This article considers rumors the backbone of what Michael Taussig calls “the nervous system.” For the last three decades Haiti has been a thoroughly nervous, sometimes terrifying place, struggling in the grip of violence, fear, and despotic repression. The grapevine in Haiti is a dangerous and highly charged place where stories of violence and magic can paralyze people with fear and confusion, but it is also the place of a type of speaking that limits the ability of any institution or government to define social knowledge totally. Authoritarian forces depend upon word of mouth to help spread terror and fear. To accomplish this they must drive speaking out of open public debate and into the back alleys of rumors. But in passing rumors speakers create an alternative public sphere and maneuver to speak in oppositional voices. It is the task of a critical anthropology to interrogate these forms and to work out methods of explanation that are appropriate to such practices.
