336 BOOK REVIEWS the only stable referent, providing certainties about the very essence of others. Similar to Guyana—a country in which the ghost of colonialism is an ever-present presence, to evoke the apt terminology of Williams (1991)—in Suriname, the rhetoric of race is taken for granted. Races are imagined as ordered within a putative ethno-racial hierarchy modeled on colonial white supremacy (p. 209), even though, in practice, these hierarchies are in fact unstable and continually contested. In chapter 6, Strange addresses racecraft, the everyday ways Suri- namese racialize others, in light of mediumship. According to the author, racecraft and mediumship are essentially different. While racecraft deploys ancestry and hereditary determination to place individuals into a presumedly stable racialized group, mediumship multiplies the identities contained within the self (p. 190). Racecraft sustains ideologies that assume that ethno- racial others are transparent (another certainty?). Mediumship is about both ontological insecurity and ontological opening. While this contrast is somewhat convincing, Strange could have further detailed how the otherness of a racialized medium can reinforce statements and points of view delivered through mediumship. Mediumship can generate commitments to others and promote instances of ethno-racial mixture—mixtures that can operate through difference rather than blending (Crosson, 2022). This book will be of interest to scholars of the Caribbean, par- ticularly those invested in understanding spiritual and religious life on the margins of Caribbean societies. Scholars of religious studies, linguistic and social anthropologists, and others inter- ested in the productive dimensions of uncertainty, mistrust, and doubts will find in this book a wealth of insights. Suspect Oth- ers shows that among Ndyukas and Hindustanis, mediumship and self-knowledge are not so much about beliefs. Instead, they are particular practices of reflexivity that are viscerally lived by people. ORCID Marcelo Moura Mello https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9460- 2824 REFERENCES Bubandt, Nils. 2016. The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Crosson, J. Brent. 2022. “Race, Nation, and Diaspora in the Southern Caribbean: Unsettling the Ethnic Conflict Model.” Journal of Latin Amer- ican and Caribbean Anthropology 27 (3): 408–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/ jlca.12625. Williams, Brackette. 1991. Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.1111/amet.13153 Fencing in democracy: Border walls, necrocitizenship, and the security state By Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 200 pp. Martha Menchaca University of Texas at Austin Fencing In Democracy: Border Walls, Necrocitizenship, and the Security State, by Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey, offers an ethnographic analysis of the proliferation of border wall construction across the world, where wealthy nations use military violence to prevent the legal entry of impoverished migrants leaving politically embattled nation-states. Focusing on the border wall separating South Texas from Mexico, the authors offer undisputable evidence of how the militarization of the US-Mexico border region adversely affects the polit- ical rights of South Texas residents, who since the Mexican American War of 1846–48, have been treated as second-class citizens. This is a political status the authors call necrociti- zenship. Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey maintain that the concerns people of Mexican descent raise against the militarization of the border are dismissed by the US government and reflect insti- tutional racism against a population acquired by war and not considered truly American. Theoretically, Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey argue that South Texas is under a continuous “state of exception,” where the residents’ constitutional rights are suspended. As evidence of this state of militarized surveillance, the authors turn to ethno- graphic frames and critical analysis of federal and state policies used to justify such action. South Texas has been unfairly depicted by the media and congressional and state legislators as a lawlessness region, where Mexican cartels recruit locals to smuggle drugs and people across the border. The authors argue that the actual reason politicians advance these stereotypes is to justify militarizing the border and restrict immigration from Latin America to avoid the “browning of America.” Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey offer a superbly and accessibly written ethnography, including a visual essay, demonstrating the effective and public-facing storytelling techniques anthro- pologists can employ when narrating tragic global economic conflicts. Overall, the text is theoretically sophisticated, well- researched, and displays the long-term effects of the legacy of US colonization. The introduction opens with a 2008 congressional hearing held in Brownsville, Texas, to hear testimonies over the location of the US-Mexico wall. The proposed plan was to place some Mexican American neighborhoods in the exterior of the US side of the border wall. After Mexican Americans testified against the plan, Congressman Thomas Tancredo callously dismissed their concerns admonishing them for their unpatriotic stance. The hearing illustrates how spatial politics is a form of cultural violence and a manifestation of necrocitizenship. Chapter 1, “The Politics of Bisection: A Visual Ethnography of Rebordering,” examines how the US government justifies the