Presentation short abstract

Focusing on the frictions that shape the political ecology of fire in Argentine Patagonia, this research explores wildfire as a catalyst of ruination and examines its intersections with political processes of Indigenous marginalization, territorial control, and land dispossession.

Presentation long abstract

This paper investigates the intersections between wildfires, territorial politics, and power structures in the Comarca Andina, a region in north-west Argentine Patagonia that has been repeatedly affected by severe forest fires over the past decades. The analysis draws on ethnographic research conducted between December 2024 and March 2025, during two major wildfires that destroyed parts of the villages of Epuyén and Mallín Ahogado. Building on local interpretations of wildfire as a catalyst of ruination (Stoler 2013) - and thus as an accelerant of long-standing colonial dynamics embedded in the territory - the study examines how wildfires become instruments of state power, tied to broader processes of marginalisation, deterritorialisation and land dispossession affecting Mapuche people and local residents. In this context, the political use of fire operates alongside national ‘nature conservation’ policies rooted in a logic of accumulation by dispossession. These policies advance capitalistic territorial control, displace native communities, and impose boundaries that inhabitants sometimes attempt to erase or reclaim through fire.

Moreover, by analysing the sociopolitical conflicts that followed the 2024 Los Alerces National Park wildfire, and by considering the role of non-native pine plantations as technologies of governmentality (Foucault 2004), the paper shows how green-neoliberal institutional policies in Argentine Patagonia have contributed to the sociocultural construction of risk. It argues for rethinking fire governance by grounding it in the social meaning of the forest as an arena of friction (Tsing 2005) between different social actors and, therefore, between competing ontologies of nature.