Socio-anthropologie (Dec 2023)
De la peur à la danse du feu ?
Abstract
On November 8th 2018, the Camp Fire, the most destructive « megafire » of California’s history, destroyed the town of Paradise and its surroundings, in the Sierra Nevada. Overwhelmed by the situation, law enforcement agencies weren’t able to deliver an evacuation order to the 50 000 inhabitants of that area who ended up evacuating in traumatic conditions. In this article we look at how this event transformed the relation to fire. Based on a seven months ethnographic fieldwork (conducted between 2019 and 2022) we demonstrate that even though the deep-rooted fear of fire is a social and historical construction, local stakeholders transform it into a diplomatic relationship in order to impulse a decolonial and empowering paradigmatic change.
