Measures of violence: Rumor publics and politics in the Kathmandu Valley

Abstract

Rumor is often depicted as a discourse predicating acts of popular violence – the unconscious medium for a decisive act of communal, mass and/or subaltern violence. This article presents a different perspective on how rumor relates to violence – instances of where rumor features as the contemplated subject of public inquiry regarding acts violence not yet formed, but considered imminent and likely as a condition of rumor’s possibility. Violence appears here as a spectral possibility contingent on how a rumor’s ‘aesthetic’, or material and circulatory expression, is likely to affect events of violent and political consequence beyond the coordinates of official publics and politics. Violence also appears in the habituated bodies, gestures, discourses, and spaces that encounter rumor and violence as such – material, spatial, and temporal orientations reflective and productive of chronic states of public and political precarity. The author’s argument is based on ethnographic work conducted in the Kathmandu Valley during the state of emergency underwriting King Gyanendra’s regime, and the riots following the abduction and execution of 12 Nepali service workers in Iraq that broadsheets labeled as one of the Valley’s first conflagrations of communal violence.