A team of outsiders comes to grassland villages in rural highland Madagascar and asks about bushfire (doro tanety). Fire is bad, respond the villagers. It has no advantages and degrades the environment. Asked the same questions, city dwellers in Antananarivo are more equivocal: it’s bad for the environment, but might be a necessary evil for cattle raising and farming. Meanwhile, fires continue to be lit prolifically in this grassy landscape with a long dry season, a little less than in the past, but still omnipresent in the landscape with smoke plumes, black scars, and night-time flickering lights.
What’s going on here? To understand these contradictions, one needs to understand fire ecology, agrarian livelihoods, the power of discourses, as well as the psychology and ethics of research methods. Fire ecology, because fire is inevitable in wet-dry tropical grassy landscapes. Agrarian livelihoods, because fire can be a simple and effective tool for pasture renewal and field preparation (at the same time as a threat to thatched roofs and tree plantations). The power of discourses, because a century of anti-fire propaganda by governments, foresters, and conservationists – serving their interests, reflecting older temperate zone biases – shapes the frame in which people talk about fire. And research methods, because how do you ask people their honest opinions about a criminal activity when you arrive in their village in a sparkling four-wheel drive vehicle? These questions are at the center of a paper “Anti-fire statements coexist with millions of anthropogenic fires in Madagascar” that we recently published, under the leadership of Víctor Fernández García and funded by a SNIS research grant.
Posted by christiankull 
