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In the Shadow of the Oracle

Religion as Politics in a Suriname Maroon Society

H. U. E. Thoden van Velzen and W. van Wetering

Writing from an ethnohistoric perspective, the authors have enviably unraveled the complexities of a belief system engrained in a community of people living in Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America. The Ndyuka, one of the six Maroon groups in Suriname, are willing to let their decisions and lives be dominated by priests, shamans, oracles, and spirits. During their extended period of fieldwork, Dutch anthropologists Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering were able to penetrate Ndyuka religiosity—a feat not achieved by other researchers, since the Ndyuka do not freely expose themselves to outsiders. Among the sacred and secular activities they witnessed and recorded were a witch eradication movement and Maroon oracles at work. Now, in this vibrant text, they offer readers an intimate, inside-out account of Ndyuka social imagery and ideological principles—in-depth revelations neither previously revealed to nor easily understood by others who do not share the same worldview.

$21.95 list, 298 pages

10-digit ISBN: 1-57766-323-3

13-digit ISBN: 978-1-57766-323-2

© 2004

“This is a book about witches and possession cults, about polytheistic priests and iconoclastic prophets, about magic as a cottage industry in a modernizing Afro-American society. It relates the world of the Ndyuka, a tribe of 50,000+ descendants of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century runaway African slaves in Suriname. It names the major innovators in the 300-year-old process of evolving and adjusting their belief system.”  — Dirk van der Elst

“I am reading In the Shadow of the Oracle again. It is a wonderful book: your data are obviously spectacular—unrivalled, really, and not just in terms of the Maroons. I would be hard pressed to think of another example of an ethnographic history of a nonliterate people that covers so much temporal ground in such a nuanced and convincing manner. But it also has a beautiful flow to its narrative organization.”  —Dr. Stephan Palmié, University of Chicago

Table of Contents

On Suriname's Maroons (Dirk van der Elst)

1. The World of the Ndyuka

2. Another Part of the Atlantic World

3. The Oracle and the Ghost

4. A Typical Day at the Gaan Tata Oracle

5. A Witch Called Coba

6. Saka Retaliates and Finds a Diva

7. The Abominable Institution

8. A Divine Disciplinarian

9. Dikii and the King of the Wilderness

10. The Return of Dikii

11. The Gods Parley Again

12. Wensi: Destroyer and Experimenter

13. A Time of Uncertainty

14. Akalali: A Fury Unleashed

15. Demons

16. The Jungle Commando's Obiya

17. Doing Anthropology among the Ndyuka

Epilogue

List of Ndyuka Terms