Center for Asian Studies

D uring breaks in clearing explosive ordnance from the former battlefields of Laos, bomb technicians commonly forage for wild foods. A half-century after the Vietnam-American War, these battlefields are rarely "wastelands," but more frequently rice fields and orchards, markets, and schoolyards. These contaminated grounds are fertile; numerous wild and cultivated foods grow here, including bitter herbs, ginger, limes, and chilies. The older craters, especially, shelter young plants and saplings. As this account of foraging suggests, contaminated sites are not experienced by those that inhabit them as wastelands apart from everyday life. Military waste may be better understood as a kind of surreal substrate to everyday life. Beneath this rice field, the war. In Lao, the linguistic classifier for bombs is nuoy, the same as the classifier for fruit. Bombs are often called by the names of the fruits they most resemble: a BLU-3 cluster submunition, which is yellow and sits upright on a flat base, with a large spray of metal fins, is known as a "pineapple bomb" (laberd mak nad) (see fig. 1). A rocket-propelled grenade, which is long and thin, is known as a "cucumber bomb" (laberd mak dtaeng). And on through the inventory of local fruits and found ordnance. Technicians may spend all day collecting pineapple bombs for demolition and break to forage for pineapples during their lunch. A bomb technician once asked me, in all seriousness, whether the American military had studied Lao native fruits in order to design their bombs to "look like fruit, so we will pick them up." A half-century after war, these former battlefields may be understood as "bomb ecologies," zones in which war profoundly shapes the ecological relations, political systems, and material conditions of living and dying. 1 Villages in the most contaminated 1. Zani, "Bomb Ecologies?"

I offer poetic parallelism as evidence for an ethnography of authoritarian power in Laos and as a conceptual frame for understanding hazards in ethnography and anthropological knowledge production. Parallel poems take the form of juxtaposed statements, often characterized by multiplicity and contradiction. In an authoritarian context marked by state violence, the very form of the parallels is data on Lao society. I examine poetic parallels as a provocation to write field poems rather than field notes. [ethnographic method, hazards, Laos, parallelism, poetry] After the monsoon rains, regular as clockwork every afternoon, I stopped by a friend's shop for tea and conversation. 1 Her shop was a few blocks from the Mekong river in downtown Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Along this part of the river bank preparations were under way for the Boat Racing Festival to honor and entertain the naga, or water dragons, that live in the river. Historically, naga have been keepers of civil order in Mekong cities (Askew et al. 2007). Naga sanction laws, adjudicate conflicts, appoint rulers, and devour wrongdoers. A naga is content when the government is prosperous, lawful, and devout. If the government is weak or immoral, naga may show their displeasure by rampaging through riverside communities. Over tea, my friend wistfully commented that when she was a child people were respectful and made offerings to the Vientiane naga. Swimming fatalities were rare. Recently, however, there have been several prominent fatalities. The local government has banned swimming-even during the festival in the naga's honor. "So is the naga killing people and that is why swimming is illegal?" She slowly shook her head to one side and then the other, equivocating, then looked me squarely in the eyes: "Leah, you must learn that the Lao think in two ways: the naga in the river and we don't know how deep it is." I sat in the silence after her statement, waiting for further clarification which she did not provide. We were alone; there was no one else present to critique her remark, yet she spoke as if she was afraid. Vientiane was presently under curfew, and it was common to see soldiers on patrol or at checkpoints at major intersections, though there were none visible from our seats on the porch of her shop. I sipped my bael-fruit tea and thought. She made no effort to reconcile the dangerous naga and the dangerous river or to explain whether the government was afraid of the righteous anger of a Vientiane naga. My feeling was that the tension between her parallel

Introducing the New Editorial Collective "A good ethnographic poem needs to be attuned to poetry's extraordinary toolkit: using the line and its tension with the sentence and the stanza, their control and release, to offer a glimpse into what it is like to be alive in a body in the world."-Nomi Stone We are pleased to introduce our readers to the new editorial collective for the Poetry section at Anthropology and Humanism. We are honored to inherit the

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Leah Zani and Marzieh Kaivanara's modular assignment sequence asks students to think critically about the technologized body. Their goal for this sequence is to encourage students to understand their own bodies in relation to technology and power. They begin the assignment with theoretical discussions of race, gender, and other facets of identity. Students participate in activities intended to connect them with their own bodies and supplement their understanding of embodiment. Then, Zani and Kaivanara introduce students to scholarship on technological embodiment. Finally, the class collectively analyzes images of technologized bodies sourced by students. Zani and Kaivanara then ask their students to consider their own use of bodily technologies, from glasses to cavities to wearable activity monitors. Instructors can directly implement or adapt Zani and Kaivanara's assignment to create space for critical reflection on t...