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Record W4413901431 · doi:10.1111/aman.70019

Learning to Love Rats: A Postwar Ecology in a Cambodian Minefield

2025· article· en· W4413901431 on OpenAlexaff
Darcie DeAngelo

Bibliographic record

VenueAmerican Anthropologist · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCambodian History and Society
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEcologyEnvironmental ethicsSociologyPsychologyBiologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT This paper follows the implementation of landmine detection rats in Cambodia. Over the course of my ethnographic fieldwork with the team for the landmine detection rat technique training in Cambodia, I saw that the way the human landmine detectors (a.k.a. deminers) learned to love the rats also changed how they also learned to live and work with each other. Deminers themselves were usually former soldiers, many of whom had fought on opposite sides during Cambodia's civil wars. Their labor in the minefield was inherently aspirational, and rats were employed in this future imaginary. They worked with former soldiers who, as Theravada Buddhists, would sometimes use the religious word “metta” for the love they felt for their rats, which they defined as “pity‐love.” Metta is a love, I was told, “that can make a cruel person kind.” This expression had a particular valence for deminers who had to work with former combatants, where the stigma of past violence made it uncomfortable to directly address such former enmities. Loving the rats sublimated the minefield's potential violence into potential pity‐love for and with colleagues, mediating a violent past to work together toward a previously unimaginable future: a postwar ecology.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.040
Threshold uncertainty score0.079

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0080.007
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.342
Teacher spread0.332 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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