Paper short abstract:

The historical and anthropological literature tends to posit rumor as a sociological phenomenon effective of predicated acts of popular violence—the unconscious medium for violence already enacted. In this article, I discuss a case where rumor becomes “the referent of its own expression”: the thing people heed, discuss, and trace as capable of inciting violence as an imminent, but as-yet unformed condition of rumor’s possibility. I argue that this way of engaging rumor and violence leads to a realm and method of public interaction where events of political consequence are anticipated beyond, despite, and in excess of the publics associated with political events “proper.”

Paper long abstract:

Rumor is often portrayed as a phenomenon effective of predicated acts of popular violence—the unconscious medium for violence already enacted. This paper addresses a case where rumor becomes "the referent of its own expression": the thing people heed, discuss, and trace as capable of inciting acts of violence not yet formed, but imminent and likely as a condition of rumor's possibility. I argue that this way of engaging rumor and violence leads to an aesthetic of public interaction where events of political consequence are anticipated beyond, despite, and in excess of the publics associated with political events "proper." Rumor appears here as an index of the vernacular political: the liminal realm of the political that sometimes intersects with, but is otherwise governed by a different (parallel) set of poetic ethics than state, civil, legal, and/or academic discourses about secular and democratic possibility. The paper focuses on the role rumor aesthetics played in how urban Nepalis related to acts of communal violence linked to the abduction and beheading of 12 Nepali servicemen by an Islamic militia group in August 2004. During this period, it was not the acts marked as "violence" by the state or mainstream press, but the events of collective and contingent violence that took place in the vagrant pathways taken by rumor that people attended most keenly. What emerged was an aesthetic method and arena of public and political exchange particular to this moment and condition of late postcolonial crisis and uncertainty.