Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos by Leah Zani (review)

Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos is a reflexive account on the hazards of conducting fieldwork in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR or Laos). In this lucid and well-written ethnography, Leah Zani strategically and selectively guides the reader through hazards of her fieldwork—conditions of war remains, military waste, police harassment, paranoia, self-censorship, surveillance—and develops a practice for researching and writing about lingering violence that confronts the sociality of war in contemporary Laos. Conducting fieldwork over a span of 17 months between 2012–2015, Zani brings parallels (such as the remains/revivals parallel) to the reader's attention. Bomb Children's conceptual, ethical, and methodological frame of parallelism presents the inherent challenges of hazardous research and contributes to the anthropological study of military waste. As the central organizing frame of Bomb Children, parallelism is derived from the Lao practice of creative style or poetic form, and has its roots in the spoken Lao language. Zani writes, parallels develop in which "statements are juxtaposed, often through the repetition of similar sounds, grammars, structures, or themes" (38). Engaging the parallel process of remains/revivals in Laos, Zani argues parallelism functions as an important research tool to analyze the sociocultural after-effects of war.

The book focuses on the contemporary Lao period of Renovation reforms beginning in the 1990s: a period marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the acceleration of and dependence on Western humanitarian, developmental intervention, and financial aid, and a shift towards a market-oriented economy. Today, the country's strategic position at the "crossroads" of Southeast Asia and rapid economic expansion has garnered attention from scholars conducting research on topics ranging from global integration to patterns of development, land acquisitions, and environmental issues. Until the early 2000s, the country was virtually closed to foreign researchers, and the Lao People's Revolutionary Party's (LPRP) suspicion towards Western researchers remains institutionalized, particularly on discussions of state politics. Despite this, scholars from disciplines such as geography, environmental and agricultural science, development studies, and anthropology continue to contribute scholarship toward the growing body of knowledge on contemporary Laos. Zani's Bomb Children adds to this growing scholarship, particularly data from fieldwork in Laos and the anthropological study of military waste.

In Laos, the consequences of US secret bombing campaign from 1964–1973, where over 2 million tons of bombs were dropped during 580,000 bombing missions, resulted in the massive accumulation of military waste. The bombings destroyed villages along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and displaced civilians during the nine-year period. Today, Laos remains the most heavily bombed country per capita. The lingering violence is embedded in a material environment scarred by thousands of bomb craters and littered with tons of military materials such as unexploded ordnance and scrap metals. How does a country rebuild from a history destroyed by bombings, and what remains after war? Turning to an anthropology of military waste to write against terror and the layering contamination of violence, Zani incorporates the parallel of remains/revivals to analyze military waste as "active, corrosive elements of the present and future" (21). "Remains" refer to the military waste left over from the US Secret War, including the material and social relations produced by war and its aftermath. "Revivals" references the ongoing transformation of military waste, and the interweaving processes of "socioeconomic liberalization, religious awakening, and authoritarian renovation," in postwar Laos (22). The study of military waste also involves attending to political and ethical principals of anthropological engagement in a post-socialist authoritarian country where state terror, fear, surveillance, and paranoia shaped Zani's fieldwork.

An insightful aspect of Bomb Children is Zani's methodology of parallel violence that requires flexibility in the field. This methodological approach of parallelism stems from her fieldwork data rooted in realities of hazards by learning to perceive the remains of war in statements, sites, and experiences. Attending to how researchers should protect themselves and...