In Search of Fire Villains

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the relationship between willful blindness and structures of blame by exploring how Ngaju Dayak villagers in Indonesia’s province of Central Kalimantan deal with the discourses, knowledge, and politics of blame that have emerged around the region’s recurrent peat fires. Since these fires cause regional air pollution, detrimental health effects, tremendous economic costs, and environmental impact on a global scale, the search for fire villains takes center stage. However, as this article shows, the causes of fires are basically unknowable. Not only do the fires’ pyrogenic agencies and temporal and scalar complexities stymie knowing, but knowing involves risks. This puts ignorance at the heart of this Anthropocenic blight, with diverse actors engaging in willful blindness to attribute blame and avoid responsibility in order to live with the fires and the epistemic and political-economic structures bound up with them. Willful blindness, it is thus argued, is a core element of structures of blame. However, given that nonhuman entities are drawn into these circuits of blame and unknowing, an analysis of willful blindness and its dynamics needs to actively reckon with these nonhuman actors.

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