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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in central Chile this paper shows how a major wildfire exposes tensions between neoliberal frameworks and relational experiences of suffering, revealing the limits of postdisaster governance by framing loss and recovery as individual rather than collective processes.

Paper long abstract

What does it mean to live through an “end of the world” when dominant ways of understanding the self and making sense of suffering no longer fit lived experience? Drawing on ethnographic research in Pompeya Sur, Quilpué, central Chile, this paper examines how a major wildfire exposes a tension between neoliberal valuations of life and relational experiences of loss, survival, and endurance. Prior to the fire, residents largely understood themselves through a subject-centered ontology emphasizing individual responsibility, autonomy, and linear life trajectories. The wildfire does not simply disrupt this worldview, it renders it insufficient.

In the aftermath, therapeutic and institutional interventions framed the event through the language of trauma, treating the fire as a discrete episode to be individually processed and temporally contained. Residents repeatedly challenged this framing. Rather than locating suffering in a single catastrophic moment, they emphasized how the fire compounded long-standing trajectories of socio-environmental fragility. Trauma, in this sense, reproduces individualized logics that obscure the relational conditions through which suffering is produced and sustained.

Many affected residents, who often describe themselves as “burned by the state,” were compelled to confront the relational nature of their existence. Survival, loss, reconstruction, and endurance are experienced not as individual achievements or failures, but as collective processes sustained through kinship ties, neighborhood relations, and material infrastructures. This relational exposure does not replace neoliberal subjectivities, instead, both modes of valuation coexist uneasily. Disaster emerges as an ontological revelation, exposing relational life while institutions persistently reassert subject-centered frameworks during post-disaster governance encounters.