Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname 9781487509712

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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 Caribbean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competition 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 suspicion 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 selfknowledge, 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 ethnographic works addressing issues of mind and body, knowledge and power, equality and inequality, the individual and the collective. Interdisciplinary in its perspective, the series makes a unique contribution in several other academic disciplines: women’s studies, history, philosophy, 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 978-1-4875-4026-5 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-4875-0972-9 (EPUB) 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 du Canada of Canada

Dedicated to Sa Emma Losa, Da Sudeng African, and Kissoondial Sewpersad

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Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments Introduction

xi

3

1 Settlement and Self-Doubt

30

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

227

Bibliography Index

217

269

243

59

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Figures

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Map of Suriname 2 The Ndyuka homeland on the Tapanahoni River 32 Guru Kissoondial performing a puja 61 Durga image at the centre of the Sri Shakti Mandir 72 A manifesting deity takes the oath 75 Da John prepares obiya 98 Da Ekspidisi’s altar for an Ampuku spirit 115 Da Sako purifying Ba Markus 120 Da Sako 128 Ma Tres 129 Sanganni Baba 147

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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 sagacity 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 Kissoondial 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 children – 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 African 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 standards. 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 Goldstein; Parashar Kulkarni; Lau Ting Hui; Anju Paul; Matthew SchneiderMayerson; 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 accurate 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 valued 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 undertaking. The same goes for Aisha Khan, Matthew Hull, and Michael Lempert, 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 consistent 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 Federal do Rio de Janeiro, were critical for the development of this project; Olívia stands out for her expertise and commitment to keeping Surinamese 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 Economics 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, Marcelo 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 intellectual 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 ethnographic 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 provided 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 Anthropology, and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation graciously gave me the financial backing for my research and writing. Likewise, my startup 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 publications for their generative comments. A number of other friends deserve recognition: Rola Abimorched; Blaire Andres; Sasikumar Balasundaram; Dale Battistoli; Dan Birchok; 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 recommendations 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 numerous 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 providing 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 prerequisite 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 deceiving 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. Others looked unsure but hopeful about visiting the medium or strained to avoid eye contact, something I later learned stemmed from fear of exposure 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

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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 toddler, 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 undeniably 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 apprehensive. 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 recognized 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 identity. 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 person’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 accessing 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 mediumship. 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 understanding and cooperation” (Harr 2013, 317). The engagement of Sharmila, Priya, and Anjali with ritual mediumship brings different kinds of suspicion to the fore. More broadly, however, across my two years of fieldwork in Suriname between 2007 and 2013,4 I repeatedly received warnings to “Trust no one!” Whenever I said my goodbyes, 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 middleaged 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 morning, 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

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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 revelation 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. Mediumship, 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 Hindus 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 multiethno-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 colonialism. 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 aftermath 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 economic 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’ largest 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 abolition; and individuals of “mixed race,” the category created by the government 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 Surinamese 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, however, conceal substantial sectarian quarrels7 and allegiances to multiple ritual systems. Many Creole and Maroon Afro-Surinamese, for example, 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 respectability against commonly held but publicly stigmatized fears of witchcraft and other spiritual afflictions (Jap-a-Joe, Sjak Shie, and Vernooij 2001). Though freely professing pride in their ethno-racial and religious

8

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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 belonging 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 interactions 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 indentured populations belong to the soil that sustained them but which they could not officially possess? Despite attempts by the plantation owners who controlled the colonial state to dispossess them, Afro-Surinamese and Asians nevertheless 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 territorial 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. Renegotiations in the 1830s forced treaty-bound Maroons to accede to government supervision over internal Maroon politics and kept Maroons and their settlements away from the plantation zone around Paramaribo (De Groot 1963; Lenoir 1975). Colonial plantation owners similarly employed indentured labourers 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, “British 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 remaining 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 Suriname’s economic and demographic decline, Dutch administrators began to officially sanction Asian immigrants’ stubborn industriousness (Fokken 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 politics (Hoefte 1998, 2014a, 2014b). Gradually, and at different historical moments, the Dutch acceded to non-European resistance and granted variable kinds of legal recognition. 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 piecemeal 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 colony’s overwhelmingly non-European majority. To that end, the colonial state ensured that granting land rights to non-Europeans maintained a

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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 recognition of their ancestors’ rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the national GDP still almost completely reliant on environmental 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 legitimacy 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 analogue, 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 continue to be assessed according to a hierarchy of deservingness, the origins 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 measured the value of non-Europeans with reference to the price of sugar. Now ethno-racial deservingness is weighed according to a group’s perceived 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 imaginary of a “proper” (netjes) cultural commitment to work that assumes that some degree of conformity to European-derived values is necessary for people to be included in the nation. As Shona Jackson has characterized 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 predictor 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, therefore 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 indenture 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 recognize 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 predominantly Ndyuka Maroon guerrillas fought Dési Bouterse’s multiracial 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 majority from each of Suriname’s Maroon nations12 has moved to Paramaribo

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and other coastal towns, and they are now totally reliant on employment 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 government 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 increasingly 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 political 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, especially 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 – practices 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 Surinamese 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 ultimately controlled by the invisible agencies that mediums and competing 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, ubiquitous intergroup and interpersonal suspicion. Colonial officials and missionaries 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-aJoe 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 stigmatized 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 converts 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 – bonuman, 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 mediumship. 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 census; 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

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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 representatives 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 positioned within the wider Surinamese economy of the ritual and the occult. Mediums offer to resolve a range of difficult personal or familial adversities 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 consultations 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 possession. More than this, mediums make sense of suffering using the same interpersonal and interethnic suspicions that are the tacit, if publicly disavowed, 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 interpersonal 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 relational. While others are often the problem, the self can itself be a semialien agency and an agglomeration of multiple interrelated spirit identities 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 impossible 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 philosopher 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 themselves 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

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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). Contemporary 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 knowledge of the kind of thing that we are, and (b) the nature and extent of our knowledge of our particular thoughts, sensations, perceptual experiences, physical properties and actions.” As this definition suggests, questions of self-knowledge are interesting because they use the propensity 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 generalize 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 supports 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 selfawareness or lack thereof can be known by others. People do not unilaterally 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 objectifications 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 personal experience as a phenomenological crossroads where the authority 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 selfknowledge to rationalize expanding colonial violence, self-knowledge remains invested in directing attention to the accomplishment of specific 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 responsibility (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; Hallowell 1955; Mauss 1985; Munn 1992; Nabokov 2000; Rosaldo 1980; Strathern 1988). In opposition to this socially autonomous “modern”

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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 vitality 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 African 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 workingclass 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 firstperson 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 understand 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 reciprocity 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’ universal 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 relations 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 consultations, 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 question 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 knowledge 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 intersubjective attunement to others. A subset of epistemic affects, these feelings bubble up to alter the conditions of trust and mistrust, confidence and

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duplicity, from which relationships are made and remade. Registering 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 communicative 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 different 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 confirmed 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, however 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 assumption 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 perplexities. 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 identity” (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 shaman precisely because of his suspicion of shamans, Surinamese mediums 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 selfawareness 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

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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 capacity 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. Disrupting assumptions about who others are rouses uncertainties so basic that they can become existential openings for new or expanded apperceptions of the self. The sensations of suspicion that trigger such ontological commotion 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 owners, 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 Europeans 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 European 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

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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 profitability of, and endemic suspicion within, plantation colonies because it separated people into supposedly natural hierarchies that, paradoxically, had to be endlessly enforced with violence.20 In post-colonial Suriname, 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 follow 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 domination and not accurate accounts of phenotypic differences in skin pigmentation 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 exception to liberal ideas that humans are naturally endowed with the dignity of a free will that grants them authority over themselves (Hesse 2011; Wynter 2003). Racecraft, a twinned act of revelation and suppression, 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

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of others, those who wield racialization seek to deny members of racialized populations their due moral equivalence. Historically, European colonists conflated racial differences with “superstitious” practices like spirit possession to legitimate the dehumanization 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 reason gathered racializing force over the course of early modern European 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 reflexivity 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 associated 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 “selfcontradictory … 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 fanatical “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 appreciably 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 omnipresent 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 mediums 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 multiethnic urban contexts where most mediums now practise. Based on this complex interplay of epistemic affects, this book argues for understanding both racecraft and spirit mediumship as contrasting methods for defining intersubjective opacity and transparency that reveal analogous, 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. Reconciling the restrictions that prevent access to others’ minds with ideologies 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 selfcertainty 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 racecraft is founded. If spirit possession forefronts the ontological complexities of human ignorance to show that people are substantially unaware of themselves, racecraft asserts comprehensive knowledge over racialized 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 violence, 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

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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 mysterious 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 occasional accusations of espionage, people seemed to largely approach me as a sympathetic foreigner and often regarded my presence as somehow 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 hopeful 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 Paramaribo, 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 contractors allowed homeless Surinamese of all ethnicities to occupy a government housing project. Although then without running water or electricity, 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 exclusively Maroon, and soon expanded to include all the available unused land in its immediate vicinity. Despite the influx of Maroons, the surrounding 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 Chinese 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 tremendously 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 transcribe 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 observation 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 analysis. Despite my ready acknowledgment of the many ways in which transcription “is theory” (Ochs 1979), for the sake of readability, I have

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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 nationstate founded on natural resource extraction, makes land central to Surinamese self-knowledge. Chapter 1 lays out the history that created 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 hierarchy that resonate with popular Hindu metaphysics of divine unity in multiplicity. Hindus in Suriname concurrently fight to assert selfrespect based on personal autonomy and equivalent social worth and strive to reproduce an impossible ideal of uniform ethno-racial respectability. 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 illustrate how mediums instil characteristically Ndyuka forms of selfknowledge. 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 correspondingly 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

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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 selfdoubt in their patients, chapter 5 presents Hindu and Ndyuka understandings 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 agencies 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 instigate 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 themselves forever in the breach of dissonant accounts of self and accountability 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 everything 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 society is a by-product of supposedly equal legal access to the nation’s natural 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 currency 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 sovereignty over an allegedly undifferentiated national territory, Surinamese

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people of all ethnicities – including, it is rumoured, many in the government’s upper echelons – recognize that powerful spirits control the Surinamese 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 ownable national territory, spirits make property rights opaque and contingent 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 Suriname. 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 principles, 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).

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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 cassava, track Surinamese animals such as tapirs, and forage forest foods such as awáa palm fruits. For Ndyukas, this familiarity with the landscape was proof that their ancestors belonged to the land thanks to their inclusion into pre-existing social relations with spirits (gadu/wenti), animals (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

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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 surrendered 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) Tapanahoni 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

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possessors of land and its usufruct (Köbben 1979; see also Price 1975 for Sáamaka). Persons and families are granted portions of clan territory 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 proprietary 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 peaceful coexistence (libi makandii) with us. For those others [spirits] who cannot 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) “respectfully” (anga lesipeki). Spirits want to live freely and amiably with humans who subsist on the resources that the spirits control. This interdependent freedom is perhaps the key trope of Ndyuka morality, concomitantly invoking the colonial treaty that recognized their ancestors’ liberty 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 mixtures, 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

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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 recognition 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 Ndyukas I know best tend to regard themselves as “poor” (pina, which also implies affliction and suffering). Ndyukas commonly describe escaping 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 essentially bad (ogíi). Just as the general invisibility of spirits allows their agency to be recognized only after their anger affects the world visible to humans, so the hidden thoughts of other humans who harbour revenant grief, resentment, and anger can equally threaten the wellbeing 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 subsequent 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

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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 pregnant. 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 persons 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

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themselves to people’s genealogical destinies through affliction. Since human bodies are aggregates of their lineage’s history, they are analogous 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 protect 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 intervention 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 spirits’ territorial dominion. As in most such stories, Da Yeenen’s intentions in violating the hunting ban go unmentioned. Whether he meant to or not, his negligence

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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 influence 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’ countervailing 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 possessing 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 relational minefield where transgenerational wounds are easily inflicted. Claims of human ownership like the unrestricted right to hunt represent 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 obligatory 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 capture “moral power” (Stroeken 2012) over the collective prospects of the malefactor and their lineage. This permits affronted spirit others 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 vulnerable 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 attempting 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, mediums and diviners simultaneously resolve and complicate Ndyuka efforts to retain their health and independence. Such revelations do

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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 mingling one’s labour with its resources, as imagined in the liberal tradition (Locke 1986). Instead, property is an affliction felt by all, a repercussion

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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 declarations of personal ownership precarious and invites contrary assertions from spirits. Within this schema, spirits are the only social actors capable of conclusively substantiating the legitimacy of human territorial belonging. Improper attempts to take resources from the sentient land result in the territory’s rightful spirit owners’ seizing human bodies 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 continuity is at the same time attributable to the ways in which the inevitable misfortunes of social life fuse culpable people to offended places. Malfeasance therefore engenders the collective “sin” (sondu) and “responsibility” (fantiwowtu) that enable offended human and spirit others to exercise power over the offending lineage and its members. This cumulative responsibility is what weaves land, people, and spirits into a compound 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 prosperity 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 ignorance of human nature continually deepens their collective liability to affronted places. Many Ndyukas therefore believe that only the ancestors 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 authorities. Land laws must come from the lineage: the kabiten and the gáanman

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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 encountered 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 complement 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 interdicted 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 spirits 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 international law.8 Despite being party to treaties that recognize the autodetermination of Maroon and Indigenous nations, the Surinamese state declares that, in pursuit of the “total development of the country,” it has

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an exclusive prerogative to define property and grant individual ownership 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 unquestionably 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 profitable, gold mining requires extensive land and heavy equipment. Traditional 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 preeminent 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

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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 imprisonment 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 challenging 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 natural 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 commodified mercenary demons (bakuu) that they hold responsible for the corruption of Ndyuka society.

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Though bakuu are abnormally rapacious, all spirits demand whatever 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 sanction more intensive natural resource exploitation. Attempts to fix relations 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 compensation 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 Pentecostalism’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 expulsion of spirits through the intervention of the Holy Ghost (Bun Yeye) was the invariable climax of these often eight-hour-long rites. In exorcising 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 obligations 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 selfknowledge. 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

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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; Jackson 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 Brahminical 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 extinguished 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 autochthonous spirits, in this section I show the aporia that Surinamese Hindus experience in the face of state ideologies of secularized territory and universalized religion, ethno-racial competition, and the interventions of the sentient land. Aporia “refers to the feeling of being at a loss, of being perplexed, or of being embarrassed when confronting 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 belonging 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.

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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 precedence 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 Suriname 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 belonging 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 peasant 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 replacement 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, Hindustanis were a plurality of the colony’s population and dominated Surinamese 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 government, 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 – especially the Protestant Christianity that dominated colonial Suriname – encouraged Hindus to reimagine Hinduism as the primal religion of

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humanity whose truths encompass and transcend all religious differences. Just as pandits preach that individual souls are ultimately fragments of the Hindu Godhead, other religious traditions are imagined to derive from the originating purity of “eternal” (sanatan) Vedic Hinduism (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 subordinating 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 sorcery, 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 reproduction of a supposedly primordial ethno-racial distinctiveness, Hinduism was transformed into a genetic religion. Surinamese Hindus frequently 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 presented as a result of the preservation of Hindu traditions (nem). Concurrently, 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 incontrovertible proof that Hindus were expressly destined to develop Suriname (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 commitment to reproducing Hindu distinctiveness make them naturally better instruments of Surinamese progress than other ethno-racial groups. Defending these claims is the central purpose of Hindu Surinamese racecraft. For Hindus, Amerindians and Maroons – the two ethnic groups with the strongest territorial claims and least assimilation to respectable

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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; Vernon 1992). By adapting Hindu rituals to mollify such Indigenous spirits, 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 coexistence of multiple such religions becomes further evidence of the state’s exclusive ability to stipulate the genuine interests of civil society (Asad 2003; Cannell 2010). The religious pluralism inherited by the post-colonial Surinamese government necessitates that Hindus subscribe 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 authentic belonging to the historically alien South American land. Brahminical 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 territorialized 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 sustain identity in South Asia are enmeshed in the past deeds and present power of sovereign spirits and deities that pervade the landscape (Fuller 1992; Singh 2012; van der Veer 1988). Over the last 2,000 years,

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these territorial deities have gradually been absorbed into a divine hierarchy 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 Brahminical 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 geography 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 revelations derived from transcendent scriptural sources (Leertouwer 1991; Masuzawa 2005). The orthodox Hinduism practised by the majority 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 (Bakker 1999; De Klerk 1951, 1953; van der Veer 1991). The new orthodoxy was a compromise between pandit authority, popular practice, and scathing criticism from both Christian missionaries and iconoclastic 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 continue to practice unorthodox apotropaic rites that affirm their belonging 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 exclusive control over a secularized national territory.

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Rituals to the Sentient Land Sacrifices to the land represent the collective performance of the variegated 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 boundary “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 ubiquity of these practices speaks to a congruent sensibility among IndoSurinamese 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 spirits of the land, despite their apparent prevalence. Even when people did disclose details, the sacrifices remained wreathed in apprehension. Rajesh and Naveen, the two youngest male members of the family 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 condemnation 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 physique, and ease with command marked him as the family’s chief authority. 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,

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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 livelihood 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 sacrifice 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 family was riven by acrimony between the siblings’ spouses, almost everyone 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

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did not actively participate, preferring to watch from a respectful distance. 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 limited 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 respective 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 carrying 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 postFoucauldian 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

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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 sovereignty both arise from doubts about the effective limits of either’s control (see Mitchell 1991). Even though Sieuw’s nephew Rajesh vehemently censored the family’s sacrifice, as an independent trucker transporting timber from interior logging concessions, he readily acknowledged 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 “permission” 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 immediately roar into action. As with Rajesh’s didactically malfunctioning truck, Surinamese people seem most disconcerted by the unpredictability of possible enforcement 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.

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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 marginality, 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 premature deaths through accident, suicide, or murder are the lowest category 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 owners, 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 vulnerable to spirit anger, ardour, and even curiosity. While encounters with spirits can strengthen into dramatic outbursts of full-blown possession, 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, mangan) receptiveness to their human inhabitants. To illustrate this, Priya

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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 apologize 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 Surinamese 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 traditions. Each step of establishing an orthodox Hindu household is accordingly 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 orthodox 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 associated 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

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of the Hindu household as exclusively secured by Brahminical ritual and doctrine. Pandits may prescribe ritual remedies for spirit afflictions, 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 Suriname’s two-hundred-year colonial history of Indigenous displacement and African enslavement. Seeking reprieve from crop failure, accidents, 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 convert 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” ethnoracial others. Yet, it is unthinkable for Hindus to admit that their comparatively greater economic achievement could really be as dependent on Indigenous spirits as it is on Hindu deities. Ritually acknowledging the sovereignty 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 universalist religion and a fragile ethno-racial identity contingent on a colonially inherited hierarchy of cultural respectability. The persistence of unorthodox Hindu rites points to the insufficiency of Brahminical rituals 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

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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 otherness 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 continuously reaffirm this difference to transform land into the property that is the economic basis for the public reproduction of Hindu ethnoracial 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 belonging 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 central 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

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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 ethnoracial 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 reconcile 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 ultimate security on the Surinamese land, Hindus and Ndyukas comparably 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 possession 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 Brahminization of Surinamese and Guyanese Hinduism. As described in chapter 1, over the course of the twentieth century, professional Brahminical 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.

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However obscured, possession and magic remain powerful possibilities that, along with ideologies of kinship and inter-ethnic competition, 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 supplicants 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, mediums most frequently embody popular gods of South Indian origin, such as Sanganni Baba and Kateri Ma. Though unfamiliar to Surinamese 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 Suriname was conducted at the Sri Shakti Mandir. Located in a south Paramaribo 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 impressive grey beard, until his death in early 2020, Guru Kissoondial cut a dramatic presence (figure 3) as an ascetic (sadhu, sannyasin) in a diasporic 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, semiclandestine trajectory of Guyanese-style mediumship in Suriname. “Kali Mai Puja,” as it is often called in the literature, enjoyed an explosive resurgence in late-twentieth-century Guyana, where in many

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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 Guyanese (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 mediums – 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. Prominent 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

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medium I met warned me to regard the others with distrust. I was told that mediums must first prove their legitimacy by accurately anticipating 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 sanctimonious 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 nineteenthcentury Indian indentured workers who settled there (very few of whom migrated to Suriname). Hindu Shakti mediumship as it is currently 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 members 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 identification with an Indo-Guyanese ancestor. Along with the pujaris, the family of Basdeo – his wife (also named Lakshmi), their son, Balram, and his wife and two daughters – also played a prominent role. Prosperous 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 appropriate appellation even if only because it convened on Sundays and was riven by internal frictions among its members. The temple’s core followers had come together as the result of consulting Guru Kissoondial

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when he was still only an independent medium doing private “bottom house work” (see Kloss 2016). With the exception of this core personnel, 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, supplicants 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 Hindus 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 Surinamese 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 Lakshmi’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 people 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]

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Lakshmi’s description speaks to South Asian bhakti1 devotional metaphysics, 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 designates the goal of achieving complete identification with one’s dependence 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 understand 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 performance of ethno-racial consciousness. The Hindus I worked with selectively strove to interpret their actions as essentially Hindu, to see their lives as expressions of the indispensable rectitude of their Hindu ethnoracial identity. To be a Hindu, particularly a Sanatan Dharm Hindu, is to understand the self as in essence defined by membership in an ethnoracial 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

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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 Hindus spoke about the self as the innermost principle of all living beings, the reflective subject of moral action, and the guarantor of the continuity 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 person 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 ethnoracial and religious distinction. On balance, the Hindus I engaged with were concerned with ritual only to the extent that it preserves the everyday 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 activity is focused on cultivating auspicious kinship. At the same time, Hindus 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 selfknowledge 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 Hindus 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

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Sanatan Dharm pandit or a Shakti medium, they are reliant upon ritual knowledge mediated by others. Through displays of purity and detachment from everyday sociability, 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 contestation. For Hindus, such competition over interpersonal respect is tied to men’s ideological commitments to living according to the actually fragile patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal ideals of Brahminical Hinduism. 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 retellings of Hindu myths have made pandits’ control over religious knowledge 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 Brahminical 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 epistemic inequality between themselves and others is to cultivate incredulity 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

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the incredulous have a right to know and judge for themselves. So motivated, 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 revelations, like mediumship, that contest the conclusiveness of the spiritual knowledge commanded by establishment ritualists like pandits. Unfettered 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 impregnable 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 malicious 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 unintentionally 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 Netherlands 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 witchcraft, 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 inherited within families, and that can be used to command infamous occult power through its spells (mantra) and rituals (tantra). Numerous specialists 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

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medium Rajeev described sweeping, perhaps the prototypical procedure 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 repeatedly from Surinamese of all social backgrounds. As with their conviction 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 spiritual 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 [afficting 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

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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 identification that inundate self-perception in the wake of forfeiting disbelief. Because credulity and superstition are seen to jeopardize Hindu entitlement to social pre-eminence among Hindus and within Suriname’s ethno-racial hierarchy, Lakshmi is at pains to underscore this point. Devotion is only successful when the devotee abandons scepticism 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 everyday 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 Hinduism. 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

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accentuated in orthodox Hinduism, Shakti distributes divine awareness 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 transcendent 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 consequences, 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 Paramaribo where Hindus might personally encounter deities who are otherwise known only from mass-produced images, television, or the imagination. 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 lifeblood of the Sri Shakti Mandir, and I spent most of my time there observing 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, performances that expose the social and theological contradictions of this self and attempt to reconcile them within an encompassing bhakti aesthetic. Protean divine efficacy – shakti – is of finite quantity in the material 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, emotions, and intentions. Here is how one pujari described the proper attitude 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

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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 personal troubles or regular votaries fulfilling devotional regimens previously 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 Guyanese 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 commonly 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.

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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 possession 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) (figure 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 masculine and feminine power. These images, Kissoondial declared, emblematize 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

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alone among the temple’s mediums was capable of manifesting deities of both genders, Kissoondial had a monopoly on enacting the androgyne’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 vegetarian meals and sweets. Through this care, devotees receive the divine gaze (darshan) that incorporates them into a deity’s shakti. Darshan 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 offerings 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 sacrificed 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 complete. This caused considerable variation in the temple’s week-to-week program. Usually, the opening puja started not later than 11:00 a.m. Kissoondial or, more reliably, one of the junior male pujaris, then led eight to

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fifteen people in obeisance to every deity in the temple’s sanctuary. Gongs were banged, bells rung, and a conch shell (shank) blown. Pungent camphor 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 current 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 distributed 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 Hindus, but also Indo-Surinamese, and even occasional Creoles or Brazilians – 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 important 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

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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 “manifesting” 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 medium’s possession by a deity (figure 5). The oath satisfied, the attendant

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pujaris (who normally included me during my fieldwork) brought the now-present deity a platter of sacred powders.8 With a greeting of “Pranam,” 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 credibility. 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 selfdoubt, 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

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arrived an hour after the end of the opening puja. Despite having previously 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 manifest, and the arrangements for the following day’s celebrations were behind schedule. Eventually, and with a show of considerable reluctance, 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 foreman 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 declining 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 recitations 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

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represented as a fanged blue child or an ash-covered mustachioed muscle 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 interspersed with a small repertoire of Hindi words: beta/beti (son/daughter), accha (good), and samjhe (understand). Dressed in my pujari’s uniform, 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 mismanagement 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 Guyanese Hindus, in Shakti temples and wider Surinamese society, possession 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

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[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 scaling 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 multiweek devotional regimes. Entering individually or in small groups, supplicants came and stood before Bhairo. With guidance from the pujaris, 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 reason 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

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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 uncertain, 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 sacrificial animals, and the fruit’s astringent juice is a vehicle for the stinging potency of divine shakti. Nodding his head, the man looked at Bhairo: “Baba, you know something, something there by my bed [when I] sleep.” This was the man’s major complaint. Rather than address the problem, 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?”

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“Yes, yes that’s what me dream.” “I see that, you must try to keep close to Durga Mata. Samjhe?” Closing 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’ bodies 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.

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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 domestic 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 public 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.

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Before she left, the deity directed her to mix salt, lime, and blue detergent 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 exclusive. Some might regard other populations’ deities as variant transformations 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. Connecting 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 unassimilably 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 routinely lost? Things did seem to go missing frequently, she affirmed. Patiently, Bhairo instructed her to “check the home from corner to

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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 corrected himself, “The owner for the land then.” Whatever their origins, 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 affliction for Hindus, whether long resident or recent immigrants. By promising 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 owners, 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 relationship 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

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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 considered 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.”

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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. Devotion 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 learning] 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 seriousness. 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.

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“Your devotion is very weak. You have the shakti … of the Devis (goddesses) … 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 herself. 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.

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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 happened? 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.

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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 interpersonal 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 transparency of their supplicants’ self-knowledge. Rather than simply claiming 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

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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 relations 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 maintained 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 revelation. 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 contextually grounded ritual knowledge. Not long after my conversation with

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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 spirits 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 categories 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 essential difference from, but inseverable hereditary relations with, the invisible 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, potentially 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 knowledge enables Ndyukas to experience a manifold self about which they would otherwise know very little and, at the same time, threatens the

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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 influences of multiple spirit and human allies and enemies (see Beliso-De Jesús 2014; Espirito Santo 2015; Matory 2007, 2009a; Palmié 2006; Wekker 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 fieldwork. 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 recurrent 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 family” but may also be an animal like a hunting dog associated with a lineage. Nenseki mark people’s bodies and personalities, and idiosyncrasies of appearance and personality are attributed to them.3 Moreover, 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 (sometimes 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

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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 situations of shock or discomfort. Inadvertent spills of food or drink are greeted with exclamations of “It had to happen!” because such seeming 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. Otherwise, a person will fall sick and even die as a result of egoistic intransigence 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

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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 collective origins of their personal agency. For Ndyukas, this polyphony expresses an ontology in which the self is a relational aggregate embodied 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 reliance 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 interior. 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 lineage 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 insufficiently 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 “compositional” (Guyer and Eno Belinga 1995) theory of knowledge that emphasizes “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

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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 compelling 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 control 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 certain when it involves others. This sensibility connects Ndyuka perceptions 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

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give voice to and how much influence they exert.7 Looking inside their patients’ bodies, mediums apprehend them as composed of, and sickened 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 subjectivity. 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 simultaneously denotes (1) a pervasive cosmological potency created by God (Masáa Gadu); (2) a large variety of interventionist spirits; and (3) various therapies that include both simple herbal preparations and elaborate 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 spiritmedicinal 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), prohibitions (kina), songs, dances, and prayers in rituals supervised by possessed 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 ingredients, 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

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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

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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). Sustaining 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 possessing 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 suffering. This exemplifies the tragic centrality of spirits to Ndyuka theories of belonging already described in chapter 1 (Price 1973; Thoden van Velzen 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 nonetheless 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 anthropomorphic beings who share Ndyuka values, kinship, and political organization. Spirits live in houses in their own native lands; speak their own languages; have husbands, wives, and children; and pursue pleasures 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 everproliferating 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 Paramaribo, 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

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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, invisible, 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 understand 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 compared 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 imposing justice. At present, mediumistic obiya “work” (wooko) assumes a variety of forms for urban Ndyukas, and life in Paramaribo has modified 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

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weaknesses in the ability of Ndyuka ritual knowledge to address rapid social change. Many Ndyuka and other Afro-Surinamese mediums live in Paramaribo, 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 consistently met other ethnicities at Ndyuka mediums’ shrines, but most patients were Ndyuka. Because of prevalent suspicions about fraudulent 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 Ndyukas that kin are the most motivated to harm each other, kinship carries a decided danger. These tensions expose the tragedy of Ndyuka kinship: The very intimacies of origin and shared blood that bind people together also produce the envy, greed, and resentment that are responsible 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-nineteenthcentury 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 previously sacrosanct sources of revelatory authority have likewise stoked Ndyuka prophets like Akalali in the 1970s and Gáangá in the 2000s to

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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 questioning for very long. This tendency to epistemic instability has been exacerbated by various sects of evangelical Christianity, especially Pentecostalism (Volle Evangelie), to which a substantial number of Ndyukas have now converted. 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 suspicions 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 simplifying 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), mediumship and obiya are matters of considerable ambivalence for Ndyukas in Sunny Point and other urban Maroon neighbourhoods. Url, a construction 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 contrast, other young Ndyukas – especially those with extensive experience 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

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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 polyphonic “sociocentricity” (Wagner 1991) of the Ndyuka self, someone is always to blame, but responsibility is never constrained to an individual 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 consequences about which the perpetrator is frequently unaware. These issues motivate Ndyukas to warn against naively trusting mediums. Because spirits ramify within lineages as collective afflictions, 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 possessed 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 suspicion and revelation. Failing to suspect human and spirit others puts one at risk of being defrauded or, worse, of being bewitched. Neglecting 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 treatment will succeed.

This tension between casual acceptance of spirit power and committed scepticism towards anyone who claims to communicate it is typical of Ndyuka attitudes. People know that spirits are real and their medicines effective. They also know that people lie. The same divinatory rituals that expose others’ veiled conspiracies also uncover the poverty

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of self-knowledge and the ubiquity of spirit control over seemingly private 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 bodies 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 rationalized 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 ironically invokes the revelatory necessity of spirit mediation and renders

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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 confrm 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 mediumship acknowledged by an ancestral authority. The resulting disappointment 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 carrying 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 medicines sit at its centre, buried under layers of vibrantly printed cloths, a

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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 threeroom 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 political 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 dignified and restrained ways. Spirits start their possession performances

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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 Sáamaka 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 spoken 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 superior grasp of Kumanti and thereby establish their greater ritual authority. 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 spending 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 inspection, 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.

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Finding the sacred bundle intact, Da Aduna and Ba Giofani tied it to a new plank. After some required upkeep, Da Aduna began the consultation 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 oracle 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 collective Ndyuka decision making – including oracular and mediumistic consultations – councils parallel oracles and obiya in being ritual assemblages 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, council participants sit in a circle around a designated “answer man” (pikiman), 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

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have had their say and the most senior member declares that a resolution 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, divinations, and prescient dreams. As with the obiya ingredients that compose 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 situation: “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 species 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 worthwhile. No sane person would bother. With this story, Da Aduna implied that Da Kwasi’s spirit might be just such a difficult, but ultimately useless, and even endangering, being.

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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 legitimate 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 personal agency and desire, Ndyuka rituals expose the impossibility of having comprehensible selves outside of the social relations that confer people with the self-awareness that they are persons of a determinate 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 identities. 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 collective 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 summon 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 family 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

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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 provocation. 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 oracle’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 residence.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

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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 identity 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 qualities. 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 clarification: “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 himself: “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 concluded, Da Aduna and Ba Giofani returned the oracle to their heads.

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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 doublechecked 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 selfknowledge 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 oracle 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 currently 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 dignity 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 possessing 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 multifaceted 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

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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 replicated 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 outskirts, most often near one of the few paved roads that lead into Suriname’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, oracles (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, grinding 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 declining 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 reputation for secrets” (Johnson 2002, 3). Ndyuka secretism encourages an aesthetics of “accumulation and containment” (Nooter 1993; MacGaffey

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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 agencies, Ndyukas approach their own and others’ embodied selves as similarly 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’ bodies, 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

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[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 concealed specificity to its position within a crowd of other similarly disguised objects. In consultations, a possessed medium sits next to or in front of their altar, or like Da Aduna, places themselves in direct contact with an oracle to make them part of an “entrapping” field of visible secrets (see Gell 1998 for other examples). This compels patients to assume positions in the room that compound the intersubjective asymmetries 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

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of traditional legitimacy belong to the social status that they confer and not to the living person who temporarily fills the role. Ndyuka ideologies of knowledge ownership hold that traditional titleholders and mediums equally derive their authority from ancestral and spirit powers 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 predecessors. 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 accomplishments 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 polyphonic 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 contemporary urban Ndyuka obiya therapy that is broadly representative of these rites as I observed them.

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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 consummate 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 dignified, 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 consulted 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 shopkeeper 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 ritually 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 protective cords and amulets (dyemba). With their bodies appropriately

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“closed” (tapu) to threatening influences, they could proceed in earnest with the ritual. After driving a staff and a dagger (dokwe) into the sodden 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, feathers, 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 oration enables Ndyuka councils to unite entire lineages and clans in collective 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 semiotiose creator (Masáa Gadu), Da Sako called upon the members of a cosmic lineage of authority that descended through all the major Ndyuka

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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 components” 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

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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 consecutive 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. Rubbing 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 captured 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 overlapping white and red lengths of fabric. Ba Markus sat down on the

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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 identities, 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 penultimate 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 reincorporated at the ritual’s end.

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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 extensively 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 bottle 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 selfknowledge. Obiya materially instantiates the metaphysics of the polyphonic 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 compositions 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 singular self that “exclusively determines the person’s fate,” Ndyuka obiya rites mirror other African-derived Caribbean ritual traditions in engaging “a distribution of agencies with critical and evolving interrelations” (Espirito Santo 2015, 12). These rituals facilitate knowledge of this ignorance, 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

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further agents, whether ancestors, spirits, or relatives and neighbours. These others, in turn, suffuse what is often assumed in the liberal tradition 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 constituents 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 confound the apparent transparency of self-knowledge. In ritual consultations, 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 spirits 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 selfknowledge 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 relations 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 ontological 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

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like chronic unemployment or troubles with the police, anything that “hurts” (ati) by causing a diminishment of personal control is considered painful. Pain is a therefore ultimately a kind of social relation. Through bonds of kinship and contingent feelings of enmity, jealousy, or avarice, relations 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 suffering. 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 affectively 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, shooting, 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 system of interrelatedness. Experiences of persistent intense pain or protracted anguish are seen as messages about the limited self-knowledge that leads people to misrecognize the agencies from which they are composed. For Ndyuka mediums and patients, pain reveals the basic relational structure of personhood 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 histories (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

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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 composed 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 afternoon, and Da John and I were squeezed on a narrow bench in the corner 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

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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?”

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Figure 10 Ma Tres.

“The whole day it’s eating (nyan) me,” said Sa Nyoni, gingerly massaging 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 consciousness. 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

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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 presence 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 interdependence 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 obligations 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 complementarity between generations, making the young dependent on the old, and the old reliant on the spirits and ancestors. Pain therefore forces sufferers 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 explanations 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 accessible through human senses. His interjection reinforces his diagnosis of the pain as a nenseki, but similarly points to the spirit’s ontological and

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perspectival difference from the humans he interacts with. As a normally 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 determine 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 integration 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

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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 performance 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 provide 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 quality 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].”

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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 assertion that “the ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain, at once so empty and undifferentiated and so full of blaring adversity, 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 otherwise 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 recognition 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 relationships that they embody. Once specified, the correspondence between pain and relatedness further integrates the qualities of a patient’s suffering 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 history 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 identified 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.

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“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 simultaneously 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 identity, she is told, is more extensive than the confines of her everyday self-understanding. Pain has driven a wedge into Sa Nyoni’s selfknowledge. She has been forced to admit that her conscious existence 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 perform the task that Pa Kodyo has assigned them.

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Pain, Interaction, and the Evidence of Ontological Ignorance The foregoing consultation encapsulates how Ndyuka mediums transform doubts provoked by physical pain into revelations about selfidentity 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 Atlantic traditions. For Ndyukas, pain licenses mediums to redefine the bodies 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 selfknowledge 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 selfawareness 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 unintelligibility are key resources for the efficacy of mediumship. Beyond that, the interaction between a medium and their audience is not solely conditioned on the underdetermined or general character of the information they provide. Spirits like Pa Kodyo intervene in both the qualities of

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bodily pain and social relationships. In performance, these make powerful 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 interpret 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 position, 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 possession and the patient’s pain. Pa Kodyo’s presence within Ma Tres acts to demonstrate that all humans are actually manifold selves whose bodies 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 foundations 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

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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. However 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 convergence between the conditions of their own possession and the suffering 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 children, his grandchildren, and me. Draped in his possessing spirit’s ritual clothes and talismans, he convulsively shuddered in apparent discomfort 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 spirits 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

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unchanged. While these performances might pass in only a brief minute, 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 nnnnnnnnnnneueueueueueuuu 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 frequently 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 measure of the distance between human and spirit realities. Here is another example. This medium’s possessing spirit – her murdered 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 Asamaya 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!

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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 consciousness. Though brief, these initiatory exclamations make the medium’s sufferings impossible to distinguish from those of her spirit. The personal 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 pervasive 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. Fullblown 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 diffuse 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

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beset human existence are in fact signs of the inflexible social obligations that spirits communicate. With their intense focus on giving voice to suffering, Ndyuka rituals 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 language as reference and reason (Bauman and Briggs 2003). In this ideology, 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 penetratingly communicative. When situated as indexes of the quality of relations between people, apparently non-linguistic sounds like rhythmic 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 substantiating 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 bodies 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 diasporic 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

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for burial.2 He would drive me all over the place … Listen, he did everything 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 distance between language and experience, the sufferings that induct Ndyukas into mediumship reveal that experiences like pain are, in reality, 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 collective responsibility. Only when her maternal grandfather recognized that the spirit belonged to his matrilineage did Ma Tres’s spells of physical 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 obligations beyond everyday self-understanding. As Ma Tres recounts her own experiences, the suffering that results from a family’s collective 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 mediums 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 interactions galvanize patients to recognize that, like possessed mediums, they are in decisive respects unaware of themselves or the relations that

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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 communicates 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 devotionalism 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 pragmatically 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 religious 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 Surinamese society makes them particularly attentive to the wider influence 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 respectable 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 consultations that I attended. Here is an example from February 2013: A young

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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 (meaning 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 responsibilities 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 transitive 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

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their alleviation is basic to familial intimacy. In protracted or chronic instances, pain entreats sufferers and their families to examine the situation 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 identified, 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 personify 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 unemployment 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 personal reputation and the sickening power of envy (hahe) and gossip (talk name, nindara, gap-sap). A significant number of the Shakti consultations I observed involved people – mainly but not always women – distressed at how their domestic relations threatened both their physical 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

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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 physical 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 preoccupations that have traditionally characterized popular and therapeutic Hinduism (Babb 1975; Fuller 1992; van der Veer 1991). The implicit cosmology 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 pandit or a pujari. Most Sanathan Dharm pandits are also astrologers who diagnose harmful planetary influences and prescribe devotional remedies (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 pertinent to their problems. Learning from suffering is a key attribute of what Asad (2011) identifies 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 essentially 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 elaborate regimes of personal devoutness, many Shakti devotionalists even

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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 feeling 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, suffering 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, analogism 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). Analogism divulges persons as composites of affinities between parts and wholes, microcosmic bodily properties and macrocosmic natural/celestial 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 phenomena (Dimmit and van Buitenen 1978). In binding and wrapping

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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 correspond to her or his mythological role. Sanganni (figure 11) is the fearsome 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 vagueness serves to expand their analogical force. Even when underdetermined, 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 wellknown divine agents. Isolating celestial causes for mundane pains subordinates the material here and now of devotees’ lives to abstract theological concepts. Though Kissoondial regarded Rahu and Ketu to be malevolent planetary demons, he felt that his painful bondage to them was a predestined divine revelation of the real significance of his human existence.

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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 recognize 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 ultimate 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 confines 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.

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From my inquiries into the origins of Kissoondial’s illness, a picture at once cosmic and relentlessly personal eventually emerged. Kissoondial 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 dangerously 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. Kissoondial was made the special victim of his father’s and grandfather’s sins. For Hindus, as for Maroons, serpents are feared and revered, and serpent deities (nag deota) possessed Kissoondial and his sister during the yearly Nag Panchami festival dedicated to them. Their father’s boastfully 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 authority 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

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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 rigorous 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 submission 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. Addressing 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 subservience 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 supplicants’ 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 chapter’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

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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 current 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 desperate 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 Pentecostal church but failed to gain any benefit from either. After visiting 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 Kissoondial’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 vegetarianism 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

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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 frustration 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 lesson: “When so ever you come to me, when you reach me, there is no pain.”9

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“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 goddess 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 prepared for you. Never want … anything in this world, my child. That is

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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 theological 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 particular 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 justifying 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 immediate 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, undifferentiated consciousness. Shiva explains that pain is a necessary reminder of worldly imperfection. The god tells Arti that she will only be healed when she has abandoned 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

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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 metaphysical 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). Whenever she tried to articulate disappointment about her undiminished sufferings, Shiva overwhelmed her with a fixed look and a blast of theology. 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 presented 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 conveyed 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 immateriality of her true self, he also indicates that the material world is a

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manifestation of the divine, a goddess who suffers in her own right. Sound, the most paradigmatically “immaterial” of physical phenomena, 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 personal 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 allpervading 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’ allpenetrating power. The Hindus with whom I spoke about mantras all agreed on the form’s exceptional efficacy and identified it with Sanskrit, 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 potential, 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 instrument of magical power and its role as the pre-eminent devotional technique of respectable Sanatan Dharm and Arya Samaj Hinduism. To

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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 reiteration. Shakti devotees use the 108 beads on a strand of Hindu prayer beads (mala) to track hundreds or thousands of mantra repetitions. During 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 sensations and thereby reduced to passive containers echoing with a hidden divine purpose that is just beyond the scope of their finite human identities and desires. Similarly, to complete his rhetorical and metaphysical encompassment 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 identification exposes how minute Arti’s pains are when compared to the burden 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 imbalance 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.

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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 interaction 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 nothing 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 alternative 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 ritual 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 recognizably 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 involuntary 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 selfknowledge that would otherwise permit her to recognize the liberated soul secreted beneath her personal suffering. If Arti were to genuinely

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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 complete 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 mediumship 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 harrowingly 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 general 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 Paramaribo 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 ominous 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

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important portent about these connections, the fleeting obscurity of the dream demanded interpretation (Descola 1989). Dream interpretation concedes an ironic division of experience from reality, a separation 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 problematic 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 subjects 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 illustrates 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 interconnections 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 igniting 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 determine human consciousness.

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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; RamPrasad 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 neighbour, 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 relying on symbols or inverted significances, but, in or out of possession, Hindu mediums prefer to focus on dreams as disclosures of interpersonal relations. Dreams’ visceral, kaleidoscopic, and evanescent qualities provide Hindus in Suriname confirmation of both their subtle theological significance 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

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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 individuated awareness of the world is ephemeral, the transient foam of epiphenomenal waves churned up from the embracing oceanic consciousness of the divine.

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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 certain 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 possessing 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 situation, Priya, for example, told me very different things about dreams. Sometimes dreams were simply “rummel” (Dutch: garbage), sheer mental 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 spurious 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).

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Dreams place reality in a divided frame, bifurcating it into equally misleading states of awareness. However opaque, this latent instability 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 wedding 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 extragalactic radio messages.

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Without introduction, the deity began to speak (with many concessions for comprehensibility, I have tried to preserve the original wording 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 question 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 confusion 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 sometimes 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 interrupted her: “What happens to happiness in your life? What you wished

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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 hoping 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 suspicion 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

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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 concordance 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 mediums jolt normally smooth inferences about the transparent intelligibility 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 mediums, 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 quotation 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 mystifications of consciousness to reveal depths of alterity simultaneously internal to and beyond a supplicant’s self-awareness.

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Priya’s vulnerability before these perplexities discloses the creative force of doubt in Hindu mediumistic interactions. The above consultation shows how the epistemic structure of mediumship implicitly cultivates 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 – frustratingly – 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 multiply 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 deities who have already decided human destiny. Cosmology does not preexist 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, conversations are organized into “turns at talk” defined by “conditional

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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 conversation, 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 participants … 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 framework 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 understandings 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 aggressively, 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 supplicants’ expectations about the knowledge conveyed through revelatory speech. Accordingly, the elusive and allusive complexity of dreams provides evidence that human agency and self-knowledge are as incomplete as Hindu mediumship reveals them to be. As with dreams, the “paradox 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

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frame what is happening between them in ways that also let mediums reveal the ontological division between deities and humans. Mediums’ citations of dreams confront supplicants with their own doubts about their capacity to understand the unresolved or evasive meanings 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 mediums 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, sometimes 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 recovered 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 conflating 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 situationally – 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 affective brinkmanship appears to have been only momentarily effective. Whatever the ultimate success of mediums in demanding enduring

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devotion, at the very least their uncanny performances raise the troubling intuition that the fabric of ordinary appearance has, in fact, been torn to reveal buried interconnections between dreams, pain, and interpersonal 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 mediumship attempts to ensure that human supplicants never attain intersubjectivity with possessing deities (see Hanks 2013). Instead, possessing deities speak at supplicants to emphasize that there are stringent ontological limits to what unaided humans can really know. Dividing the supplicant from their self as it is described by the medium’s manifesting 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 consciousnesses. 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 anthropomorphic. 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 selfknowledge is “reversed” by the possessing deity and the cosmology he or she makes manifest (Wagner 1986). Within a mediumistic consultation, 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 (Fernandez 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

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this respect, Hindu mediumship makes the paradox that dream experience 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. Mediums, however, also seek to restrict this reflective impulse to the consideration 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 intelligibility 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, however, see through this opacity, making the self of the supplicant transparent – 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 revelation, there can be no doubt; in fact, it presumes that humans exist in an eternal existential aporia in which the conviction of having transparent 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

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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 normally. 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 discerning clandestine influences like the hidden intentions of bewitching relatives. Dreams thus require stringent analysis. Without elucidation, 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 understood. 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) signifcance 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 constant warnings to mistrust others. Dreams spur people to make seemingly 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 relatedness 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

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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 suffering 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 Elana’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 intervention 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 consulted a friend. His friend explained the dream by interpreting the man

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as an Ampuku forest spirit and the fruits as the members of John’s matriline (bée). The dream revealed that Da John’s lineage was being punished 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 lineage 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 existence, the significance of Da John’s dream is expanded to involve the entirety of his lineage. In each instance, dreams reveal the individuated 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 relational self. This is vividly depicted in dreams of drowning or floating 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 dependence 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 materialize 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 interpretive difficulties posed by these transmutations, Ma Tres and other

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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 talismanic 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 Amerindians, 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 unexpected 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, whichever 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 numerous 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 sanctuary, 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

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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 frequent 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 sitting 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 coming down the trail and wearing completely different clothes. Da Tomiki explained that the doppelgänger was in reality a spirit who had borrowed 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 person 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 quiddities of dreams into conscious reality, spirits are practically identical

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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-interpretive 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 person’s dreams to ancestral relations with spirits demanding collective ritual attention. For Ndyukas, as for other African-descended peoples in the Americas, “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 acknowledging 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 mediums 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, however, 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

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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 yesterday 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 something 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 spirits, 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 sisters. We helped with that. But there was a forest spirit present where

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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 animal. 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

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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 identical to the one her mother had just recounted. This meant that the same spirit was appearing in both their dreams. They would therefore 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

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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. Centrally, as when Pa Kodyo invokes his “horse” Ma Tres’s affection for Ma Abeni, we see how the ironic stance of mediumship multiplies the relationships, and thus the reserves of social support, that sufferers rely on for relief. Dreams are similarly ironic because they distance the subjective 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 confluence of Ma Abeni’s and Sa Adyuba’s dreams attests to their ubiquitous 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

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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 commonsense 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 exorcized ghost. Epistemic discrepancies between alternating states of waking 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 expression” (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 relationships. In doing so, they expose a relational reality that anticipates and decides the outcomes of the dreamer’s everyday conscious reality (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 ultimately 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.

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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 multidimensional 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 transparency, mediumship mirrors the ironic perplexities of dreams to galvanize 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 interpretation 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 nevertheless provide portals to invisible realms and relations. Out of this metaawareness – 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 “unavoidable 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 others. Mediumship interactively enlists the confabulations of dreams to expose that auto-interpretations of first-person subjectivity are as open

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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 without 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 highlight the ontological, epistemological, and moral distinctions that separate 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 deceptiveness 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 puzzling and bizarre, dreams disgorge an ironizing dialectic of possibility

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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 mediums 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 experiences. 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 community. This means that, even when mediums use dreams to exonerate their patients from personal accountability for their sufferings, misfortune is nevertheless explained through sufferers’ irredeemable membership 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 interventionist 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 Surinamese use racial ideologies to persuade themselves that they are capable 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.

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Given the suffocating hold that racecraft had over colonial Surinamese 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 others so as to validate discrimination against them. A theory of heredity, racecraft proclaims that the moral character of other ethno-racial populations is predetermined by ancestry and easily discerned from phenotypical 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 racialization, 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 alternative] signs” of responsibility and belonging (Briggs 1996b, 462). Racecraft 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 fundamentally 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

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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 selfcertainties, 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 Surinamese 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 compounded 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 normally 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 senseless 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. “Lionel Messi,” André replied – naming the Argentine striker who was then the hero of Surinamese men. Agidibo grunted recognition. His skill at

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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 obvious 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 punish 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 obligations 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 drinking from, stroked it, and made knowing faces at Kumar. Kumar held the bound toys firmly, and André took a large swig from the second

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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 everyone 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 burdensome, 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 Agidibo 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.

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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 embarrassment 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 conceded, but not before demanding some rum. Looking furtive, Kumar slunk inside and came back with a bottle. Ba Ben and André tried to persuade 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

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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 interaction was to be understood. The previous chapters showed that mediums 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 contemporary nation-states, Surinamese are committed to the rhetorical equality 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 classstructured” colonial society has produced enduring “political divisiveness, [highly unequal] economic privilege or privation, and contrasting ethnic stereotypes” (Drummond 1980, 353). Though all of these divisions are present in Suriname’s “plural society” (M.G. Smith 1965), because that society is divided between six major ethno-racial populations, 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 Surinamese ethno-racial groups grasp for the dignity of a common humanity, an egalitarianism that, at best, provides only piecemeal “grounds for a moral mediation of problems stemming from economic differentiation and racial and cultural antagonism” (B.F. Williams 1991, 194). The failure of such longed for ethno-racial equality is disproportionately the result of the phantom hierarchies of economic and cultural deservingness that colonial white supremacy imposed, and by which contemporary Surinamese remain haunted. In spite of frequent

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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, outright 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 suspicions 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 feeling that they are responsible for securing a superior position for their own ethno-racial group in an ideal ethno-racial order that is nonetheless 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. Conversely, Hindustani and Maroon Surinamese are also defiantly, if uneasily, 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 Surinamese 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

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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 Surinamese 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 everyone else in Suriname. Because when the Kuli are educated, then Black people cannot become better than them. When Black people are uneducated, 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 “discrimination” (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

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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 ethnoracial 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 insinuations 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 overcompensation for Hindustani men’s natural inability to sexually gratify their women. Whether framed as overt physical assaults or concealed sorcery, accusations 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 spirits. 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.

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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 specializing 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 Hindustanis with global fears about Islamist political violence. Connecting the pandemic of bakuu witchcraft that is “killing” the Ndyuka homeland to the war on terror, one Tapanahoni Ndyuka man in his twenties directly blamed “Kuli” (Hindustanis) for the 9/11 attacks: “What we [Ndyukas] can’t stand is fuck-upped Kuli terrorists!” Such negative 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 paraphernalia 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 evidence 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 pervasive 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 Hindustanis’ wider social threat, not only to the social position of AfroSurinamese, but also to the parameters of respectability and inclusion in the Surinamese public sphere. Even as Maroons are themselves marginalized and maligned by these very same colonially inherited cultural prejudices – and identical allegations about bakuu – the hegemony of

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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 ethnic 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 poverty, 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 property such as houses and cars. My Hindu interlocutors were accordingly sensitive about Afro-Surinamese claims to enjoy prior rights over Surinamese 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 particular, 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 discourse 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 exclusively inhabited by “Kafri” (Sarnami: Black people). These stereotypes are key tropes of Hindu exceptionalism, and Hindus 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 reputation, Ravan was born as a fair-skinned Brahmin. After attaining a boon

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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 corrosive 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 aberration potentially authored by bakuu (see Putnam 2012 for the panCaribbean context).9 Whatever the exact accusation, Hindus characterize Maroons and other Afro-Surinamese as inherently untrustworthy and potentially dangerous. Added to allegations of cocaine trafficking 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, neither side can ever hope to persuade the other of anything but their bad faith. Ironically, as seen in the reciprocated Maroon and Hindu accusations 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 population 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

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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, understand? 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 dispositions of Afro-Surinamese. In the incident invoked, Anjali’s daughter 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 personality, 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 inducing 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

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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, misgivings 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 otherwise 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 conflict, 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 intelligible, 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 compel 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. Morally upright persons are supposed to take satisfaction in their social

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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 withstanding 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 noninterference 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 members of purportedly distinct ethno-racial groups accused each other of mirrored moral pathologies illustrates a common Surinamese commitment 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 equivalent 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

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out of colonial regimes that sought to make European dominance visible, it forces a body’s materiality to stand for some qualities at the occlusion 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 conspicuously 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 phenotypical 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 AfroSurinamese (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 parentage. 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 specifying 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

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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 perspectives (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 reflection between members of racialized populations. Racecraft somatically encodes a meta-ethics of social division that coerces racialized persons 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 AfroSurinamese 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 racecraft 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, however, 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 righteous 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

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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 egalitarianism, 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 incontestable ethno-racial distinction. Against the sense that ethno-racial others have perverted the ideal ethics of both hierarchy and egalitarianism, 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 providing definitive verification for the social expendability of the accused. Precisely because racialized attacks on the moral character of ethnoracial 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 egalitarianism is enmeshed in Surinamese racecraft. People can announce that they epitomize an egalitarian ethic precisely because they hold themselves 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 yearning 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 recognize the consequences of their own racism at the expense of confessing 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

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of Surinamese racecraft, a reminder of the necessity of competition for cultural and economic power that was mainlined into present-day Surinamese 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 racecraft, envy contains within itself “a model of the problem that defines it” (Ngai 2005, 21, see also Hughes 2020). Accusations of envy are therefore, 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 Surinamese 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

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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 generically 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 “mistreatment” (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 otherwise. When a person discovers that they are a victim of the malicious envy of a close relative or friend, they nearly always react with indignation – “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 reliability 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, repurposing inter-ethnic animosities for domestic conflicts and, conversely, turning interpersonal aversions into racializing stereotypes. Ironically, it is this intimate familiarity that gives envy its critical rhetorical 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 suspicions 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 simultaneously 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 uncertainties and ironies of everyday intersubjectivity into the sort of epistemic entitlement that lets Anjali declare that she already knows the concealed contents of Afro-Surinamese minds.

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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 others phenotypically visible, the capacity of ethno-racial others to act contrary 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 prejudices, 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 others. That the physical features of Maroons or Hindus supposedly make them morally transparent to racists absolves racists of the ethical need to take seriously those whom they racialize. To mull over another’s moral viewpoint is to admit that they matter beyond the onedimensional 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 subjectivity into communal identities premised on the inevitability of negative intersubjectivity between racialized populations. This “denial of relationality” (Hoagland 2007) asserts that racialized others are constitutionally 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 unreliability 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 consequently 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).

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The resulting ressentiment empowers envy to bore a hole in shared Surinamese egalitarian expectations. The morality of ethno-racial hierarchy 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 others’ propensity to envy as pertaining across relations and interpersonal animosities. From within a family, a temple, or a neighbourhood, accusations of envy easily expand to disparage whole populations. In this way, racial ideologies rhetorically magnify envy and “scale” it to collectives that exceed more intimate identities of kinship or friendship (Carr and Lempert 2016). Hindu and Maroon wishes for the recognition of incontestable ethnoracial distinctions are an ironic outcome of racial capitalism’s subversion of the moral power of egalitarian ethics. Shared egalitarian values concurrently strengthen Surinamese resistance to new forms of racialized hierarchy yet corroborate surmises that, so long as their ethnoracial group is ascendant, such a hierarchy is morally inevitable in a class-stratified nation-state. This situation inflames the mutual ressentiment 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 … unintelligible” (Fassin 2013, 253), Surinamese certainties about racialized moral stratification make accusations of envy into a means for securing 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 complications. As already mentioned, Anjali is a spirit medium. Her spirits, however, 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 inhabited by this spiritual multiplicity because mediumship severs physical appearance from identity. The spirits and deities that mediums manifest outstrip the limits of human knowledge to transcend suspicions based on visible exteriors. This provides them, even when they are themselves racialized, with an epistemic position beyond race.

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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 solidarities” (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 responsibility 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 interethnic 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 appreciate the encounter as a conflict between two coextensive yet incommensurately ironic practices of self-revelation. In it, the “otherness” of the sacred (Csordas 1994; 2004) encounters the otherness of racialization. Whatever else happened, opposed revelations of ethno-racial and ritual suspicion and responsibility collided to doom inter-ethnic cooperation, 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 relational ontology, the spirit promised him absolution for his failure to satisfy 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

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a contest between two racialized populations over moral belonging and respectability. Though ultimately scuttled by the injurious stereotypes that menaced 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 accountability, they also work to exculpate sufferers from personal responsibility for these relationships. Analogously, accusations of envy and the witchcraft 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 respectability 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 narrative 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 panicking 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 stereotypes about Hindu men as immorally domineering and sexually dysfunctional. Rather than simply acquitting Kumar by convicting his rival

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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. Consequently, 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 personal 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 ethical 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 metaphysical guilt offers Kumar the return of his honour as a moral Hindu householder 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 AfroSurinamese view monetary payments as a crucial measure of spirit efficacy. More than material advantage, the exchange of money is an

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“ontological effect” of trust in the medium’s transparent conduction of spirit power (Espirito Santo 2009). For Kumar to pay for the antisorcery 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, emotions, and sensations permit mediums to internalize possession’s ontological ironies and descry them in their supplicants. If racecraft reduces people to transparent surfaces of hereditary determination, mediumship 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 postcolonial 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.

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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 acknowledging 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 perform their own subjection to otherwise invisible relations to reveal the shallowness of human self-knowledge. Reflexively, these revelations 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 humanity’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 egalitarian 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 surface that exposes hidden relational depths, racecraft makes the epidermal 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 distinction. 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 denigration. 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 coherence; mediumship, though, ostentatiously embraces the ironies that mediums enact. Unlike the ironies of race, the ironies of mediumship

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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 multiplicity 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 simultaneously 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 transparency 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 bewitching 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

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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 complicity 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 ontologies 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, selfdoubt 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 experiences like pain and dreams into relational crossroads of the invisible world. Without a single, unitary consciousness, the subject of responsibility 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 difference 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 contemporary 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 religion 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

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mediums, Hindus also transfer immediate accountability for their patients’ misfortunes to a variety of malevolent spirits and bewitching rivals, this spiritual vulnerability is viewed as a symptom of stubborn 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 occurrences whose causal influences are otherwise cloaked by the coruscating 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 others 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 independent needs of their souls, the same spontaneity of the will that is the essence of the Kantian notion of individual freedom becomes evidence that the self is a matrix of inescapable relationships (Kant 2012). In this context, autonomy implies perfect attunement to the relations

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that enable a person to act with the ethical certainty that they are harmonious mediums for the collectivities that they incarnate. Within existence as mediums reveal it, the self is really only tangible 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 superordinate agency of others. Revealing their patients’ fragmented responsibility 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 epistemic affects. Feelings well up when what has resisted articulation becomes concurrently pronounceable and open to contestation. Epistemic 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 apprehension 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 evidential 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 agencies contained within both the Surinamese landscape and the thoughts and feelings of their patients and then tie them to what is inexplicable 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

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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 revelatory authority. Ordinary Hindus and Ndyukas live their lives within variable degrees of intersubjective uncertainty. In the wake of a family 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 feelings 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 framings 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

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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 negative 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 perceptible by defining what is discernible about it. As meta-epistemic practices, 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 suspicions about who belongs, whether in respectable Surinamese society or on Surinamese soil. Responsibility is foundational to the legitimation of such belonging, to persuading oneself and others of the moral appropriateness of a person’s membership in a collective and of collectives’ 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 Suriname, 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 adversity or opposition. From this perspective, belonging is taking the conditions 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 accusation 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.

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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 landscape forces Hindus and Ndyukas to confront their ambiguous status as interlopers in a country in which they feel at home but are nevertheless denied irrefutable acceptance. While the tragedy of Ndyuka landownership provides a deeper connection to their adoptive homeland, 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 others, 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 contradictions. 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 undermine the strength of liberal arguments for human freedom – an irony as clear in the present as it has ever been. Such exceptions freed Europeans from responsibility for choosing to dominate those they conquered and enslaved. Declaring themselves the exclusive mediums of the universal, European colonialists could disparage other paradigms of selfknowledge 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, practices 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 selfknowledge is, foremost, a dynamic and dialogical relation with others.

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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 interactions that afford it. Spirit possession, however, enacts the dissolution of any such sovereign 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 fundamental 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 hierarchical 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 forever dismiss crucial aspects of themselves to maintain its legitimacy?

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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 consecrated 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 permitted 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 circumference without a centre. The self remains a composite that emerges from interactions that provide the epistemic frames that direct attention to who or what a self or selves may be. To return to Da Espee’s opening quotation, racecraft reveals precisely how European pretensions 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 mediums uncover show an awareness of just how collectively fraught selfawareness always actually is.

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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

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Notes to pages 7−17 Christian denominations (4%); Javanism (0.08%); Winti (2%); Other/No Faith/No Answer (11%). As between iconoclastic Arya Samaj reformists and orthodox Sanatan Dharm Hindus. 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. In 2015, Alcoa, the major US aluminium producer, closed its refinery, which had been the largest single employer in Suriname. 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. 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. Kwinti, Matawai, Sáamaka, Ndyuka, Páamaka, and Aluku. 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). 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. 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

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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. 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). 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. 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. 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 selfinterested self-deception (Ricœur 1970). Both approaches span what Webb

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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.

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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.

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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. 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.” 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. 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. Aisha Khan (2004) gives a superb treatment of another version of this problem for Indo-Trinidadian inclusion in Trinidad. 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). Such disclaimers are typical of Surinamese Hindu ideas of masculinity as personifying shrewd control and cautious incredulity. 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. 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. 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

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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 moralcosmological 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). 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 “eyepass” (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. Sarnami: āpan, or srefi in Sranan, also glossed as jiw or atma, life or soul in Sarnami. 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. Made from sweetened milk, tulsi, and other herbs. A round frame drum played with two thin sticks. In a practice that is in my experience peculiar to Suriname, when mediums underwent possession, they stood with their backs towards the temple’s

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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

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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?” Ampuku forest spirits (busi wenti/gadu) possessed nearly all the female and male Ndyuka mediums in whose rituals I participated. 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). 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. 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. Suriname has a significant Haitian community, and Haitians are stigmatized as practitioners of black magic. 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,

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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. Bruderschap en eenheit partij: Brotherhood and Unity Party. 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. 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. 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. 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 AfroSurinamese 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. Suriname has no minimum wage. 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

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obligation to inherited deities, as retained as part of a broadly racializing/ ethnicizing focus in Indo-Surinamese and Guyanese Hinduism. 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. Or the waxing and waning of the moon in the Puranas. Madrasi is the collective Guyanese term for all people of southern Indian origin whose ancestors disembarked from the port of Madras (now Chennai). I don’t want anything, Father, only for my pain to be relieved. When you come to me, when you arrive, there is no pain. I just want to be rid of the pain. These pains will be relieved; slowly but surely you will find that you are relieved of them before you die. But it is already too late because what is left in me that is without pain? Sitting on the floor with reduced noise, this interaction was one of the very few in which I noted down where participants were looking. 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). 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.

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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.

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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, IndoGuyanese occupy a structural position in Suriname analogous to Maroons.

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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. Stories are told of Maroon-owned bakuu streaking through the night over Sunny Point as balls of blazing fire. 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. 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. “‘The nature of things,’ said Rousseau, ‘does not madden us, only ill will does’” (Berlin 1999). 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 selfopacity, 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). 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

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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.

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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

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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

Index 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

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;

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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; selfknowledge 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 ethnoracial groups, 207–8 epistemic affects. See affects, epistemic

Index Espee, Da (medium), 217, 225 ethics: egalitarian, 203, 210; Enlightenment, 225; mutual respect and, 38, 207–8, 221; of noninterference, 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

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; IndoSurinamese, 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, 49, 56. See also Shakti (Hinduism) Hindustanis. See Indo-Surinamese history: colonial, 6, 22; Ndyuka, 98, 101, 126, 224 Hobbes, Thomas, 17 Holy Ghost (Bun Yeye), 44 honour (ijjat), 64, 205, 211, 213; identity and, 47, 64 householding, 47, 55, 81; joint families and, 9; masculinity and, 212; morality and, 82, 144, 213; otherness and, 57 houses, 34, 55, 84, 163 Hume, David, 16, 22, 225 humility, 76, 92 identity, 47–8, 55–6; attachment to, 150; communal, 209; confrmation of, 109–10; continuity of, 65; Hindu, 64; overlapping, 134; pain and, 126, 136; as severed from physical appearance, 210; unveiled in dreams, 177 ideology, 11–12, 92, 140 ignorance, 39, 123; conversion of, 127, 215; of divinity, 148, 154; race as, 205; of ritual knowledge, 91; weaponized, 25 illness, 60, 68, 144, 146, 164 illusion, 155, 163, 173, 185 immateriality, 155, 157 incarnation: bhakti and, 64; of evil, 83; of lineage, 95, 132; selfknowledge as, 215, 218 indenture, 6, 46, 62–3 Inderjal, 67, 149 India, 49–50, 59 Indo-Surinamese: economic success of, 57, 199, 200; ideals, 9, 28, 89, 144; mediums, 51; prejudices of, 12, 57, 71, 199, 201; respectability, 52

inequality, 42–3, 66, 207 infdelity, 197, 212 insanity, 110, 165 intentions, hidden, 174, 203, 221 interdependence, 38, 130, 142, 185, 202 interiority, 124, 162, 186 intersubjectivity, 18, 116, 141–2, 155; attunement of, 205; negative, 209, 222; racecraft and, 214; repair and, 170 intimacy, 144, 214 invocation (nyanfalu), 30, 110, 119, 137–8 irony, 185, 215; of belonging, 222; dreams and, 187; of ethnoracial denunciations, 207, 209; mediumistic, 210; racecraft and, 189, 200, 203, 215; self-knowledge and, 223 Irvine, Judith, 21 Islam, 13, 47, 64, 198 Jackson, Shona, 11 jajman, 47 James, William, 16 Javanese, 7, 14, 238n3 jealousy, 14, 67, 126, 197 Jesus, 44, 193 John (Willems), Da, 27, 93–4, 95; on dreams, 174; on permission, 34; preparing obiya, 98 Johnson, Paul C., 24 kabiten (titleholder), 31, 33, 41, 117 Kali, 59, 68, 73, 143, 168 Kango, 107 Kant, Immanuel, 17, 22–3, 223, 225 kaolin. See clay karma, 65 Kateri, 60, 73, 85, 147, 167 Keane, Webb, 15 Ketu, 146–8

Index 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,

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; kinmediated, 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

Index 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

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; postcolonial, 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

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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 selfdefence, 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

Index 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,

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 AfroSurinamese, 199, 213; about IndoSurinamese, 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

Index 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

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

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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)

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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)