ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that rumors are spread because they sound true, or sound like they might be true. Many scholars of rumor have argued that rumor is the product of ambiguous situations: rumors resolve contradictions; they explain not only misfortune but good fortune. Rumors could explain how someone grew rich without working hard. Rumors about corporations, colonial bureaucracies, events, and diseases are not just "about" those things at all; they are narratives and explanations and theories in which colonial bureaucracies, corporations, events, and diseases are shifting subjects. Rumours are being spread by ignorant people that the government wanted to know the density of the population so they could check the increase of population by giving people medicine indirectly. The level of detail and specificity about dates and locations are as great as anxieties about sugar, colonial power, biomedical causation, and political processes.
