Measures of violence
Rumor publics and politics in the Kathmandu Valley
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2391066 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sepideh Bajracharya (Lewis and Clark College, Portland, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 361-378 |
| Publication date | 2015-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Material Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1359183515601453 |
| OpenAlex | W2373191341 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 34 |
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
Argument (complex analysis · Criminology · Ethnography · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Rumor · Sociology · Subaltern · Trope (literature · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Global Security and Public Health · Law · South Asian Studies and Conflicts
Marxism and literature
Off Stage/On Display
Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics
Peripheral Visions
Civil society and the political imagination in Africa
Modernity and its malcontents
Speaking with Vampires
Speaking with Vampires
Rifle Reports
Forget Colonialism
Remembering Partition
Selected Subaltern studies
Theft of an Idol
Fetish, Recognition, Revolution
Law and disorder in the postcolony
Life and Words
White Love and Other Events in Filipino History
Democracy and political theory
A public backstage
Along the Archival Grain
Memories of the Slave Trade
Government of Paper
Leveling Crowds
Theft of Life
Of Headhunters and Cannibals
Blurred Boundaries
Legends of People, Myths of State
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |