Bomb Children

Leah Zani is a Junior Fellow in the Social Science Research Network at the University of California, Irvine.

“Bomb Children is a riveting and reflexive account of war remains, military waste, and ‘development’ in contemporary Laos. As a document it bears/bares the hazardous conditions of its making, poised on the edge of blasts in the margins of safety zones that are never safe, in the collision and convergence between social ecologies riddled with minefields, and between remains and (economic) revival. Tacking between these ‘paired conceptual frames’ and a set of parallelisms that collapse war and peace and life and death, Bomb Children labors in an ethnographic mode that eschews the pornography of detailing mutilated bodies and instead looks to the war damages that are not over and that remain viscerally present in the everyday of people's lives.” - Ann Laura Stoler, author of (Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times) “Bomb Children is nothing short of breathtaking. Leah Zani presents little-known and incredibly important material on the everyday aftermath of the Secret War for the people of Laos. Her topic is not only ethnographically underexplored, but has been deliberately concealed by the U.S. government for decades. In Zani's hands, fieldwork becomes a flexible toolkit, selectively and strategically deployed to grasp the object of military wasting in a revealing and ethically responsible way.” - Joshua O. Reno, author of (Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill) "A thoroughly original work, Bomb Children is likely to become a useful reference for students and scholars alike, and indeed anyone interested in the social consequences of airstrikes. It is also an arresting personal account of the hazards of fieldwork in a highly monitored and dangerous country." - Erin LIn (Pacific Affairs) "The book is a compelling study of the multifarious hazards haunting former war landscapes in Laos and a fascinating literary project. As an innovative and creative reflection of anthropological methods and epistemologies, the book is an excellent contribution to the discipline." - Oliver Tappe (Sojourn) “This is a daring, adventurous and inspiring ethnography of a kind rarely seen in this region. Zani’s book will be a must-read for scholars of military waste and provides a valuable contribution to ongoing conversations about power in Lao PDR.” - Holly High (South East Asia Research)

• Acknowledgments  viiNote on the Lao Language  ixFieldpoem 30: Postwar  1Introduction: The Fruit Eaters  3Fieldpoem 11: The Fruit Eaters  361. The Dragon and the River  37Fieldpoem 15: "The Rice Is More Delicious after Bomb Clearance"  642. Ghost Mine  65Fieldpoem 23: Blast Radius  973. Blast Radius  98Fieldpoem 26: House Blessings  130Conclusion: Phaseout  131Fieldpoem 18: Children  149Appendix: Notes on Fieldpoems  151References  155Index  165