Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781478033912 Academic Inspection Copy

How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent

Description
Author
Biography
Table of
Contents
Google
Preview

A critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia, one of Earths most fire-prone countries, Timothy Neales How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent critiques the colonial logics of control deployed to manage unruly environments and explores alternative forms of environmental stewardship.

Each year, Australia faces increasingly unprecedented wildfires, marked both by their scale and by the intense public disagreements about their political, cultural, and ecological causes. How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent is a critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia and the technoscientific systems of control that shape its current and future possibilities. Timothy Neale observes how two seemingly opposing forces-an entrenched sense of crisis and widespread normalization-combine to form an apparatus of institutional fire management that increasingly centers technical control and militarization. While sympathetic to the double binds many fire management professionals find themselves in, Neale ties contemporary wildfire problems to ongoing colonization and Indigenous dispossession, exploring Indigenous-led land management and cultural burning as a practical assertion of sovereignty. Through dialogue and collaboration with professional fire managers and Indigenous environmental stewards, Neale calls for a collective movement beyond control thinking by fostering new alliances and modes of coping with, rather than commanding, our flammable world.

Timothy Neale is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University and author of Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia.

 

 

Acknowledgments xi Prologue xv Introduction 1 1. Technical Control 25 Interlude 1: Sing-Along with David and Linda Hurley 59 2. Communicative Control 62 Interlude 2: Sensng with Fire Analysts 90 3. Epistemic Control 94 Interlude 3: Lunch with Phil Cheney 125 4. Moral Control 129 Interlude 4: Investigating with Bomber 134 155 5. Indigenous Control 159 Conclusion: After Control 184 Notes 195 References 209 Index

Google Preview content