Darcie DeAngelo wins the Julian Steward Book Award

Darcie's book won the prize for the best ethnography of the year for environmental anthropology with the Anthropology and Environment section at the American Anthropological Association. Here is what the adjudicating committee said:

How do we (re)learn trust and care when a war and its afterlife (and alterlife) breed suspicion, mistrust, and hostility? Darcie DeAngelo’s How to Love a Rat is a groundbreaking contribution to environmental anthropology and an emerging body of literature that bridges war studies with anthropology. Through an intimate ethnography of Cambodian de-mining teams, their rat partners, and ghosts and spirits, DeAngelo redefines what it means to study human relationships in postwar landscapes and ecologies. The book’s narrative moves seamlessly between the sensory and the political, the personal and the ecological, the real and the surreal, to consider what it means to love rats in postwar ecologies. Demonstrating that love — fragile, methodical, and deeply embodied — can be a form of environmental and political repair, the monograph shows how affect, care, and labor emerge through the collaboration between humans, animals, technologies, and the material traces of conflict. It offers a rich illustration of what an ethnographer, in particular, can bring to thinking about postwar environments, highlighting care, trust, and vulnerability that circulate across human and nonhuman lives in environments scarred by conflict.

In prose that is both engrossing, evocative, and also restrained, DeAngelo leaves no element straightforward or unsettled – even the rats are made and remade as postwar technologies – a tender reminder that technologies of war enable violence but not only. How to Love a Rat challenges readers to rethink the boundaries of the social, the ethical, the technological, and the ecological, offering a model for an environmental anthropology attuned to the relational more-than-human labor of restoration.

The Julian Steward Book Prize Committee commends the books’ intellectual rigor and emotional depth. This book stands as an essential text in environmental anthropology for anyone engaged in reimagining the relationship between anthropology, interspecies ethnography, ecology, and the possibilities of life after war.

DeAngelo, Darcie. 2024. How to Love a Rat: Detecting Bombs in Postwar Cambodia. University of California Press. (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Alberta)