In this article, I focus on the effects and affects of the child-trafficking rumors that have circulated after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia. The perpetual uncertainty about the truth of the rumors has inserted alternative, uncertain futures into parents' narratives of loss. I argue that to grasp such a condition of uncertainty ethnographically, we have to attend not only to what rumors reveal about a particular sociopolitical context but also to the ways in which they affect the lives of our interlocutors. Doing so allows us to inquire into both the conditions in which particular rumors acquire affective power and the emotional effects of the possible truth that they articulate. I further suggest that focusing on rumor's subjunctive mode, the uncertainty about what happened and how that could affect the future, attunes us to the uneasy space between knowledge and belief in which rumors operate. © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association.

Indian Ocean tsunami narrative child trafficking Rumor Indonesia Affect Disaster

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