“It's your family that kills you”: Responsibility, Evidence, and Misfortune in the Making of Ndyuka History

Abstract

Abstract Questions of responsibility are central to the politics and metaphysics of history. This paper examines the creation of different histories from alternative formulations of personal and collective responsibility among urban Ndyuka Maroons in present-day Suriname. Tracing conflicting attempts to assign accountability for a senior man's sickness, I argue that a distinctly Ndyuka conception of history emerges from the dialectical relation between the material qualities of misfortunes and the practices Ndyuka use to affix responsibility. Ndyuka efforts to assuage history as embodied by ghosts and other spirits that seek revenge on corporate kin groups simultaneously use the symptoms of misfortune to make history and attempt to contain or deny the transmissibility of collective responsibility to future generations. Understanding this process demonstrates how distinct perceptions of historicity emerge from different conceptions of responsibility, and the extent to which intergenerational sociality is defined by conflicted attempts to redefine historical accountability as much as to acknowledge it.

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