How to Love a Rat takes place in a Cambodian minefield. Working amid the danger of 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, as well as 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 deminers' love for the rats mediates both the traumatic violence of the past and the uncertain dangers of the minefield. The book's stories depict an emergent and transformative postwar ecology that has developed through human-nonhuman relationships, including those shared between humans and rats, landmines, and spirits.
How to Love a Rat Detecting Bombs in Postwar Cambodia
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Reviews
"This inventive and beautiful ethnography offers powerful insights into the multispecies worlds created by warfare. Darcie DeAngelo's moving exploration of the everyday contours of postwar ecology in Cambodia illuminates how trust and love between species take root in a social world riven by mistrust and complicity."—Radhika Govindrajan, author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas"DeAngelo's How to Love a Rat is a richly textured study that brings to light a complex and multifaceted world in which Cambodian deminers and Tanzanian rats enact a common future in the midst of ongoing violence, unappeased spirits, and unresolved enmities. This surprising and nuanced ethnography brings together studies of militarized ecologies and the multispecies turn, and it will be a must-read for scholars of postwar environments."—Eleana Kim, author of Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ
"How to Love a Rat is essential reading about the making of habitable futures in former killing fields. Animal companions, former combatants, and ghosts come together in an uneasy choreography of landmine detection, and in efforts to undo violence long past its end date. This is a brilliantly crafted book and a vital story for our times."—Adriana Petryna, author of Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change
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