This thesis explores hybridity and ethnicity in Nickerie, Western Suriname. It
undertakes this exploration from the perspective of doglas, Surinamese people with
mixed African and Asian parentage. In Suriname’s postcolonial process of nationbuilding,
ethnicity has been essentialized, with doglas representing a category of
anomaly, but also of uncertainty. What I have termed ‘dogla discourse’ refers to the
opinions, experiences and negotiations among and about doglas in Nickerie that both
shored up and destabilized Suriname’s ethnic essentialism. Dogla discourse fuses and
confuses ethnic categories and boundaries in its insistent hybridity. The thesis shows
that being dogla does not simply align with common tropes of ‘mixed-race’. I argue
that in embracing conflicting paradigms of ethnicity, doglas in Nickerie both
emphasized and undermined ethnic essentialism. This was expressed in idioms of
kinship and sexual relations, in notions of the pure/impure dogla body, and in the
relevance and irrelevance of ‘cultural spirituality’. Furthermore, dogla discourse
problematized the role of ethnicity in the enduring struggles of how to define ‘the
national’ in postcolonial states. Thus, the thesis presents an ethnographic
contribution to studies of ‘mixed-race’ in contexts of postcolonial nation-building,
and theoretically expands conceptualizations of ‘the hybrid’.