How to Love a Rat (eBook)

Detecting Bombs in Postwar Cambodia

Darcie DeAngelo (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
196 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-39743-9 (ISBN)

Infos

How to Love a Rat takes place in a Cambodian minefield. Working amid hidden bombs, former war combatants use explosive-sniffing rats to clear mines from the land. In total, an estimated four to six million landmines in Cambodia have been left behind by wars that ended decades ago. This has created the conditions for a flourishing mine-clearance industry, where workers who were once enemy combatants may now be employed on the same clearance teams.

Zeroing in on two distinct sets of feelings, Darcie DeAngelo paints a portrait of the love experienced between humans and rats and the suspicions felt between former adversaries turned coworkers. In doing so, she points to how human-animal relationships in the minefield produce models for relationality among people from opposing sides of war. The ways the deminers love the rats mediate both the traumatic violence of the past and the uncertain dangers of the minefield. The book's stories depict an transformative postwar ecology emerging through human-nonhuman relationships, including those shared between humans and rats, landmines, and spirits.

Inhalt

Contents

Acknowledgments 
Notes on the Language 

1. New Choreographies 
2. Shadow Stories 
3. Even the Clouds Lie 
4. A Murder 
5. Metta Means “I’m Sorry, You’re Sorry” 
6. Smell (Like) a Rat 

Notes 
References 
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.9.2024
• Reihe/Serie: Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Schlagworte: biological technologies • Decontamination • deminer industry • Disarmament • ethnography • Explosive remnants of war • former khmer rogue soldiers • human animal relationships • khmer studies • landmine detection rats in Cambodia • militarized ecologies • military waste
• ISBN-10: 0-520-39743-6 / 0520397436
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-39743-9 / 9780520397439