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AbstractQuestions 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.

Ugly emotions like envy and greed tend to emerge ethnographically through accusations (as opposed to self-attribution), de-centring the individual psyche and drawing attention to how emotions are deployed in broader projects of moral policing. Tracking the moral, social dimension of emotions through accusations helps to account concretely for the political, economic and ideological factors that shape people's ethical worldviews – their defences, judgements and anxieties. Developing an anthropological understanding of these politics of accusation leads us to connect classical anthropological themes of witchcraft, scapegoating, and inter- and intra-communal conflict with ethnographic interventions into contemporary debates around speculative bubbles, inequality, migration, climate change and gender. We argue that a focus on the politics of accusation that surrounds envy and greed has the potential to allow for a more analytically subtle and grounded understanding of both ethics and emotions.

Ugly emotions like envy and greed tend to emerge ethnographically through accusations (as opposed to self-attribution), de-centring the individual psyche and drawing attention to how emotions are deployed in broader projects of moral policing. Tracking the moral, social dimension of emotions through accusations helps to account concretely for the political, economic and ideological factors that shape people's ethical worldviews – their defences, judgements and anxieties. Developing an anthropological understanding of these politics of accusation leads us to connect classical anthropological themes of witchcra , scapegoating, and inter- and intra-communal con ict with ethnographic interventions into contemporary debates around speculative bubbles, inequality, migration, climate change and gender. We argue that a focus on the politics of accusation that surrounds envy and greed has the potential to allow for a more analytically subtle and grounded understanding of both ethics and emotions.

Abstract
Throughout the Guianas, people of all ethnicities fear one particular kind of demonic spirit. Called baccoo in Guyana, bakru in coastal Suriname, and bakulu or bakuu among Saamaka and Ndyuka Maroons in the interior, these demons offer personal wealth in exchange for human life. Based on multisited ethnography in Guyana and Suriname, this paper analyzes converging and diverging conceptions of the "same" spirit among several Afro- and Indo-Guianese populations. We argue that transformations in how people conceptualize bakulu reveal how supposedly radical moral differences are constructed within and between populations in the multi-ethnic Caribbean. More than figurative projections of monetized inequality or racial and ethnic prejudices, baccoo actively mediate how people throughout the Guianas think about and experience the everyday conduct of economic and racial relations.