Minefield Montage: Juxtapositions of Materials, Stories, and Sensoria from Cambodia

This presentation will depict the use of montage as a sensory ethnographic method in a Cambodian minefield among deminers who were training to detect landmines with mine detection rats. Montage allowed unexpected relationships to emerge, from uncertainty’s relationship to love to human relationships with spirits. The paper draws from juxtapositions of multiple fieldwork materials from visuals, narratives, and sensorial sources (such as audio and touch). I focus on exemplary moments of montage from the field: 1) contemporary art by Cambodian artists with filmed fieldwork scenes; 2) narratives of love deminers have for the rats with narratives of suspicions they have for coworkers; and 3) the homage the deminers give to a dead rat with the homage they give to spirits. The senses bridge across these juxtapositions, revealing unnoticed parallels and exciting connections. Considering that the minefield threatened potential violence in the form of explosives in the ground, by the state which surveilled the deminers, and the former combatants-turned-deminers themselves, montage offered a useful method for allowing what was unsaid but also expressed more apparent to an outsider. Moreover, because the fieldwork entailed understanding spirits and nonhumans like mine detection rats, montage formulated ways of knowing that went beyond words. Key for this presentation is utilizing associative logic to understanding the minefield’s milieu with all its actors: humans, rats, spirits, and ethnographer. Unnoticed, and sometimes unspeakable, connections and patterns emerged through the relationship between the materials, stories, and sensoria of the minefield. This presentation will make use of the montage mentioned above by showing them directly as part of the presentation including soundscapes, video, and narrative.