Dear Member of the Société des Américanistes,

We are pleased to invite you to the conference to be held on Thursday, April 27, 2023, from 5 to 7 pm by visioconference on the following link:

https://zoom.us/j/93875592450?pwd=c0JYYUhWSDRLN2cxUjkzL0VOWlRCUT09
ID de réunion : 938 7559 2450
Code secret : 971196

Guilherme Moura Fagundes
Associate professor at the University of São Paulo
and recipient of the 2022 Society of Americanists Prize

will present:

Making it Burn: Fire Techniques and the Government of Life in the Brazilian Savanna

Making it Burn: Fire Techniques and the Government of Life in the Brazilian Savanna is an ethnographic work on the different ways of conceiving wildland fires, as well as their effects on the treatment of human and non-human alterities. Alongside with Quilombola communities, environmental managers and firefighters from the Jalapão region, the study examines in detail the emergence of integrated fire management in Brazil and the place of local agropastoral knowledge in this new global environmental policy. Based on fieldwork, archival research, and audiovisual production, the study argues that different fire techniques (convivial, suppression, prevention, and management) provide not only specific ways of dealing with the pyric phenomenon, but also produce ecological systems and political institutions for the government of life forms.

The conference will be given in English