How to Love a Rat

Detecting Bombs in Postwar Cambodia
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-0-520-39742-2
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 17, 196 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 316 g

Reihe: Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Deangelo, Darcie

Fachgebiete

• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Tierkunde / Zoologie Tierethologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Historische & Regionale Volkskunde

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Darcie DeAngelo is an anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker. She explores the unexpected relations between humans and nonhumans amid war and other environmental disasters.