BOOK REVIEWS 335 Despite these critiques, Samimian-Darash makes an impor- tant contribution to the anthropological and scholarly literatures on the future. While the author stresses that she is not cham- pioning scenarios as a mode of governance, she makes an important conceptual intervention by arguing that scenario technologies can be a vital tool in framing how we think about the future and how we might shape it. The strength of sce- nario techniques is their imaginative element, she argues, which invites participants to envision many future worlds rather than foreclosing on plausible possibilities or reducing the future to a set of risks to be mitigated. Readers will likely find this to be an engaging book that is suitable for undergraduates and seasoned scholars alike who are interested in concepts of governance, the future, uncertainty, and risk, as well as topics of security, energy, and public health. ORCID Sean Field https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0677-5256 DOI: 10.1111/amet.13165 Suspect others: Spirit mediums, self-knowledge, and race in multiethnic Suriname By Stuart Strange. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2021. 281 pp. Marcelo Moura Mello Federal University of Bahia Stuart Strange’s Suspect Others places suspicion, doubt, mis- trust, and uncertainty at the heart of anthropological theory. Addressing the interrelationships between urban Hindu and Ndyuka Maroon mediumship, this book demonstrates the per- vasiveness of suspicions and doubts in Suriname, one of the most ethno-racially, religiously, and linguistically diverse coun- tries in the Caribbean. Conceiving of suspicion, doubt, and mistrust as “epistemic affects,” Strange analyzes how such affects reveal and are transformed by the “problems of self- knowledge” and “apprehensions about what it is possible to know” (pp. 5–6). Through nuanced ethnographic narrative, based on descriptions of ritual interactions conducted in sev- eral languages, the author models how to study and write about the reflexivity of the Other. Strange writes from the periphery of the Caribbean without reducing the complexity of Ndyuka and Hindu mediumship to dated issues of creolization or pluralism. Throughout the book, which is based on extensive fieldwork among mediums of dif- ferent ethno-racial backgrounds, Strange composes narratives that demonstrate how people, in practice, deal with other-than- human powers and their revelations. Far from being merely illustrative, such narratives demonstrate how suspicion is an “elemental part of daily existence” (p. 5) in Suriname, a country indelibly stamped by the “tragic legacy of plantation colonial- ism” (p. 6). Given that mediums “transform patient’s suspicions about others into doubts about their own self-knowledge” (p. 13), mediums’ revelations point to the diverse range of rela- tions with others (including spirit others) that can make the self other to itself. As demonstrated in chapter 1, which provides the theoretical framework of the book, the self is opaque and dependent upon intersubjectivity, responsibility, and belonging (both to ethnic racialized groups and the nation). In a moral economy of general suspicion, individuals’ (self) uncertainties unfold in a scenario where competing sources of ritual author- ity are constantly scrutinized. At the same time, allegiances to multiple ritual systems turn the quests for certainty into aporias (in Derrida’s sense). Such aporias are raised and reinforced by the unsolved paradoxes of (belonging to) the sovereign nation. From chapters 1 to 5, the author skillfully demonstrates how epistemic dispositions (or affections) are amplified, nullified, modified, tempered, influenced, or even ignored by the revela- tions of existing ties between humans and other-than-humans. Insofar as Ndyukas’ and Hindustanis’ notions of personhood are essentially incomplete, an always-emergent form of being in the world subjected to the agency and influence of mul- tiple invisible agents, the very fact that individuals are only dimly aware of spiritual others is consistent with the assump- tion (or certainty?) that, by definition, such ties are already there. Among Ndyukas, mediums reveal, not without ten- sions between secrecy and transmission, how single actors are peculiar assemblages of spirits and ancestors inherited through genealogies (pp. 94–96). As for Hindustanis, humans are ontologically dependent upon Hindu deities (pp. 68–70), who inhabit even the most intimate moments of human exis- tence (p. 171). For both Ndyukas and Hindustanis, we learn that pains and dreams are evidence of social relations that are often unseen and unknown to humans. Similar to possession, dreams unfold processes of learning to see the self from the perspective of spiritual others (p. 173). Physical pain, in turn, is evidence of composite selves made from these relations with spirits. Mediums expose human ignorance of bonds of relatedness, their (inter-)dependence on manifold unseen relations (pp. 125– 27, 160). Thus, a practice that is deemed morally suspect (mediumship) can generate commitments and long-lasting ties. One of the most significant merits of Suspect Others is that it does not reduce mediumship to an inquiry over religious author- ity and legitimacy. Mediumship is not regarded through the lens of exoticism, as an explanatory paradigm (Bubandt, 2016) or proof of the strength of strange beliefs among ethnographic oth- ers. Mediumship instead is shown to pose theoretical, reflexive, and pragmatic questions to ordinary people, generating doubts that influence humans in ways that change their very states of being. In a context like Suriname, where suspicion and unpre- dictability are regarded as inescapable, race seems to be