Paper Short Abstract:

How might attention to fire’s image inform the ethnography of Australian fire ecology and carbon exchange? In addressing this question to the intimate and fragile impressions left by catastrophic fire, this paper also reflects on the fleeting glimpse as itself a compelling ethnographic form.

Paper Abstract:

In early 2020 Australia seemed consumed by fire. ‘The Black Summer fires’ engulfed the southeast, with significant fires also burning across the northwest of the country. As these gathered force, photojournalists, scientists, and artists produced a diverse set of images designed to lend these scale, offering a ground against which figures of catastrophe and crisis might be measured. In Sydney, however, smoke and falling ash brought distant bushfires near as intimates, offering impermanent, but no less impressive counterimages to the mass-mediated, spectacular flames of bushfire: Cinders and microparticles circulated in the city’s atmosphere, elevating medical risks of circulatory disorders, and impacting public health and finance for an unforeseeable future. It became hard to breathe.

This presentation begins with the image of one such cinder, a fragile impression produced in the context of ethnographic fieldwork on Indigenous fire management and carbon exchange. This cinder offers a potent figure through which to reconsider fire’s animacy, sociality, and power. Such fleeting images and impressions have become unexpected, but insistent interlocutors in this fieldwork, encouraging reconsideration of fire’s role as medium of climate change and carbon exchange: What becomes differently apparent through the cinder’s delicate, yet insistent imposition of memory and form? What other forms does fire take as image or impression? And how might attention to fire’s image reshape the ethnography of fire? In asking what images might demand of an ethnography of fire’s urban ecology and indigeneity the paper also reflects on what makes the fleeting glimpse so compelling as an interlocutor.