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Accepted Paper:
Negotiating the Burning Future: Indigenous Responses, Infrastructures, and Fire Governance in Indonesia
Sofyan Ansori
(Northwestern University)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the way fire infrastructures are perceived, embraced, or contested, this paper seeks to explain the complexity of indigenous people's responses toward the environmental/developmental interventions and the future imagined by the state and its experts within fire governance in Indonesia.
Paper long abstract:
Responding to the massive forest fires in 2015, Joko Widodo, the Indonesian president, promised to solve such an environmental catastrophe by creating the Peat Restoration Agency (Badan Restorasi Gambut, BRG). Supported by the national budget and international donors, this agency constructed extensive fire infrastructures to mediate and regulate future interactions between people and nature. It also institutionalized community-based fire control groups through which villagers were expected to maintain and operate these new facilities. Focusing on the way fire infrastructures are perceived, embraced, or contested, this paper seeks to explain how the indigenous people orient themselves toward the environmental/developmental interventions and the future imagined by the state and its experts. Instead of preventing fires, the new infrastructures have actually inadvertently facilitated the occurrence of fire since people did not engage with fire infrastructures the way the BRG imagined. My ethnographic experience in the dry season of 2019 in Central Kalimantan suggests that community-based fire governmentality does not necessarily produce the intended subjects. Ngaju people, an indigenous community who engage with BRG-led fire governance in my field sites, can orient themselves differently to the future anticipated by BRG. Contrasting this vernacular anticipation with the prevention foregrounded by BRG is essential for recognizing the significance of temporal dimension in the formation of environmental subjects. In so doing, this paper provides a different window to understand the complexity of indigenous responses within fire governance and other contemporary conservation projects that demand people's participation and local engagement in Indonesia and elsewhere.