This is one of those rare books whose delight with its own fluidity leaks from every page. Price has built a career exploring the implications of history and memory among the Saramaka Maroons (one of six communities descended from escaped slaves who fled from the brutal plantations of coastal Suriname) and here, for the first time, he seriously and deeply personally engages Saramaka understandings of history as created by contemporary ritual practitioners exemplified by Tooy, the Captain of Cayenne's Saramaka community and Obiaman (shaman) par excellence.

Beginning with an account of Price's role in arranging Tooy's shamanic services for a wealthy Martiniquan and moving toward a restatement of Price's theories on the ethnogenesis of African American cultures, the book is an enthralling mash-up of personal anecdote, archival excavation, and ethnographic engagement. By bringing together the complex relations between the idiosyncrasies of specialist ritual imaginations and the larger structures of historical and cosmological consciousnesses, Price emphasizes the dynamism with which Saramaka people daily construct their realities in the face of contingency, making narratives from other narratives to produce new histories both elegant and polyphonic.

This is best witnessed in the most challenging section of the book (pp. 177–205) dealing with Tooy's trial and incarceration for rape. This chapter is at once informative and difficult, showing the ways clashing definitions of law, personhood, and gender entwine violently in the lives of Maroon migrants to French Guiana. The Prices provided a wholehearted defense of their friend (if an ethically problematic one—Tooy's sexual relationship with multiple sisters is considered morally suspect by Maroons as well, troubling a crucial line of Price's argument), but ultimately their ethnographic skill was useless before French Law. This episode provides a fascinatingly complex examination of the interplay between Saramaka modes of history and memory in dealing with the legal intricacies of the contemporary French State. This allows a more complex reflection on the multiple meanings and necessities of Maroon understandings of history in the multi-ethnic nations in which they live.

Price vividly sutures these stories to a welter of images, personal snapshots, and archival illustrations, creating a compelling visual counterpoint in which visions of history coexist as easily and, potentially, as controversially, as the multiple stories told by Tooy and Price in the course of the book.

While deeply admiring of Price's virtuosity in spinning together such a rich tapestry of tales with often profoundly insightful theoretical asides, my one reservation is that, while a compelling vision of Saramaka culture does emerge from this diversity of well-crafted fragments, a more synoptic approach could have had its occasional place. This would have allowed a fuller glimpse of contemporary Saramaka immigrants' religious lives, often lived tenuously as illegals at the margins of the state, as well as of the broader social milieu of an ever increasingly diverse French Guiana. Otherwise, Richard Price has made yet another invaluable contribution to Afro-Atlantic ethnography that stands as a lively model for the benefits of historical ethnography more generally.