AIDS Rumour, Intellectual Anxiety, and Discursive Empowerment among Cameroonian Tradipractitioners (vol 83, pg 119, 2016)

This article refines established notions of rumour as a strategy of discursive empowerment by differentiating typologies of empowerment. Specifically, I employ terminology from the anthropological literature on witchcraft to distinguish between levelling' rumour, which seeks to attack the power of others, and accumulative' rumour, which seeks to increase the power of rumour-tellers. To exemplify this, I explore a rumour that circulated in 2012 and 2013 among practitioners of traditional medicine in West Cameroon, which claimed that the state would kill tradipractitioners working to cure HIV/AIDS. I first outline the likely sociopolitical roots of practitioners' anxiety regarding their intellectual labour. I then argue that this narrative was simultaneously levelling and accumulative in a national context, yet became accumulative in the more international context of practitioner-anthropologist relations. Ultimately, both forms of empowerment were key to understanding the rumour's favourable positioning of tradipractitioners in an increasingly uncertain, tense, and multinational part of Cameroon.