. Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine, 1–23.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoagland, Sarah L. 2007. “Denying Relationality: Epistemology and Ethics
and Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Nancy Tuana and
Shannon Sullivan, 95–118. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1965. Primitive Rebels. New York: Norton.
Hoefte, Rosemarijn. 1998. In Place of Slavery: Social History of British Indian and
Javanese Laborers in Suriname. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
– 2011. “Learning, Loving and Living in Early Twentieth-Century Suriname:
The Movement of People and Ideas from East to West.” The Journal of
Caribbean History 45(2):190–211.
– 2014a. “Mama Sranan’s Children: Ethnicity and Nation Building in
Postcolonial Suriname.” The Journal of Caribbean History 48, 1 & 2 (2014):128–48.
– 2014b. Suriname in the Long Twentieth Century: Domination, Contestation,
Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Holbraad, Martin. 2008. “Defnitive Evidence, from Cuban Gods.” The Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, S93–S109. https://doi.org/10.1111
/j.1467-9655.2008.00495.x.
– 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Holt, Thomas C. 2009.The Problem of Race in the Twenty-frst Century. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Hoogbergen, Wim, and Dirk Kruijt. 2004. “Gold, ‘Garimpeiros’ and Maroons:
Brazilian Migrants and Ethnic Relationships in Post-war Suriname.”
Caribbean Studies 32(2):3–44.
– 2005. De oorlog van de sergeanten: Surinaamse militairen in de politiek. Amsterdam:
Bert Bakker.
Honwana, Alcinda Manoel. 2002. Espíritos vivos, tradições modernas: Possessão
de espíritos e reintegração social pós-guerra no sul de Moçambique. Maputo:
Promedia.
252 Bibliography

Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. 1964. Sacrifce: Its Nature and Function.
Translated by W.D. Halls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hughes, Geoffrey F. 2020. “Envious Ethnography and the Ethnography
of Envy in Anthropology’s ‘Orient’: Towards a Theory of Envy. Ethos
48(2):192–211.
Hughes, Geoffrey F., Megnaa Mehtta, Chiara Bresciani, and Stuart Strange.
2019. “Introduction – Envy and Greed: Ugly Emotions and the Politics of
Accusation.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 37(2):1–20. https://doi.org
/10.3167/cja.2019.370202.
Hume, David. 1978 [1738]. A Treatise on Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
– 2006. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. New York: Cosimo.
Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Constitution. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Inden, Ronald B. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. “A Circumpolar Night’s Dream.” In The Perception of the
Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, 89–111. London: Routledge.
Irvine, Judith T. 1982. “The Creation of Identity in Spirit Mediumship and
Possession.” In Semantic Anthropology, ASA Monograph 22, ed. D. Parkin,
241–60. London: Academic Press.
Jackson, Shona N. 2012. Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the
Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In
Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok, 350–77. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Janzen, John M. 1978. The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
– 1992. Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Jap-a-Joe, Harold. 2005. “Afro-Surinamese Renaissance and the Rise of
Pentecostalism.” Exchange 34(2):134–48. https://doi.org/10.1163
/1572543054068550.
Jap-a-Joe, Harold, Peter Sjak Shie, and Joop Vernooij. 2001. “The Quest for
Respect: Religion and Emancipation in Twentieth-century Suriname.” In
20th Century Suriname: Continuities and Discontinuities in a New World Society,
ed. Rosemarijn Hoefte and Peter Meel, 198–219. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Jayawardena, Chandra. 1962. Confict and Solidarity in a Guianese Plantation.
London: University of London, Athlone Press.
– 1966. “Religious Belief and Social Change: Aspects of the Development of
Hinduism in British Guyana.” Comparative Studies in Society and History
8(2):211–40. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500004011.
 Bibliography 253

– 1968. “Ideology and Confict in Lower Class Communities.” Comparative

Studies in Society and History 10(4):413–46. https://doi.org/10.1017
/s0010417500005028.
Jedrej, M.C., and Rosalind Shaw. 1992. “Introduction.” In Dreaming, Religion,
and Society in Africa, ed. M.C. Jedrej and Rosalind Shaw, 1–20. Leiden: E.J.
Brill.
Johnson, Paul Christopher. 2002. Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of
Brazilian Candomblé. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
– 2014. “Towards an Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession.’” In Spirited
Things: The Work of Possession in Afro-Atlantic Religions, ed. Paul Christopher
Johnson, 23–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
– 2020. Automatic Religion: Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Jones, Graham M. 2017. Magic’s Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Judy, Ronald. 1991. “Kant and the Negro.” Surfaces 1:6–81. https://doi.org
/10.7202/1065256ar.
Kant, Immanuel. 1902. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. In Kant’s
Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 7. Deutsche Akademie Der Wissenschaften Zu
Berlin. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
– 1974. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Mary
Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
– 2002. Dreams of a Spirit Seer. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation.
– 2012. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kapila, Shruti, and Faisal Devji. 2013. “Introduction.” In Political Thought
in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.”
Language and Communication 23(2–3):409–25 https://doi.org/10.1016
/s0271-5309(03)00010-7.
– 2007. The Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
– 2008. “Others, Other Minds, and Others’ Theories of Other Minds:
An Afterword on the Psychology and Politics of Opacity Claims.”
Anthropological Quarterly 81(2):473–82. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0000.
– 2015. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Keen, Ian. 2003. “Dreams, Agency, and Traditional Authority in Northeast
Arnhem Land.” In Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the
Western Pacifc, ed. Roger Ivar Lohman, 127–48. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
254 Bibliography

Kelly, J.D. 1991. A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial

Discourse in Fiji. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Khan, Aisha. 1993. “What Is ‘a Spanish’? Ambiguity and ‘Mixed’ Ethnicity
in Trinidad.” In Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. K. Yelvington, 180–207. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press.
– 2004. Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South
Asians in Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
– 2013. “Dark Arts and Diaspora.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies
17(1):40–63. https://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.2008.0013.
Kleinman, A., P.E. Brodwin, B.J. Good, and M.-J. DelVecchio Good. 1992. “Pain
as Human Experience: An Introduction.” In Pain as Human Experience: An
Anthropological Perspective, ed. M.-J. DelVecchio Good, P.E. Brodwin, B.J.
Good, and A. Kleinman, 1–28. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Klinker, Ellen. 1997. Op hoop van vrijheid: Van slavensamenleving naar Creolse
gemeenshap in Suriname, 1839–1880. Utrecht: CLACS/IBS.
Kloss, Sinah. 2016. “Manifesting Kali’s Power: Guyanese Hinduism and the
Revitalisation of the ‘Madras Tradition.’” Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies
41(1):83–110.
Köbben, A.J.F. 1968. “Continuity in Change: Cottica Djuka Society as a
Changing System.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 124(1): 56–90.
https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379-90002884.
– 1969a. “Classifcatory Kinship and Classifcatory Status: The Cottica Djuka
of Surinam.” Man, New Series, 4(2):236–49. https://doi.org/10.2307
/2799570.
– 1969b. “Law at the Village Level: The Cottica Djuka of Surinam.” In, Law,
Culture, and Society, ed. Laura Nader. Chicago: Aldine.
– 1979. In vrijheid en gebondenheid: Samenleving en cultuur van de Djoeka aan de
Cottica. Utrecht: Centrum voor Caraïbische Studies.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the
Politics of Transspecies Engagement.” American Ethnologist 34(1):3–24.
https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3.
Kracke, Waude. 1991. “Languages of Dreaming: Anthropological Approaches to
the Study of Dreaming in Other Cultures.” In Dream Images: A Call to Mental
Arms, ed. J. Gackenbach and A. Sheikh, 103–224. Amityville, NY: Baywood.
Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and
Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lalmohamed, Bea. 1992. Hindostaanse vrouwen: De geschiedenis van zes
generaties. Utrecht: Jan van Arkel.
Lambek, Michael. 1981. Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
– 1993. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery and
Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
 Bibliography 255

– 1998. “The Sakalava Poiesis of History: Realizing the Past through Spirit
Possession in Madagascar.” American Ethnologist 25:106–27. https://doi.org
/10.1525/ae.1998.25.2.106.
– 2003. “Rheumatic Irony: Questions of Agency and Self-Deception as
Refracted through the Art of Living with Spirits.” Social Analysis (47):40–59.
https://doi.org/10.3167/015597703782353014.
Leertouwer, Lammert. 1991. “Primitive Religion in Dutch Religious Studies.”
Numen 38(2):198–213. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852791x00123.
Lenoir, J.D. 1975. “Suriname National Development and Maroon Cultural
Autonomy.” Social and Economic Studies 24(3):308–19.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. “The Sorcerer and His Magic.” In Structural
Anthropology, 167–85. New York: Basic.
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 2018 [1923]. Primitive Mentality. New York: Routledge.
Lewis, Oscar. 1969. “Culture of Poverty.” In On Understanding Poverty:
Perspectives from the Social Sciences, ed. Daniel P. Moynihan, 187–220. New
York: Basic Books.
Littlewood, Roland. 2004. “From Elsewhere: Prophetic Visions and Dreams
among the People of the Earth.” Dreaming 14(2–3):94–106. https://doi.org
/10.1037/1053-0797.14.2-3.94.
Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (The Clarendon
Edition of the Works of John Locke), ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
– 1986. The Second Treatise on Civil Government. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
Lohmann, R.I. 2003. “Supernatural Encounters of the Asabano in Two
Traditions and Three States of Consciousness.” In Dream Travelers: Sleep
Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacifc, ed. R.I. Lohmann, 189–210.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
– 2007. “Dreams and Ethnography.” In The New Science of Dreaming, vol. 3:
Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. D. Barrett and P. McNamara, 35–69.
Westport, CT: Praeger.
Lorenzen, David. 1995. “Introduction.” In Bhakti Religion in North India:
Community Identity and Political Action, 1–33. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Lucy, John A. 1999. “Refexivity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(1–2):212–15.
https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.1999.9.1-2.212.
Luhrmann, Tanya. 2012. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American
Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Vintage.
Lutz, Catherine. 2017. “What Matters.” Cultural Anthropology 32(2):181–91.
https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.2.02.
MacGaffey, Wyatt. 1988. “Complexity, Astonishment and Power: The
Visual Vocabulary of Kongo Minkisi.” Journal of Southern African Studies
14(2):188–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057078808708170.
256 Bibliography

– 2000. Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
– 2001. “Astonishment and Stickiness in Kongo Art: A Theoretical Advance.”
Res 39:137–50. https://doi.org/10.1086/resv39n1ms20167526.
Mandelbaum, David G. 1966. “Transcendental and Pragmatic Aspects of
Religion.” American Anthropologist 68(5):1174–91. https://doi.org/10.1525
/aa.1966.68.5.02a00050.
Marchand, Iris. 2012. “Dogla Politics? Questioning Ethnic Consociationalism
in Suriname’s National Elections of 25 May 2010.” Ethnic and Racial Studies
37(2):342–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.720692.
Marriott, McKim. 1990. “Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology.” In India
through Hindu Categories, ed. McKim Marriott, 1–39. New Delhi/Newbury
Park/London: Sage Publications.
Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions, or, How European
Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Matory, J. Lorand. 2007. “Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as a Metaphor in the Afro-
Atlantic Religions.” Journal of Religion in Africa 37(3):398–425. https://doi.org
/10.1163/157006607x218764.
– 2009a. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy
in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2009.
– 2009b. “The Many Who Dance in Me: Afro-Atlantic Ontology and the
Problem with ‘Transnationalism.’” In Transnational Transcendence, ed. T.
Csordas, 231–62. Berkeley: University of California Press.
– 2015. Stigma and Culture: Last-place Anxiety in Black America. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
– 2018. The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Mauss, Marcel. 1985. “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person;
The Notion of Self.” In The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy,
History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, 1–24.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McAlister, Elizabeth. 2014. “Possessing the Land for Jesus.” In Spirited Things:
The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions, ed. Paul Christopher
Johnson, 177–205. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
M’Charek, Amade. 2013. “Beyond Fact or Fiction: On the Materiality of Race
in Practice.” Cultural Anthropology 28(3):420–42. https://doi.org/10.1111
/cuan.12012.
McNeal, Keith. 2011. Trance and Modernity in the Southern Caribbean: African and
Hindu Popular Religions in Trinidad and Tobago. Gainesville: University Press
of Florida.
 Bibliography 257

– 2012. “Seeing the Eyes of God in Human Form: Iconography and

Impersonation in African and Hindu Traditions of Trance Performance in
the Southern Caribbean.” Material Religion 8(4):490–519. https://doi.org
/10.2752/175183412x13522006994854.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Meel, Peter. 1994. “Verbroederingspolitiek en nationalisme: Het dekolonisatievraagstuk
in de Surinaamse politiek.” Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der
Nederlanden 109:638–59. https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.3920.
– 1998. “Towards a Typology of Suriname Nationalism.” New West Indian
Guide 72:257–81. https://doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002593.
Mello, Marcelo Moura. 2014. “Devoções manifestas: Religião, pureza e cura
em um templo hindu da deusa Kali (Berbice, Guiana).” PhD diss., Museu
Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro.
– 2018. “Murtis em movimento: Relações entre pessoas, coisas e divindades
em um templo hindu na Guiana.” Mana 24(1):103–30. https://doi.org
/10.1590/1678-49442018v24n1p103.
– 2020. “Mimesis, dúvida e poder: Divindades hindus e espíritos de
colonizadores na Guiana.” Horizontes Antropológicos 26(56):57–86. https://
doi.org/10.1590/s0104-71832020000100004.
Meyer, Birgit, 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe
in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Mills, Charles W. 1999. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
– 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon
Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
– 2017. Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Mines, Diane P. 2005. Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and the Politics of Dignity in
a South Indian Village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mintz, Sidney W. 1971. “Groups, Group-Boundaries, and the Perception of
‘Race.’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13:437–50. https://doi.org
/10.1017/s001041750000640x.
– 1974. Caribbean Transformations. Chicago: Aldine.
– 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking.
– 1996. “Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as
Oikoumen.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(2):289–311. https://
doi.org/10.2307/3034097.
Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. 1992. The Birth of African-American
Culture: An Anthropological Approach. Boston: Beacon Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches
and Their Critics.” The American Political Science Review 85(1):77–96. https://
doi.org/10.2307/1962879.
258 Bibliography

Mittermaier, Amira. 2011. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the

Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Moran, Richard. 2001. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Morgan, Edmund S. 1975. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of
Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton.
Mullings, Leith. 2005. “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology.”
Annual Review of Anthropology 34:667–93. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev
.anthro.32.061002.093435.
Munn, Nancy. 1973. Warlpiri Iconography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
– 1992. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim
Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Munneke, Harold F. 1991. “Customary Law and National Legal System in the
Dutch-Speaking Caribbean, with Special Reference to Suriname.” Revista
Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe/European Review of Latin
American and Caribbean Studies 51:91–9.
Nabokov, Isabelle. 2000. Religion against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil
Rituals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Naipaul, V.S. 1967. The Mimic Men. London: Andre Deutsch.
Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. On the Geneaology of Morals. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Nooter, Mary H. 1993. Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals. New York:
Museum for African Art.
O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. 1984. Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Ochoa, Todd Rámon. 2010. Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise
in Cuba. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ochs, Elinor. 1979. “Transcription as Theory.” In Developmental Pragmatics, ed.
Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, 43–72. New York: Academic Press.
Oostindie, Gert. 2006. “The Study of Ethnicity in the Dutch Caribbean: Full
Circle to Furnivall?” Latin American and Ethnic Studies 1:215–30. https://doi
.org/10.1080/17442220600859445.
– 2011 [1997]. Paradijs overzee: De “Nederlandse” Caraïben en Nederland. Leiden:
KITLV Uitgeverij.
Oostindie, Gert, and Alex van Stripiaan. 1995. “Slavery and Slave Cultures in
a Hydraulic Society: Suriname.” In Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery,
ed. Stephan Palmié, 728–44. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Overing, Joanna. 1990. “The Shaman as a Maker of Worlds: Nelson Goodman in
the Amazon.” Man, New Series, 25:601–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/2803656.
 Bibliography 259

Padoux, André. 2017. The Hindu Tantric World: An Overview. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Palmié, Stephan. 2002. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban
Modernity and Tradition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
– 2006. “Thinking with Ngangas: Refections on Embodiment and the Limits
of ‘Objectively Necessary Appearances.’” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 48:852–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417506000326.
– 2007. “Is There a Model in the Muddle? ‘Creolization’ in African American
History and Anthropology.” In Creolization and Diaspora: Historical,
Ethnographic, and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. C. Stewart, 178–200. Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Shore Press.
– 2013. The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Pandya, Vishvajit. 2004. “Forest Smells and Spider Webs: Ritualized Dream
Interpretation among Andaman Islanders.” Dreaming 14(2/3):136–50.
https://doi.org/10.1037/1053-0797.14.2-3.136.
Parris, J.-Y. 2011. Interroger les morts: Essai sur le dynamisme politique des noirs
Marrons Ndjuka du Surinam et de la Guyane. Matoury: Ibis Rouge.
Parry, Jonathan. 1994. Death in Banares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paton, Diana. 2012. “Witchcraft, Poison, Law and Atlantic Slavery.” William and
Mary Quarterly 69(2):235–64. https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.69.2.0235.
– 2015. The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the
Caribbean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pedersen, Morton Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political
Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2013. “Outline for an Ethnography of Doubt.” In
Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies, ed.
Mathijs Pelkmans, 1–42. London: I.B. Tauris.
Pietz, William. 1987. “The Problem of the Fetish II: The Origin of the Fetish.”
Res 13:23–45. https://doi.org/10.1086/resv13n1ms20166762.
Pires, Rogério Brittes W. 2015. “A mása gádu köndë: Morte, espíritos e rituais
funerários em uma aldeia Sáamaka cristã.” PhD diss., PPGAS/MN/UFRJ.
– 2017. “Dinheiro, tecidos, rum e a estética do eclipsamento em Sáamaka.”
Mana 23(3):545–77. https://doi.org/10.1590/1678-49442017v23n3p545.
– 2019. “Funerals, Rhetorics, Rules and Rulers in Upper Suriname.” In Maroon
Cosmopolitics: Personhood, Creativity and Incorporation, ed. O.M.G. da Cunha,
234–67. Leiden: Brill.
Pires, Rogério Brittes W., Stuart Earle Strange, and Marcelo Moura Mello.
2018. “The Bakru Speaks.” New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
92(1–2):1–34. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134360-09201001.
Prentiss, Karen P. 1999. The Embodiment of Bhakti. New York: Oxford University
Press.
260 Bibliography

Price, Richard. 1973. “Avenging Spirits and the Structure of Saramaka

Lineages.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkekunde 129:86–107. https://
doi.org/10.1163/22134379-90002733.
– 1975. Saramaka Social Structure: Analysis of a Maroon Society in Surinam. Rio
Piedras, Puerto Rico: Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto
Rico.
– 1983. First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
– 1995. “Executing Ethnicity: The Killings in Suriname.” Cultural Anthropology
10(4):437–71. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1995.10.4.02a00010.
–, ed. 1996. “Introduction.” Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the
Americas, 1–32. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
– 2002. “Maroons in Suriname and Guyane: How Many and Where.” New
West Indian Guide 76(1–2):81–8. https://doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002544.
– 2007. Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
– 2012. Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Price, Richard, and Sally Price. 1992. Stedman’s Suriname: Life in an 18th Century
Slave Society. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Putnam, Lara. 2012. “Rites and Rumors of Race: The Circulation of
Supernatural Knowledge in the Greater Caribbean, 1890–1940.” In Obeah
and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, ed. Diana
Paton and Maarit Forde, 243–67. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Raheja, Gloria Goodwin. 1988. The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the
Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ram-Prasad, C. 1995. “Dreams and the Coherence of Experience: An Anti-
Idealist Critique from Classical Indian Philosophy.” American Philosophical
Quarterly 32(3):225–39
Ramsoedh, Hans. 2001. “Playing Politics: Ethnicity, Clientelism and the
Struggle for Power.” In Twentieth-Century Suriname: Continuities and
Discontinuities in a New World Society, ed. Rosemarijn Hoefte and Peter Meel,
91–110. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers/Leiden: KITLV Press.
– 2012. “Vertrouwen en voorspelbaarheid in de Surinaamse politiek: Een reactie
op kenmerken van politieke cultuur en politiek leiderschap in Suriname.” Oso
31:306–10.
Richman, Karen E. 2005. Migration and Vodou. Tallahassee: University Press of
Florida.
– 2014. “Possession and Attachment: Notes on Moral Communication among
Haitian Descent Groups.” In Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-
Atlantic Religions, ed. Paul Johnson, 207–23. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
 Bibliography 261

Ricœur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
– 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in Papua
New Guinea. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Robbins, Joel, and Alan Rumsey. 2008. “Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic
Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds.” Anthropological Quarterly
81(2):407–20. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0005.
Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Rocklin, Alexander. 2015. “Obeah and the Politics of Religion’s Making and
Unmaking in Colonial Trinidad.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion
83(3):697–721. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfv022.
– 2016. “‘A Hindu Is White although He Is Black’: Hindu Alterity and
the Performativity of Religion and Race between the United States and
the Caribbean.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58(1):181–210.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417515000614.
Rodney, Walter. 1981. A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Romberg, Raquel. 2014. “Mimetic Corporeality, Discourse and Indeterminacy in
Spirit Possession.” In Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic
Religions, ed. Paul Johnson, 225–56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roseman, Marina. 1991. Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar
Music and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and
Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2016. “The Original Political Society.” Hau: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory 7(2):91–128. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.2.014.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.
Samson, Ph.A. 1946. “Afgoderij als straafbaar feit.” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
27(1):371–81. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134360-90000417.
Scarry, E. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
NewYork: Oxford University Press.
Schieffelin, Edward L. 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the
Dancers. New York: St Martin’s Press.
– 1985. “Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality.” American
Ethnologist 12(4):707–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1985.12.4.02a00070.
– 1996. “On Failure in Performance: Throwing the Medium out of the
Séance.” In The Performance of Healing, ed. Carol Laderman and Marina
Roseman, 59–90. New York: Routledge.
Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of
Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
262 Bibliography

Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2011. Perplexities of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Scott, David C. 2014. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Seigel, Jerrold. 2005. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe
since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shapero, Joshua. 2019. “Authorizing Others: Spatial Routines, Oracular
Delegation, and Perspectival Politics in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca.” Ethnos
84(4):615–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2017.1383501.
Shaw, Rosalind. 1992. “Dreaming as Accomplishment: Power, the Individual
and Temne Divination.” In Dreaming, Religion, and Society in Africa, ed. M.C.
Jedrej and Rosalind Shaw, 36–54. Leiden: Brill.
Shoemaker, Sydney. 1963. Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
– 1990. “First-Person Access.” Philosophical Perspectives (4):187–214. https://
doi.org/10.2307/2214192.
Sidnell, Jack. 2000. “Primus inter Pares: Storytelling and Male Peer Groups in
a Guyanese Rum Shop.” American Ethnologist 27(1):77–99. https://doi.org
/10.1525/ae.2000.27.1.72.
– 2005. Talk and Practical Epistemology: The Social Life of Knowledge in a Caribbean
Community. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
– 2010. Conversation Analysis: An Introduction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Silverstein, Michael. 2001. “The Limits of Awareness.” In Linguistic
Anthropology: A Reader, ed. A. Duranti, 382–401. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Simmel, Georg. 1906. “The Sociology of Secrets and Secret Societies.” American
Journal of Sociology 11(4):441–98. https://doi.org/10.1086/211418.
Singer, Philip, and Enrique Araneta. 1967. “Hinduization and Creolization
in Guyana: The Plural Society and Basic Personality.” Social and Economic
Studies 16(3):221–36.
Singer, Philip, Enrique Araneta, and Jamsie Naidoo. 1973. “Learning of
Psychodynamics, History, and Diagnosis Management Therapy by a Kali
Cult Indigenous Healer in Guiana.” In The Realm of the Extra-Human: Agents
and Audiences, ed. Agehananda Bharati, 345–70. The Hague: Mouton.
Singh, Brighupati. 2012. “The Headless Horseman of Central India: Sovereignty
at Varying Thresholds of Life.” Cultural Anthropology 27(2):383–407. https://
doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01148.x.
Smedley, Audrey. 2006. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a
Worldview. 3rd edition. New York: Routledge.
Smith, Frederick M. 2006. The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South
Asian Literature and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press.
 Bibliography 263

Smith, Justin E.H. 2015. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in
Early Modern Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Smith, M.G. 1965. The Plural Society in the British West Indies. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Speckman, J.D. 1965. Marriage and Kinship among Indians in Surinam. Assen:
Van Gorcum.
Staal, Frits. 1996. Rituals and Mantras: Rules without Meaning. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass.
Stasch, Rupert. 2008. “Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political
Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology.”
Anthropological Quarterly 81(2):443–53. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0009.
– 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Stephen, Michele. 1995. A’aisa’s Gifts A Study of Magic and the Self. Berkely:
University of California Press.
Stewart, Charles. 2004. “Introduction: Dreaming as an Object of Anthropological
Analysis.” Dreaming 14(2/3):75–82. https://doi.org/10.1037/1053-0797.14.2-3.75.
– 2007. “Introduction: Creolization, History, Ethnography, Theory.” In Creolization:
History, Ethnography, Theory, 1–25. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
– 2012. Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Strange, Stuart Earle. 2014. “Animating Ndyuka: Possession, Voice, and
Politics in a Maroon Community.” Unpublished talk presented at the
American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C.
– 2016. “The Dialogical Collective: Mediumship, Pain, and the Interactive
Creation of Ndyuka Maroon Subjectivity.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 22(3):516–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12444.
– 2018. “‘It’s Your Family That Kills You’: Responsibility, Evidence, and
Misfortune in the Making of Ndyuka History.” Comparative Studies in Society
and History 60(3): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/s001041751800021x.
– 2019. “Indigenous Spirits, Pluralist Sovereignty, and the Aporia of
Surinamese Hindu Belonging.” Ethnos 84(4):642–59. https://doi.org/10.1080
/00141844.2017.1381632.
– 2021. “Vengeful Animals, Involuntary Mourning, and the Ethics of Ndyuka
Autonomy.” Cultural Anthropology 36(1):138–64. https://doi.org/10.14506
/ca36.1.06.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
– 1996. “Cutting the Network.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
2(3):517–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034901.
– 2009. “Land: Tangible or Intangible Property?” In Land Rights: Oxford Amnesty
Lectures, ed. Timothy Chesters, 13–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
264 Bibliography

– 2014. “Reading Relations Backwards.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological

Institute 20(1):3–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12076.
– 2020. Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Stroeken, Koen. 2012. Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft. New York:
Berghahn.
Suriname Census. 2012. Algemeen Bureau voor de Stastistiek in Suriname.
https://statistics-suriname.org/en/census-statistics-2012/.
Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in
Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
– 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tedlock, Barbara. 1987. “Dreaming and Dream Research.” In Dreaming:
Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, ed. Barbara Tedlock, 1–30.
Camdridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thoden van Velzen, H.U.E. 1966. “Het geloof in wraakgeesten; Bindmiddel en
splijtzwam van de Djuka matri-lineage.” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 45:45–51.
https://doi.org/10.1163/22134360-90002275.
– 1991. “Antropologie en Droomtaal.” Etnofoor 4(2):21–41.
– 1995. “Dangerous Ancestors: Ambivalent Visions of Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth Century Leaders of the Eastern Maroons of Suriname.” In Slave
Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery, ed. Stephan Palmié, 112–44. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press.
Thoden van Velzen, H.U.E., and W. Hoogbergen. 2011. Een zwarte vrijstaat in
Suriname: De Okaanse samenleving in de 18E Eeuw. Leiden: KITLV.
Thoden van Velzen, H.U.E., and Wilhelmina van Wetering. 2004. In the Shadow
of the Oracle: Religion as Politics in a Suriname Maroon Society. Long Grove, IL:
Waveland Press.
– 2007. “Violent Witch Finders and the Suspension of Social Order in a
Suriname Maroon Society.” In Wildness and Sensation: Anthropology of
Sinister and Sensuous Realms, ed. Rob van Ginkel and Alex Strating, 157–76.
Apeldoorn: Het Spinhuis.
– 2013. Een zwart vrijstaat in Suriname: De Okaanse samenleven in de negentiede
en twinstige eeuw. Leiden: Brill.
Thomas, Deborah A. 2004. Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the
Politics of Culture in Jamaica. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
– 2008. “Racial Situations: Nationalist Vindication and Radical
Deconstructionism.” Cultural Anthropology 28(3):519–26. https://doi.org
/10.1111/cuan.12018.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1997. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
History. Boston: Beacon.
 Bibliography 265

– 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York:
Palgrave.
Turner, Victor. 1968. The Drums of Affiction: A Study of Religious Processes among
the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
– 1975. Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual: Symbol, Myth, and Ritual.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of
Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: John Murray.
Urban, Greg. 1987. “The ‘I’ of Discourse.” Working Papers and Proceedings of the
Center for Psychosocial Studies, Chicago 10:27–51.
– 1996. Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
van der Burg, Corstiaan, and Peter van der Veer. 1986. “Pandits, Power, and
Profts: Religious Organization and the Construction of Identity among the
Surinamese Hindus.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 9(4):514–28. https://doi.org
/10.1080/01419870.1986.9993549.
van der Pijl, I.H. 2003. “Room to Roam: Afro-Surinamese Identifcations and
the Creole Multiple Self.” FOCAAL:105–16.
– 2010. Levende doden: Afrikaans-Surinaamse percepties, praktijken en rituelen
rondom de dood (tweede druk). Amsterdam: IBS/Rozenburg Publishers.
– 2016. “Death in the Family Revisited – Ritual Expression and Controversy
in a Creole Transnational Mortuary Sphere.” Ethnography 17(2):147–67.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138116647226.
van der Veer, Peter. 1988. Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience
and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre. London: Athlone Press.
– 1991. “Religious Therapies and Their Valuation among Surinamese
Hindustani in the Netherlands.” In Oxford University Papers on India. Vol. II:
The Modern Western Diaspora, 36–57. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
van der Veer, Peter, and Steven Vertovec. 1991. “Brahmanism Abroad: On
Caribbean Hinduism as an Ethnic Religion.” Ethnology 30(2):149–66.
https://doi.org/10.2307/3773407.
van Lier, Rudolf. 1971. Frontier Society: A Social Analysis of the History of
Suriname. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
van Stripiaan, Alex. 1993. Surinaams contrast: Roofbouw en overleven in een
Caraïbische plantagekolonie, 1750–1863. Leiden: KITLV Press.
van Wetering, Wilhelmina. 1996. “Witchcraft among the Tapanahoni Djuka.”
In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 370–88.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Vernon, Diane. 1985. Money Magic in a Modernizing Maroon Society. Tokyo:
ILCAA.
– 1992. Les représentations du corp chez les noirs Marrons Ndjuka du Suriname et la
Guyane Française. Paris: Éditions de I’ORSTOM.
266 Bibliography

– 1993. “Choses de la forêt: Identité et thérapie chez les Noirs Marrons

Ndjuka du Suriname.” In Jeux D’Identités: Études comparatives à partir de
la Caraïbe, ed. Marie-José Jolivet and Diana Rey-Hulman, 261–81. Paris:
L’Harmattan.
Vertovec, Steven. 1992. Hindu Trinidad: Religion, Ethnicity and Socio-economic
Change. London: Macmillan Caribbean.
Vial, Theodore. 2016. Modern Religion, Modern Race. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Wagner, Roy. 1986. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
– 1991. “The Fractal Person.” In Big Men and Great Men: Personifcations of
Power in Melanesia, ed. Maurice Godelier, 159–73. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Walker, Harry. 2013. Under a Watchful Eye: Self, Power, and Intimacy in Amazonia.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wekker, Gloria. 2006. The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-
Surinamese Diaspora. New York: Columbia University Press.
Willerslev, Rane. 2004. “Spirits as ‘Ready to Hand’: A Phenomenological
Analysis of Yukaghir Spiritual Knowledge and Dreaming.” Anthropological
Theory 4(4):395–418. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499604047918.
Willford, Andrew C. 2006. Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in
Malaysia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Williams, Brackette F. 1990. “Dutchman Ghosts and the History Mystery:
Ritual, Colonizer, and Colonized Interpretations of the 1763 Berbice Slave
Rebellion.” Journal of Historical Sociology 3:133–65. https://doi.org
/10.1111/j.1467-6443.1990.tb00094.x.
– 1991. Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural
Struggle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Wilson, Peter J. 1973. Crab Antics: A Caribbean Case Study of the Confict between
Reputation and Respectability. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Wirtz, Kristina. 2005. Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería:
Speaking a Sacred World. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
– 2007. “Making Sense of Unintelligible Messages: Co-construction of
Meaning in Santería Rituals.” Text & Talk 27:435–62. https://doi.org
/10.1515/text.2007.019.
– 2014. Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and
History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty. New York: Harper & Row.
Wolfe, Patrick. 2016. Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. New York:
Verso.
 Bibliography 267

Wooding, Charles J. 2013. Winti: Een Afroamerikaanse godsdienst in Suriname.

Rotterdam: Uitgeverij Dubois.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003.“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom:
Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.” CR:
The New Centennial Review 3(3):257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
Yelle, Robert. 2003. Explaining Mantras: Ritual, Rhetoric, and the Dream of a
Natural Language in Hindu Tantra. New York: Routledge.
Younger, Paul. 2010. New Homelands: Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana,
Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zhuangzi. 2009. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings: With Selections from Traditional
Commentaries, Brook Ziporyn Translator. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
This page intentionally left blank
Index
Italicized page numbers indicate figures.
Abeni, Ma, 179–84
ablutions. See washing, ritual
abstinence, 71, 150
accidents, 50, 51, 54, 94, 220
accountability. See responsibility
accusations, 221; demons and, 200; of
envy, jealousy, and greed, 196, 202,
207–8; racecraft and, 194; racially
reversible, 205; of witchcraft, 157, 197
Aduna, Da (medium), 106
Adyuba, Sa, 179–81
aesthetics, 117, 204
affects, epistemic, 5–6, 19–22, 25;
clash of, 194; “co-presence” and,
21; physical symptoms and range
of, 20; as sensation of risk, 220
affordance, 170–1
African: criticism of Europeans,
23; “cults of affiction,” 140;
enslavement, 6–8, 22, 56, 189; Hindu
deities appearing as, 163; ports, 106;
war medicines (Kumanti), 98
Afro-Surinamese: claims of
entitlement, 45, 199; infuence of,
48, 64; rainforest and, 114. See also
Creoles; Ndyuka; Maroons
Agamben, Giorgio, 52
agency: human, 169–70; of others,
117, 123, 136, 168, 184; personal,
95, 186, 215, 219–20; of place, 32–4;
of spirits, 94, 116
aggression, 14, 33, 213, 220, 225
Agidibo, 188; on endogamy, 197; on
exclusivity of spirit knowledge,
100; failed consultation with, 190,
211; as fraud, 213
agriculture, 39, 46, 99, 199
akaa spirits, 93–5, 122, 174, 219. See
also soul; spirits
Akalali, 101, 104, 141
alcohol, 106, 122, 150, 236n17; beer,
94, 108, 111, 123, 191–2; liquor, 51,
82, 114; rum, 52, 121, 123, 165
altars, 113–17, 115, 127, 238n2; home,
82, 156; portable, 119, 123; at Sri
Shakti Mandir, 71
altered solidarities, 211
alterity, 83, 168
Amerindians, 7, 45, 48, 57; dreams
about, 177. See also spirits
Ampuku spirits, 109, 115, 178; in
dreams, 176, 178; obiya and, 98,
181; possession, 118; Sáamaka and,
107; taboo and, 37. See also spirits
270 Index
amulets, 118–19
Anadharaishvara, 72
analogism, 24, 116, 146–7
ancestors, 26, 32; achievements of,
197; corporate ownership and,
33; exploitation of, 45, 126, 196;
inheritance from, 102; liberty and
rights of, 10, 34; racecraft and, 189;
war medicine and, 106, 111
André, 188, 190
androgyne, 72
animals, 32–3, 35, 37, 73; anteaters,
37–8; birds, 109, 112, 120–1, 177,
191; demons as, 181; dogs, 93, 129,
175; in dreams, 167, 176–8; fsh, 32,
51, 71, 150; snakes, 72, 93, 149
Anjali (medium), 4–5, 51, 162;
racecraft and, 200–2, 209–10
Antony, Da, 174–5
aporia, 19–20, 45, 58; existential, 173;
over contingent success, 56
architecture, 60
Arti (medium), 143, 150–9
Asabieng, Da, 33, 41
Asaimundu, Da, 181
Asasi, Da, 104
asceticism, 60, 151, 156
Asians, 45, 47, 204; indenture of, 6,
8, 63
astrology, 3, 55, 65, 80, 144
asymmetry: between mediums and
patients, 221; between spirits and
humans, 100, 136, 155, 170, 213
atonement, 149
auspiciousness, 54–5, 65, 123, 145
authority: ancestral, 105, 107, 110,
117; Brahminical, 49, 54, 56, 66;
over family, 50, 66; gerontocratic,
28, 42–3, 132; of mediums, 220–1;
Ndyuka, 108; of racecraft, 215;
revision of, 224; over the self,
16–17, 23, 171, 213; signs of, 116;
of spirits, 84, 149, 171, 211; of the
state, 9, 41, 48, 53
autonomy, 140, 219; intrusions on,
38; mutually assured, 34; personal,
28, 39, 184; territorial, 41
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 94
bakuu. See demons
basiya, 31, 117, 176
bauxite (mineral), 7, 10, 177
bée. See kinship
belief, 20, 25; effcacy and, 68–9;
Hindu emphasis on, 49, 69; in
labour, 71; universalized, 57
belonging, 8, 40–1, 223; through
culpability, 36; doubts about, 50,
195; responsibility and, 222; signs
of, 189; state authority over, 9, 12;
suffering as proof of, 41, 139
Ben, Ba, 100, 188, 190, 213
Benko, 197
BEP (Brotherhood and Unity Party),
106
Berbice (Guyana), 151
Bhagavad Gita, 64, 145
bhagwan. See deities
Bhairo, 54, 72–3, 77–88
bhakti, 64, 70–1, 73, 142, 232–3n1
birthplace, 91, 93, 176, 217
Blackness, 200, 203
body, the, 63, 70; altars and, 116;
amulets and, 118, 123; attachment
to, 157; as “house,” 93, 120;
pain and, 127, 135, 139, 153;
phenotypical diversity of, 204,
222; as place, 37; possession and,
75, 79, 158; social relations and,
126, 133, 141; surface of, 158, 168,
204, 211; symbolic, 73
Bollywood, 60, 204
bonuman. See mediums
Boonmila, Da, 99–100, 179

Borges, Jorge Luis, 220
boss, 31, 112
Bouterse, Dési, 11, 228n11
Brahma, 77, 200
Brian (medium), 76, 88
Brotherhood and Unity Party. See BEP
Brunswijk, Ronnie, 102
Bubandt, Nils, 18, 20
busi. See rainforest
capacity (kakiti), 43, 98
capitalism, 11, 43; racial, 8, 198, 210,
222
carry-oracle. See oracle
Cassam, Quassim, 16
Chandrapal, 167
chanting, 150–1, 156–7. See also
mantra
Chinese, 7, 26, 43, 60, 238n3
Christianity, 7, 13, 47, 52; austere,
198; conversion to, 44, 64, 149;
“idolatry” and, 57, 198. See also
Pentecostalism
civil war, Surinamese, 42, 196,
235–6n12
class, 58, 206, 210
clay, kaolin (pemba), 115, 120, 137,
192
colonial state, 9, 32, 49, 189
colonialism, 223; Dutch, 6, 9–10,
12, 49–50; insignia from, 117;
plantation, 23, 28, 195, 202
Commewijne district, 61
communication, phenomenology
of, 170
competition, ethno-racial, 11, 53, 194,
207, 212
consciousness, 135, 161, 168; altered
states of, 186; as attributable to
spirits, 94; encompassment of, 89;
refexivity and, 16; as residue of
relations, 220
Index 271
contradictions: in dreams, 168, 172;
of Enlightenment thinkers, 223–5;
of race, 224; respectability and,
223; revolution and, 101; ritual
resolution of, 45, 70
conversation, 136, 201; analysis,
169–70
cosmology, Hindu, 149, 169, 172
Cottica River, 31
Creoles, Afro-Surinamese, 7, 18, 46,
48; Christian, 7, 57; emancipation
of, 9; prejudices of, 196
criminality, 197, 199; occult, 79, 202
culpability. See responsibility
curse (fuka), 34, 38, 149
dances (pée), 14, 102
darshan. See gaze
death: compliments and, 201; by
murder, 98, 138; personal spirits
and, 93; premature, 14, 54, 175;
by self-evaluation, 65; vengeance
as, 39
deception, 174, 207, 215
deities, 4, 54, 56, 73; complexions
of, 204; dependency on, 150; false
(maya devi), 62, 172; favoured
(istadewta), 55; images of,
71–3; limited pantheon of, 47;
personifying family relations, 144;
places sacred to, 49; planetary, 144;
Puranic, 55, 60, 146; serpent (nag),
54, 149, 151; talismans and, 81; as
variant transformations, 83
deities, Hindu: Anadharaishvara, 72;
Bhairo, 54, 72–3, 77–88; Brahma,
77, 200; Chandrapal, 167; Dih, 50;
Durga, 4, 69, 72, 74, 164; Ganga,
73, 147; Hanuman, 72, 87; Kali,
59, 68, 73, 143, 168; Kateri, 60,
73, 85, 147, 167; Krishna, 162;
Lakshmi, 69; Parvati, 72; Ram, 199;
272 Index
Sanganni, 60, 73, 77, 147; Shani,
148; Sita, 199; Vishnu, 233n1. See
also Shiva
Demerara (Guyana), 77
demons, 43, 54, 60, 67; death ascribed
to, 176; in dreams, 181; exorcism
of, 121–2; Hindu statuary as, 198;
illicit wealth and, 42, 84, 118, 198;
Ndyuka success ascribed to, 200;
Puranic, 146; racecraft and, 83;
relation to land, 84; source of, 205
Descartes, René, 22
deservedness, 11, 205, 214
desire, 39, 89, 94, 154, 157; as
covetous gaze, 202
destiny, 64, 149, 169, 219; collective,
113, 139; hereditary, 17, 213;
personal, 65, 89; submission to, 150
development, national, 10–11, 41, 47,
195, 199
devils. See demons
devotion: as labour, 71, 82, 89, 219;
mediumship and, 85, 217; pain
and, 143, 154, 158
dialogue: of councils, 108;
mediumship and, 190;
responsibility as, 218; self-
knowledge and, 168, 223; between
spirits, 107
dignity, 22, 23, 38, 113, 202; egalitarian,
66, 194; racecraft and, 203, 206
Dih, 50
discrimination: against
Amerindians, 47–8, 71; against
Indo-Surinamese, 198–9; against
Maroons, 12, 195–6, 199–201,
239n8; against people of African
descent, 203. See also prejudice
dispossession, 8–9
dissimulation. See deception
divination, 67, 97, 103–4
dogla, 182, 204
Dominiki (medium), 235–6n12
doubt, 20–1; about belonging,
45–6, 48, 223; creative force of,
169; about dreams, 164, 173; about
human understanding, 92; about
moral obligations, 38; provoked
by pain, 135, 141; about ritual
effcacy, 124, 155, 212; of state
sovereignty, 31. See also self-doubt
dreams, 29; about animals, 178; as
communal spaces, 187; in councils,
109; dialogism of, 168; inscrutability
of, 173, 185–6; interpersonal
relations and, 162, 176;
interpretation of, 161, 174–5, 184;
meaning in, 171–4, 178; Ndyuka
subjectivity and, 173; opacity
of, 161, 186–7; pain and, 168;
phenomenology of, 161; possession
and, 179; as revelation, 160–1, 163;
in South Asia, 162; spirits in, 51, 80;
symbolism of, 162; as warnings, 175
Du Bois, W.E.B., 205
Durga, 4, 69, 72, 74, 164
earth. See land
effacement, 69, 135, 151, 158
egalitarianism, 63–4, 69, 78–9, 202–3;
challenges to, 221; ressentiment
and, 206, 210
Ekspidisi, Da. See Espee, Da
Elana, Sa, 160–1, 174–5
encompassment: Brahminical, 55;
possession and, 89, 150; in Shakti
devotionalism, 142, 155, 157
Enlightenment, European, 223–5,
230n20
enstoolment, 105, 117
envy, 201–2, 205–7; within ethno-
racial groups, 207–8
epistemic affects. See affects,
epistemic

Espee, Da (medium), 217, 225
ethics: egalitarian, 203, 210;
Enlightenment, 225; mutual
respect and, 38, 207–8, 221; of non-
interference, 203; racecraft and, 206
evil eye, the, 67, 201
exceptionalism: ethical, 207;
European, 17; Indo-Surinamese,
47, 56, 58, 199, 212
exclusion, 8, 189, 200, 203
exorcism, 44, 84, 111, 120, 181
extraction, natural resource, 10, 30,
42, 56
eye contact, 3
eye pass, 66, 233n2
famii. See kinship
Fanon, Frantz, 205
farming. See agriculture
fasting, 71, 77, 82, 150
feedback affrmations (piki), 108, 190
Fields, Barbara, and Karen Fields, 23
flm, 60, 62
fre walking, 77
fags, 31, 53, 55, 114, 239n6
foraging, 32, 35
forest spirits. See Ampuku spirits
fortune, 69, 71, 103, 201
framing, 136, 155, 173, 186, 214
fraud, 14, 103, 158, 213–14
freedom, 7, 34, 186, 219, 223
French Guiana, 42, 106–7, 149
Freud, Sigmund, 19, 22
funerals, 27, 47, 122
Gáan Gadu, 234–5n6, 241n16
Gáangá (prophet), 42
Ganga, 73, 147
gaslighting, 169
gaze, 73, 202, 234n7
gender, 66, 73, 77, 96, 131
Georgetown (Guyana), 77
Index 273
gerontocracy, 28, 31, 130, 132
gesture, 76, 94, 108, 113, 138
ghosts: as “Dutchmen,” 50; of
animals, 149; in dreams, 180; of
victims of premature death, 54, 98
giants, 177–8
Giofani, Ba, 107
Godo Olo, 27
gods. See deities
gold, 31, 42–3, 95; mediumship and,
14, 79, 95; mining, 42, 102, 118,
192; price of, 43
Gomes da Cunha, Olívia, 32
goonmama spirits, 119
gossip, 62, 77, 144
greed, 14, 35, 67, 101; Indo-
Surinamese, 197; Maroon, 202,
213; witch’s, 103, 198
grimoire, 67, 149
guilt, 24, 29, 179; absence of, 79;
collective, 35, 38, 99; metaphysical,
213; of perceived victimizers, 206
Guru. See Kissoondial, Guru
(medium)
Guyana, 11, 77, 240n11; migration
from, 60, 151; Shakti mediumship
in, 60, 62, 151
Haiti, 7, 191, 199
Hanuman, 72, 87
healing, 139; Hindu, 4, 59, 67, 81,
157; Ndyuka, 97, 101, 118, 124;
shrines, 91, 99, 114
heathens, 14
Hegel, G.W.F., 17
Henny, Da, 103, 105
hierarchy: cosmic, 71; of
deservingness, 10; historical logics
of, 224; moral, 11, 144, 206; racial,
8, 58, 69, 195, 207; spiritual, 49, 154
Hinduism: Arya Samaj, 49, 142, 156;
Sanatan Dharm, 4, 45, 62, 142, 198;
274 Index

universalist, 56–7; unorthodox, 45, inequality, 42–3, 66, 207

49, 56. See also Shakti (Hinduism) infdelity, 197, 212
Hindustanis. See Indo-Surinamese insanity, 110, 165
history: colonial, 6, 22; Ndyuka, 98, intentions, hidden, 174, 203, 221
101, 126, 224 interdependence, 38, 130, 142, 185, 202
Hobbes, Thomas, 17 interiority, 124, 162, 186
Holy Ghost (Bun Yeye), 44 intersubjectivity, 18, 116, 141–2, 155;
honour (ijjat), 64, 205, 211, 213; attunement of, 205; negative, 209,
identity and, 47, 64 222; racecraft and, 214; repair and,
householding, 47, 55, 81; joint 170
families and, 9; masculinity and, intimacy, 144, 214
212; morality and, 82, 144, 213; invocation (nyanfalu), 30, 110, 119,
otherness and, 57 137–8
houses, 34, 55, 84, 163 irony, 185, 215; of belonging, 222;
Hume, David, 16, 22, 225 dreams and, 187; of ethno-
humility, 76, 92 racial denunciations, 207, 209;
mediumistic, 210; racecraft and,
identity, 47–8, 55–6; attachment to, 189, 200, 203, 215; self-knowledge
150; communal, 209; confrmation and, 223
of, 109–10; continuity of, 65; Irvine, Judith, 21
Hindu, 64; overlapping, 134; Islam, 13, 47, 64, 198
pain and, 126, 136; as severed
from physical appearance, 210; Jackson, Shona, 11
unveiled in dreams, 177 jajman, 47
ideology, 11–12, 92, 140 James, William, 16
ignorance, 39, 123; conversion of, Javanese, 7, 14, 238n3
127, 215; of divinity, 148, 154; race jealousy, 14, 67, 126, 197
as, 205; of ritual knowledge, 91; Jesus, 44, 193
weaponized, 25 John (Willems), Da, 27, 93–4, 95; on
illness, 60, 68, 144, 146, 164 dreams, 174; on permission, 34;
illusion, 155, 163, 173, 185 preparing obiya, 98
immateriality, 155, 157 Johnson, Paul C., 24
incarnation: bhakti and, 64; of evil,
83; of lineage, 95, 132; self- kabiten (titleholder), 31, 33, 41, 117
knowledge as, 215, 218 Kali, 59, 68, 73, 143, 168
indenture, 6, 46, 62–3 Kango, 107
Inderjal, 67, 149 Kant, Immanuel, 17, 22–3, 223, 225
India, 49–50, 59 kaolin. See clay
Indo-Surinamese: economic success karma, 65
of, 57, 199, 200; ideals, 9, 28, 89, 144; Kateri, 60, 73, 85, 147, 167
mediums, 51; prejudices of, 12, 57, Keane, Webb, 15
71, 199, 201; respectability, 52 Ketu, 146–8

Khan, Aisha, 232n14
kinship: auspicious, 65; joint
families, 47, 144; matrilineal,
33, 99, 108, 131–2; and Ndyuka
selfhood, 95; obligation and, 130;
pain and, 126; palwar, 50; patients
and, 101; patrilineal, 66; political,
35, 43, 126
Kissoondial, Guru (medium), 59,
60–2, 69, 72–3; manifesting Shiva,
152, 171; performing a puja, 61;
suffering and, 146–8
knowledge: ancestral, 92, 113; denial
of, 91–2; through dreams, 163;
imbalance of, 68; limits of, 131,
172; ritual, 66, 70, 101, 119. See also
self-knowledge
Kodyo, Pa, 118, 127–31, 135–6, 179–84
Krishna, 162
Kumar, 188, 190, 197, 211–14
kumbam, 73
kunu. See spirits
Kwakwaka’wakw, 21
Kwasi, Da, 106–7, 109, 236n17
Lachmon, Jaganath, 30, 230n1
Lakshmi (deity), 69
Lakshmi (medium), 68–9, 163–4
land: belonging to, 9, 30–2, 223;
claims to, 199; exploitation of, 10,
42, 44, 56–7; ownership, 28, 33,
38, 42, 46; as sentient, 34, 40–2, 44,
48, 50; spirits, 31, 33–4, 51, 53, 84;
wrongs against, 36
language: Akan, 106; Dutch, 26, 160,
165, 196; English, 7, 78, 125, 165;
Guyanese English (“Creolese”),
78; Hindi, 66, 78, 145; Javanese,
7; KiKongo, 106; Mandarin, 7;
Ndyuka, 7, 126, 139; Sáamaka, 7,
107; Sanskrit, 66, 156; Sarnami,
143; spirit (Kumanti, Ampuku,
Index 275
Papa), 106–7, 120, 137, 188;
Sranan, 7, 26–7, 54, 127
Lanti Wenti, Da, 137, 190
law, 41, 44
leaves. See plants
legitimacy: of belonging, 40, 45;
dreams and, 178; insecurity about,
19; of mediumship, 5, 62, 89, 105,
145; of ritual knowledge, 102, 123;
of the state, 9, 31, 224
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 21
libation, 31, 34, 54, 106, 134
lineage, 31, 35, 37; land and, 34, 38–9;
nenseki and, 93. See also authority,
ancestral; destiny
linguistic anthropology, 27
linguistics, 16
Locke, John, 17, 22, 223, 228–9n15
lukuman. See mediums
MacGaffey, Wyatt, 115
magic, 55, 59, 168; black, 8, 13, 61,
235n11; love potions, 202; spells, 5,
67. See also witchcraft
Mahabharata, 162
Mahashivratri (festival), 171
Maluku, 20
Mangwa, Da (medium), 137, 176,
188, 212; altar of, 114; on obliging
akaa spirits, 94
mannengee obiya, 111
mantra, 80, 88, 151, 237nn14–15;
dedication and, 156–7; during
puja, 74; possession and, 77. See
also chanting
Marienberg, 61, 151
Markus, Ba, 120, 117–23, 218
Maroni River, 31, 106
Maroons: absorption into state
economy, 11; political autonomy
of, 8–9, 41; prejudices of, 197–9,
212; Sáamaka, 107, 175; suspicion
276 Index
of coastal peoples, 196; suspicion
of Indo-Surinamese, 12; territorial
sovereignty of, 41. See also Ndyuka
marriage, 47, 62, 65
Marx, Karl, 22
Masáa, 106, 107
masculinity: Hindu, 82, 144–5, 194,
197, 211; Ndyuka, 104
materiality, 117, 154; of the body, 133,
204, 221. See also ritual materials
Matodya, Gazon, 42
matrilineage (lô). See kinship
Mauss, Marcel, 17
medicine: allopathic, 67, 145, 196;
Ampuku, 181; Indic, 162; Kumanti
war, 98, 106. See also obiya
meditation, 68, 163
mediums: Afro-Surinamese, 62,
101, 151; appellations for, 13; as
“horses,” 127, 139, 182–3, 213;
consultations with, 3–4, 13, 70,
76, 127; ethno-racial backgrounds
of, 14; Guyanese, 27, 62, 156, 163;
healing and, 4, 14, 80, 97, 112, 134;
initiatory exclamations of, 139;
interruption and, 170; Ndyuka,
96, 103; partial amnesia of, 139;
selfhood and, 18
mediumship, 5; accoutrements of,
115; compensation for, 118, 167,
192, 213, 232n11; conversational
repair and, 170; failed, 113,
236n17; Guyanese-style, 60–1;
Hindu Shakti, 60–3, 70, 145,
158, 165; interactive character
of, 21–2; irony and, 183, 210–11;
performance of, 21, 135, 138, 155,
217; possession and, 21; in public
life, 14, 232n18; suffering and
induction into, 137, 140–1, 148,
151, 159, 177; as superstition, 13;
validity of, 104. See also mediums
Mello, Marcelo, 198
menstruation, 118
Messi, Lionel, 190
metaphysics: Hindu, 28, 64, 224;
Ndyuka, 123
middle passage, 106
mining. See extraction, natural resource
Mintz, Sidney, 24
misfortune, 15, 103, 151, 221;
collective, 58; demons and, 84;
intimacy and, 101, 142; kin-
mediated, 39; transference of, 219
mistrust, 6, 8, 19, 96, 212
mixed race, 7, 196
modernity, 22, 24–5, 140, 145
money: as coins in ritual, 87, 111;
physical risk and, 43; Surinamese
currency, 30. See also mediumship,
compensation for
Moran, Richard, 15, 185, 218
Mother Earth (Bhumi Devi, Dharti
Mai), 153, 157
Muslim. See Islam
mythology, 145–7, 219
Nag Panchami (festival), 149
nasi. See spirits
Ndyuka: councils (kuutu),
108–9, 117–19; guerrillas, 196;
intergenerational inequality,
42–3, 130; migration, 28, 44,
100; morality, 34–5, 37, 99–100;
personhood, 36, 39, 93, 119;
pessimism, 104; prayers, 119;
prophetic movements, 42–3,
101, 224; proverbs (odoo), 32, 40,
109, 174; relation to land, 32–3,
39–40; self-knowledge, 95; stories,
35–8, 94, 109–10, 196; territorial
sovereignty, 8, 31, 40–2, 231n8–9;
titleholders, 42, 117; urban life and,
102; women, 44

nenseki. See spirits
Netherlands, the, 67, 101, 171, 182
Ngobaya Ondoo, 106
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22
Nieuw Nickerie, 55
Nyoni, Sa, 127–36, 141, 159, 218
oath, 75, 77, 122, 192
obiya, 97–8, 235n8; bath, 109; effcacy
of, 111–12, 200; opinions on, 102;
oracles and, 105; preparation
of, 98; recipes, 97–8, 112, 119,
182; rituals, 117–23, 123. See also
healing, shrines
obiyaman. See mediums
objectifcation: of moral divisions, 208;
of pain, 159; of the self, 6, 16, 76, 221
offering (puja), 51–2, 61, 70, 73; of
food, 73, 119, 175. See also sacrifce
Ogíi, Tata, 42, 235n9, 241n16. See also
Gáangá
ojha. See witchcraft
omens, 179
ontology: of accusation, 194; of
collective belonging, 39; of interethnic
interrelatedness, 211; of knowledge,
92; Ndyuka relational, 95, 211
opacity, 14–19, 92; of the body, 158,
204; claims, 15, 220; of dreams,
161, 186–7; intersubjective, 20, 25,
69, 217; of objects, 116; of others,
96, 189, 215; pain and, 125, 159; of
property rights, 31; of scholarly
intent, 26; of the self, 16, 23, 89,
110, 173, 217
oracle (tyai-a-ede), 96, 105–8
otherness, 47, 57, 165, 211;
establishment of, 152; selfhood
and, 15, 22, 219
pain, 28, 68, 80; accepting, 155;
dreams and, 168, 171; Ndyuka
Index 277
conceptions of, 125–7; as parallel
between medium and devotee,
173; relational qualities of, 126,
130–3; transformation of, 125, 150;
vocalization of, 138–40
pandits, 46–7, 55, 59, 62, 145
Papa. See spirits
paradox, 161, 173, 207
Paramaribo, 13, 26, 42, 100, 198
paramount chief, 31, 112, 228n11
Parvati, 72
pastors, 12, 44
péesi. See land
pemba. See clay
Pentecostalism, 44, 102, 151
phenomenology: of communication,
170; of dreams, 186; of pain, 139
phenotype. See body, the
philosophy, 17, 20, 162
piety, 79, 89, 144, 146, 150
Pires, Rogério, 198
place, 36, 119. See also land
plantations, 6, 22–3, 46. See also
colonialism, plantation
plants, 97, 105, 111, 119, 180. See also
ritual materials
Plato, 154
pluralism, 7, 30, 46, 57–8
politics, 11; electoral, 102; European,
48, 225; Maroon, 9, 11; post-
colonial, 210; traditional Ndyuka,
43, 108, 127, 130, 160
polyphony, 94–5, 136
possession, 25, 54, 69, 150; as
challenge to the autonomous self,
223–5; dehumanization and, 24;
dreams and, 179; language and,
106–7, 138; legitimacy of, 89, 178;
misfortune and, 168; reluctance
and, 77, 140; Shakti, 75; suitability
for, 110; vibration and, 77, 152
poverty, 10, 35, 42, 64, 150
278 Index
prayer beads, 74
prejudice: as deprivation of resources,
197; reversibility of, 198–200, 205.
See also discrimination
Priya, 201
prohibitions, 37, 41, 71, 97; against
animal sacrifce, 55, 62; hunting,
37; sexual, 239n7
puja. See offering
pujaris, 62; criticism of female, 77–8;
“doing devotion,” 73; gestures of,
76; mantra and, 88; respectability
and, 70, 78; uniforms of, 71
purity, 62, 66, 71, 73; possession and,
78; ritual, 144
racecraft, 23–5, 29; care and, 203, 209;
colonial, 47; criminality and, 197;
demons and, 83; egalitarianism
and, 206; as ethno-racial self-
defence, 199, 214; hazardous labour
and, 43; heredity and, 189; as
inversion of mediumship, 189–90,
211, 214–15, 221–2; moral character
and, 201, 204; possession and, 25–6;
as rhetoric, 188, 200; as shifting of
“natural” categories, 224
racial capitalism. See capitalism
racialization, 8, 23–4, 46, 188; and
denial of self-refection, 225; of
landscape, 56; morality and, 205;
of spirit others, 57; tools of, 200
racism, 23, 195, 199, 204, 206
racists, 238n1; as targets of
deception, 215
Rahu, 146–8
rainforest, 9, 10, 30, 52; as refuge, 7;
as therapeutic, 114
Rajeev (medium), 68, 163
Ram, 199
Ramayana, 199
Ramesh (medium), 156
Ravan, 199–200
reality, co-construction of, 135, 183
reason, 225
reciprocity, 35, 37, 170, 209, 222
recognition, mutual, 38, 99, 205
refexivity: doubt and, 16–18, 90; of
dreams, 161; social consciousness
and, 221
relatedness, 160, 174
relationality, denial of, 209
repair, conversational, 170
respectability: affronts to, 213;
competition over, 66, 198; for
land, 35, 40, 99; for leadership, 78;
mutual, 203, 221; Ndyuka, 38, 39;
self, 203, 212; as warning, 202
responsibility, 217–19; belonging
and, 222; collective, 141, 206,
212, 222; elucidation of, 184–5;
intergenerational, 36, 38, 40;
kinship and, 103, 187; to land, 223;
pain and, 149; signs of, 189
ressentiment, 206, 210
revelation, 25; Hindu, 66, 76, 146,
173; Ndyuka, 92, 102; opposed,
211; Shakti, 150
ritual: apotropaic, 49, 59; effcacy
of, 20, 68, 77, 102, 135; Hindu, 45,
48–9, 56, 65; Ndyuka, 28, 93, 110;
Shakti, 28, 69, 71, 147, 158; songs,
91; sweeping (jharai), 67–8, 73, 82,
164; urban adaptation of, 102. See
also washing, ritual
ritual materials: bottles, 114, 116–17;
camphor, 75; coconuts, 73–4;
detergent, 119; dhar water, 76,
79–80; dirt, 80, 192; “dye water,”
75; fabric, 122; limes, 80, 81, 86;
neem brush, 82, 84, 164; palms,
121; perfume, 127, 182; powders,
164–5; “stench water,” 119–21;
sweet rice, 79, 81. See also plants

ritual specialists, 13, 67, 232n18
Robby, Da, 184, 234n3
Robinson, Cedric, 205
rubber, 11
rules, 36–7, 97, 110
sacrifce, 46, 48–52, 56, 59; animal,
55, 120–1, 151; fre, 145; secret, 14.
See also offering (puja)
Sako, Da (medium), 117–23, 120,
127–31, 128, 179–83
Sanatan Dharm. See Hinduism
Sanganni, 60, 73, 77, 147
Saramacca River, 197
Saraswati, 86
Scarry, Elaine, 133, 140
scepticism: European, 22; Hindu, 66–
7, 69, 82, 89, 213; of mediumship,
4–5, 19, 167; Ndyuka, 101–5
Schieffelin, Edward, 21
Schmitt, Carl, 52
secrecy, 92, 114
secularization, 48
self, 228n14; debates and controversies
about, 16; dissolving into abstraction,
209; as divine, 218; as ego, 36, 73,
123, 215, 219; Hindu, 28, 65, 142, 145;
models of, 18; moral accountability
and, 19; multiplicity of, 28, 40, 92,
94–6, 127, 215, 219; Ndyuka, 92, 97,
117, 135; objectifcation of, 214, 221;
othering, 217
self-avowal, 15, 19
self-awareness. See self-knowledge
self-doubt, 15, 21, 30–1, 58, 89;
dreams and, 168, 173, 185–6; of
devotees, 79
self-estrangement, 117, 135
self-evaluation, 65
selfshness, 104, 145, 150, 224
self-knowledge: doubts about,
14–15, 104, 161; dreams and, 161,
Index 279
185; as an epistemic ideal, 17;
European, 17; Hindu, 60, 64, 65; as
incomplete, 170; Ndyuka, 123–4,
135; objectifcation as spirit being,
6; recursiveness of, 17; testing of,
18–19
selfessness, 69
self-opacity: obiya and, 117
shakti (energy), 70, 73, 81, 87, 89;
manifestation, 151
Shakti (Hinduism): devotees, 74,
76, 145–6, 172; devotionalism and
pain, 141–2; domestic relations,
144; etiology, 147; rhetoric, 154
shamans, 21
Shani, 148
Shiva, 59, 63, 72, 77, 150;
consultation(s) with, 152–4, 171; in
dreams, 163
Shiva Mahamantra, 74, 88, 156
Shivshakti Mandir. See Sri Shakti
Mandir
shrines: disrespect and, 53; dreams
about, 177; interiors of, 127; posts
of, 106, 114; typologies of, 114;
visitors to, 14. See also healing,
shrines
Sieuw, 50–2
sin, 40, 149
Sita, 199
slavery, 45, 126, 230n20; European
rationalizations of, 10
sociality, 126, 208, 222, 224
Socrates, 19
solidarity, 11, 99, 102, 208
sorcery. See witchcraft. See also magic
soteriology, 158
soul, 153, 162, 191; as aatma, 142; as
yeye, 33, 93–4. See also akaa spirits
sound, 74, 156–7, 237n15; as
idiophone, 126; of suffering, 138–9
South Asia, 48, 63–4, 162, 204
280 Index
sovereignty, 52–3; spiritual, 44, 54,
57; state, 12, 31, 58
spirits: Amanfu, 106, 108;
Amerindian (ingii), 50, 54–5, 118,
127; anger and retaliation of, 38,
51, 54; autochthonous, 31, 42, 48,
56, 223; avenging kunu, 99, 197–8,
219, 240n14; boundary “masters,”
50, 84; coexistence with, 34; as
composite entities, 180, 183;
expulsion of, 44; hybrid, 99;
invisibility of, 34, 35, 40, 99, 137;
legal recognition of, 41, 231–2n10;
nasi (nenseki), 93, 129–30, 133, 175,
234n3; personal, 93; place (gadu fu
a peesi), 176; serpent, 98, 106, 177;
tutelary, 31, 93, 99, 107, 119; winti
(wenti), 7, 54, 93, 177. See also akaa
spirits; Ampuku spirits; demons;
ghosts
sporting (gaffng), 145
squatter settlements, 3, 8, 12, 26–7
Sri Shakti Mandir (temple), 60,
62–3, 70, 72, 76; Afro-Surinamese
members of, 83; appearance
and iconography of, 71–2;
interpersonal politics of, 151–2
Stasch, Rupert, 15
statue (murti), 72, 74, 198
stereotypes, 209, 211; about Afro-
Surinamese, 199, 213; about Indo-
Surinamese, 197, 212
stigma, 7, 13, 196
stools, 117, 127, 137, 188
Strathern, Marilyn, 228–9n15
subjectivity: ironies of, 185;
multiplicity of, 93, 212; pain and,
126; racism and, 209
suffering: of ancestors, 126, 142; of
the body, 127; collective, 65, 149,
157; re-enactments of, 137; as
validation, 45, 150, 154
Sunny Point, 12, 26–7, 44, 95, 102;
jealousy and, 197; stories about, 196
superstition, 13, 69; confation with
racial difference, 24
supplicants. See Shakti, devotees
Suriname, 6–7, 22; census, 227–8n6
Suriname River, 60, 118
suspicion: in Caribbean slave
societies, 23; of compliments, 201;
of ethno-racial others, 189, 205; of
family and friends, 3, 118, 208; of
Indo-Surinamese, 43, 213; among
mediums, 61–2; of mediums, 4–5,
14, 21, 78–9, 101, 158; in Ndyuka
politics and land rights, 43; of
oneself, 5; relation to land, 10;
transformation into doubt, 15, 21,
217; of waking reality, 187
Sweli, 122
Tabiki, 39
taboo (kina), 100–4
talisman, 81, 87, 137
Tapanahoni River, 27, 32
tappu (drum), 74, 77, 88
temples, 60, 165. See also Sri Shakti
Mandir
territory. See land
therapy, 68, 104, 110, 117–18
Thoden van Velzen, H.U.E., 224,
234–5n6, 239n5
Thomas, Deborah, 230n21
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Borges), 220
Tomiki, Da (medium), 177
tragedy, 40, 101, 175, 223
transcendence, 73, 145
transfguration, 116, 137, 147, 150
translation, 150, 166, 174, 190
transparency, 14–19, 26, 92; ethical,
213, 215; intersubjective, 25, 172,
221; of self-knowledge, 89; racism
and, 189, 209

treachery, 105, 143, 198–9, 212
treaties, 8, 32, 34, 41
Tres, Ma (medium), 118–23, 129, 176–7
Trinidad, 7, 61
trust, 4, 20, 68, 214
truth, universal, 24, 150
tyai-a-ede. See oracle
uncertainty, 20, 45, 164, 172
unemployment, 14, 79, 95, 126, 144
unintelligibility, 135
Upanishads, 154
van der Veer, Peter, 67
van Wetering, Wilhelmina, 224,
234–5n6, 239n5
Vedas, 163
vegetarianism, 145, 151
vengeance, 93, 149, 205–6
Vernon, Diane, 18
victimization, 206–8
Vinod (medium), 61, 165, 170
violence, 23, 25, 42–3, 138; communal,
195; domestic, 197; political, 198
Vishnu, 233n1
Vodou, Haitian, 229n16, 234n1,
238n2 (chap. 6)
vulnerability, 40, 57, 130, 219–20
Index 281
wage labour, 11, 35
Wagner, Roy, 234n4
Wanica, 27, 61
washing, ritual, 87–8, 112, 192; with
Ampuku medicine, 181; in the
river, 104; at seaside, 80; with
“sweet” obiya, 122
Wekker, Gloria, 18
well-being: of household, 82;
of others, 201; of the self,
69, 203
Wensi, 235–6n12
white supremacy: of colonial
period, 8, 9, 189; in post-colonial
social life, 10, 194, 207, 210;
self-knowledge and, 225
winti. See spirits
Wirtz, Kristina, 21
wisdom (koni), 92, 108, 113
witchcraft, 104; campaigns against,
42, 231n7; fatalism and, 65;
fear of, 7, 201; intra-ethnic, 211;
mediumship and, 20; as ojha, 13,
67, 144
witches (wisiman), 102, 202, 208
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 173
Zhuangzi, 164
This page intentionally left blank
Anthropological Horizons

Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the

Senses/Edited by David Howes (1991)
Arctic Homeland: Kinship, Community, and Development in Northwest
Greenland/Mark Nuttall (1992)
Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit
Possession/Michael Lambek (1993)
Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains: Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an
Andean Town/Peter Gose (1994)
Paradise: Class, Commuters, and Ethnicity in Rural Ontario/Stanley R. Barrett (1994)
The Cultural World in Beowulf/John M. Hill (1995)
Making It Their Own: Severn Ojibwe Communicative Practices/Lisa Philips
Valentine (1995)
Merchants and Shopkeepers: A Historical Anthropology of an Irish Market Town,
1200–1991/P.H. Gulliver and Marilyn Silverman (1995)
Tournaments of Value: Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town/Ann Meneley
(1996)
Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress/Sam Migliore (1997)
Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations/Edited
by Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith (1997)
Eh, Paesan! Being Italian in Toronto/Nicholas DeMaria Harney (1998)
Theorizing the Americanist Tradition/Edited by Lisa Philips Valentine and
Regna Darnell (1999)
Colonial ‘Reformation’ in the Highlands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, 1892–1995/
Albert Schrauwers (2000)
The Rock Where We Stand: An Ethnography of Women’s Activism in Newfoundland/
Glynis George (2000)
‘Being Alive Well’: Health and the Politics of Cree Well-Being/Naomi Adelson (2000)
Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture/Jane Helleiner (2001)
Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and
Nationalism/Edited by Himani Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab, and Judith
Whitehead (2001)
An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800–1950/
Marilyn Silverman (2001)
The Double Twist: From Ethnography to Morphodynamics/Edited by Pierre
Maranda (2001)
The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada/Eva
Mackey (2002)
Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa
and ‘the World on Paper,’ 1892–1991/Sean Hawkins (2002)
Guardians of the Transcendent: An Ethnography of a Jain Ascetic Community/Anne
Vallely (2002)
The Hot and the Cold: Ills of Humans and Maize in Native Mexico/Jacques M.
Chevalier and Andrés Sánchez Bain (2003)
Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations/Edited by John
Clammer, Sylvie Poirier, and Eric Schwimmer (2004)
Revenge of the Windigo: The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North
American Aboriginal Peoples/James B. Waldram (2004)
The Cultural Politics of Markets: Economic Liberalization and Social Change in
Nepal/Katharine Neilson Rankin (2004)
A World of Relationships: Itineraries, Dreams, and Events in the Australian Western
Desert/Sylvie Poirier (2005)
The Politics of the Past in an Argentine Working-Class Neighbourhood/Lindsay
DuBois (2005)
Youth and Identity Politics in South Africa, 1990–1994/Sibusisiwe Nombuso
Dlamini (2005)
Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse/Andie
Diane Palmer (2005)
We Are Now a Nation: Croats between ‘Home’ and ‘Homeland’/Daphne N. Winland
(2007)
Beyond Bodies: Rain-Making and Sense-Making in Tanzania/Todd Sanders (2008)
Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine/Tanya Richardson (2008)
Invaders as Ancestors: On the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish
Colonialism in the Andes/Peter Gose (2008)
From Equality to Inequality: Social Change among Newly Sedentary Lanoh Hunter-
Gatherer Traders of Peninsular Malaysia/Csilla Dallos (2011)
Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams: Identity and Modernity among Jat
Sikhs/Nicola Mooney (2011)
Dimensions of Development: History, Community, and Change in Allpachico,
Peru/Susan Vincent (2012)
People of Substance: An Ethnography of Morality in the Colombian Amazon/Carlos
David Londoño Sulkin (2012)
‘We Are Still Didene’: Stories of Hunting and History from Northern British
Columbia/Thomas McIlwraith (2012)
Being Māori in the City: Indigenous Everyday Life in Auckland/Natacha Gagné (2013)
The Hakkas of Sarawak: Sacrifcial Gifts in Cold War Era Malaysia/Kee Howe
Yong (2013)
Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro: African Storytellers of the
Karamoja Plateau and the Plains of Turkana/Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler (2014)
In Light of Africa: Globalizing Blackness in Northeast Brazil/Allan Charles Dawson
(2014)
The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist
Lithuania/Gediminas Lankauskas (2015)
Milanese Encounters: Public Space and Vision in Contemporary Urban Italy/Cristina
Moretti (2015)
Legacies of Violence: History, Society, and the State in Sardinia/Antonio Sorge (2015)
Looking Back, Moving Forward: Transformation and Ethical Practice in the Ghanaian
Church of Pentecost/Girish Daswani (2015)
Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird: Explorations in the Folk Zoology of an Eastern
Indonesian People/Gregory Forth (2016)
The Heart of Helambu: Ethnography and Entanglement in Nepal/Tom O’Neill (2016)
Tournaments of Value: Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town, 20th
Anniversary Edition/Ann Meneley (2016)
Europe Un-Imagined: Nation and Culture at a French-German Television Channel/
Damien Stankiewicz (2017)
Transforming Indigeneity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian
Amazon/Sarah Shulist (2018)
Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Suf Movement in Dakar, Senegal/
Joseph Hill (2018)
Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte/Michael Lambek (2018)
Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian
Roma/Péter Berta (2019)
Virtual Activism: Sexuality, the Internet, and a Social Movement in Singapore/Robert
Phillips (2020)
Shadow Play: Information Politics in Urban Indonesia/Sheri Lynn Gibbings (2021)
Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname/
Stuart Earle Strange (2021)