How to Love a Rat

"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. A must-read for scholars of postwar environments."—Eleana J. 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