“Trust no one!” Stuart Strange’s Surinamese interlocutors warned him (5). However, as Strange ably demonstrates in his fascinating monograph, to suspect others is to suspect oneself. This book examines the roles of doubt, mistrust, insecurity, and suspicion in processes of identity construction and social formation in contemporary Suriname. Suspicion and doubt among those consulting Shakti Hindu and Afro-Surinamese Maroon mediums can take a variety of forms, including doubts about oneself, doubts about others, and doubts about the very spirit mediums with whom one is consulting. These feelings of mistrust and suspicion are what Strange calls “epistemic affects,” bodily intensities related to possibilities of knowing used by spirit mediums to challenge consulting clients’ knowledge of the self as constituted of/by spirit being(s) (5–6). Examining such epistemic affects, Strange presents a deft comparative analysis of ritual productions of self-knowledge through spirit embodiment practices among Shakti Hindus and Ndyuka Maroons. The book is primarily based on ethnographic research in a community of Indo-Surinamese and Maroons in an urban housing project on the outskirts of Paramaribo. Chapters in the book cover doubt and belonging to the land, conceptions of self, and production of knowledge of self and others through ritual engagement with pain, dreams, and racecraft.Strange does an excellent job bringing together for analysis competing ways of local belonging and modes of religion-making in Suriname—state-defined belonging as official government recognition versus grassroots understandings of belonging as maintaining appropriate relations to spirits of the land through correct ritual recognition and exchange. He tells the reader that belonging is central to collective self-doubt and whose land Suriname is emerges as a major source of anxiety, particularly for Hindu Surinamese. Ndyuka Maroons can hold up their ancestors’ early successes at adapting to life in Suriname—with their inherited communal knowledge of land, flora, fauna, and their respective spirits—as proof of their authentic belonging. Indo-Surinamese, though, harbor doubts about their own legitimate belonging, especially for followers of an official “orthodox” Hinduism, a diaspora religion with translocal gods constructed as separated from its sacred lands in India. However, Hindu Indo-Surinamese can make a place for themselves and secure prosperity in Suriname by creating relations with the local spirits of the land via ritual food offerings that run counter to and trouble the elite, respectable world religion of Hinduism, leading to dissimulation of these relations with autochthonous spirits and further anxiety and doubt.Strange shows the reader the ways in which practitioners use Ndyuka and Shakti spirit embodiment rituals as modes through which to explore, debate, and act on differing conceptions of self, and their attendant social and spirit obligations and entanglements. Mediums reveal their clients’ lack of self-knowledge. They then bring to light occluded connections and responsibilities to gods and spirits pervasive in human life. For Shakti mediums this includes disclosures of self as but part of a unitary soul with its related great gods requiring the client to cultivate bhakti-inflected relationality with them. In contrast, according to Ndyuka mediums, persons are “polyphonic,” difficult to know assemblages of spirit and human agencies and relations (117). Spirit possessed mediums can provide revelations about otherwise occluded human and spirit actions and intentions, often the sources of misfortune and doubt. And they also reveal the ritual responsibilities owed to the various spirit entities enmeshed with human persons.Strange ably compares Surinamese interpretations of pain and dreams as indicators of a lack of knowledge of self. According to Ndyuka and Shakti mediums, cohabiting spirits and gods use pain and dreams to communicate their otherwise opaque historical and kin-related entanglements with humans, whether benign or malevolent. Mediums reveal and interpret, or help petitioners to interpret, pain and dreams as signals indicating a need for greater responsiveness to spirits’ and gods’ other than human requirements or forgotten historical obligations. For Ndyuka Maroons, interpreting pain with the help of a medium became an occasion for affirming the Nduka idea of self as a “kin-mediated multiplicity,” an agglomeration of spirit agencies, ritually obliged ancestors, and generational misdeeds, which are the cumulative sources of power, knowledge, and identity for the Ndyuka (127). Hindus engaging with Shakti ritual practice interpret pain as an indication of the petitioner not fully understanding her self as a singular soul, a divine spark dependent on a collection of deities who require appeasement or devotion. Dreams require collective analysis because they bring messages of gods and spirits and expose the ill intentions and interference of relatives. Because Ndyuka and Hindu Shakti practitioners interpret the self and the dream as difficult to know, the medium’s insight is required to receive these messages, breaking down distinctions between waking life and dream, personal interior and communal exterior.Finally, in contrast to (but also running tandem with) the ritual work of Ndyuka and Shakti mediums, Strange examines Surinamese racecraft (a term he borrows from Barbara and Karen Fields). While mediumship sows doubt, racecraft promises certainty. The ideology of racecraft states that racial others are essentially knowable; the skin tells it all. Hindustanis and Afro-Surinamese stereotype one another and their race-making work becomes the basis for mistrust and doubt. Accusations of sorcery in particular are a major component of how race is constructed in Suriname and both Ndyuka Maroons and Shakti practitioners racialize one another through accusations of doing witchcraft, particularly trafficking in fierce and dangerous demonic entities called bakuu. Yet, while racecraft’s stereotypes and visible surety assert that the external, the overt, and the apparent tell the viewer everything she needs to know, mediumship sows doubt about the notion that racial nature is written on the surface. Mediums of whatever ethnoracial identification can have spirits from a variety of other ethnoracial identifications manifest or “possess” them, and so in some sense can become racialized others. The surface, then, cannot tell what is going on inside, only gods and spirits can speak with surety about what goes on beneath the skin.Strange manages to create a comparative work that is both deeply informative but contained, not ballooning out many hundreds of pages. That said, the book does not reflect on the comparative endeavor itself, its methodological requirements or potential theoretical import. Given the decline in comparison as a method, certainly in the study of religion, this would have been a welcome addition. The focus on the agonistic intimacies between Afro- and Indo-Surinamese, analyzing suspicion and doubt in identification and social formation, is an important analytical avenue, but it left this reader wondering about solidarities and mutual exchanges in Suriname. We have many hints of these in the book (and they certainly have existed historically) but which were not explored in a significant way.Suspect Others does assume prior knowledge of the cultures and histories of African and South Asian diasporic groups in Suriname and the Americas more broadly on the part of the reader. It would be suitable only for graduate classes or the most precocious of undergrads as an excellent addition to courses in African diaspora religions, South Asian religions, spirit possession, or postcolonial philosophy. Trust that this is a theoretically sophisticated and engaging work of anthropology, which also makes significant contributions to the study of religion, the studies of the South Asian and African diasporas, and global philosophy.