Watching the fire approach

In the red half-light of a smoke-covered sun, a group of us stand, faces upturned in horror as we watch a gust of wind fan a blaze in the hills above Santa Barbara, California. We are constantly watching the hills, those of us who have not evacuated. For fifteen days, the ash has fallen like a sinister snow, the sun is dimmed and scarlet, and the low humidity parches our lips. I feel the fire in my body.

On December 4th, 2017, a brush fire started near Thomas Aquinas College in Ventura County, California. By December 21st, the fire spanned more than 400 square miles and was to become the largest in California’s history.

I stand, an unwilling participant in this ethnographic moment, watching flames leap above a mansion, its adobe archways dim and fragile in the ashen glow. I watch the fire threatening these visible symbols of the southern California’s drastic income disparity not only as an observer, but as a sociologist endlessly curious about home. In southern California, “home” has myriad images, imaginaries, economies, landscapes, and cultures. Behind walls and gates, large houses in the foothills near Santa Barbara and Montecito are home to some of the wealthiest Hollywood stars, musicians, and bankers. Now, these rooms with a view are monuments to the immobility, and vulnerability, of wealth, stuck into a mountainside of tinder.

But it is not just the homes of the wealthy that are threatened. The Thomas Fire consumed both the Ventura Botanical Gardens and the Vista del Mar Psychiatric Hospital. That same week, a homeless encampment tucked beneath Los Angeles mansions ignited, and then was engulfed by a small blaze. And, as fire moved closer and evacuations emptied Santa Barbara and its neighboring cities, shops and restaurants shuttered during the holiday season.

Disasters, according to Clarke (2004), “are prosaic and ordinary,” revealing “important things about how and why society works as it does” (1). Indeed, while fire has been omnipresent in California for centuries, recent blazes highlight and heighten crises of inequality in California. After the fires are contained, rents and property values spike with demand, further polarizing the already-skewed housing markets in these highly-populated areas (2). Yet, there is little ordinary about these present-day fires. Climate patterns are shifting. The warm air that builds in the deserts and desiccates these coastal mountains is getting hotter; the Western fire season now extends into Christmas–105 days longer than in 1970 (3). All these tinder-dry hills need is a source of ignition, which, 95% of the time, has been provided by human activities.

Landscape-scale disasters, ordinary or not, blur the lines between rural and urban, nature and structures. Does this flammable land bordering our homes truly belong to us? Or do we belong to this landscape? We feel the effects of its climate, we establish bonds to a place through structures, roads, and embodied knowledge, but clearly, we cannot control the effects of our actions on the land itself. Gazing through the ash with my neighbors, we are unsure of our place in this place, and unsettled in our settlements. Where is home when our perceived boundaries between nature and people are going up in smoke?

(1) Clarke, L., 2004. Using Disaster to See Society. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 33(2), p.137–139.
(2) Park, M., 2017. They survived the California fires. Now, the crisis is finding housing. CNN, p.1–9. Available at: http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/21/us/california-fires-housing-crisis/index.html.
(3) Liu, Y., Stanturf, J. & Goodrick, S., 2010. Trends in global wildfire potential in a changing climate. Forest Ecology and Management, 259(4), p.685–697.

Commentary on Rachel Tanur's Works: Venice Clothesline

This photograph of an African hut in a mountainous and lush landscape is at once intimate and puzzling. The house is well-constructed, its mud walls bound with branches and topped with water-repellent, dried grass. Maize grows in a plot nestled between the home and a small, wooden shed, evidence of planning and care. Yet, tall grass surrounds the domicile and people and animals are absent from this pastoral scene. In this photograph, the intimacy of what is visible hints at the stories left unseen to the observer. Is this homestead still a home, or now a remnant, left behind during a recent migration? Home, when linked to a particular house and homestead, is often considered an unmovable, geographical place upon which changes are unavoidably wrought. Social structures past and present shape where houses are located, who lives in them, and how the monetary values of both buildings and landscapes are determined. When disaster, displacement, economic change, or depopulation alters the physical contours of communities, individuals may leave behind their immobile residences. At the same time, the social construction of home exceeds mere materiality. As Bachelard (1958) explained, “a home, even though its physical properties can be described…is not a physical entity but an orientation to fundamental values” (1). A person may be more transitory than their house, but their sense of “home” may be linked with cultural belonging, experiences, lineage, and social networks. Many African agrarian communities divvy up access, rather than ownership, to homesteads through customary land tenure laws. In both Swaziland and Uganda, sites of two of my studies on land tenure, land is owned by a group, and access to land is negotiated and reinforced by village, clan, or homestead hierarchies. As a solemn, Ugandan man told me, “home is where ancestors live, where your god dwells, where you were born, and where your kids live.” What happens to “home” when people are no longer in the picture? In the wake of seasonal migration, crisis, or displacement, how do people, particularly those who relied primarily on land for livelihood, recreate home after extreme “domicide,” such as war and the forced resettlement of indigenous people (2)? And how can individuals made especially vulnerable by conflict and social loss find their place, both materially and symbolically, in the midst of such disorientation? We do not know where the photograph was taken. Local history, context, and culture is vital for fully understanding the meanings of place and residence. For instance, if this hut was located in Swaziland, it might be simply left fallow for a season, while its residents temporarily work in the capital city of Mbabane. If this home was in Acholiland, Uganda, it’s emptiness may reflect decades of internal displacement. In the 1990s, the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group confronted government forces in guerrilla warfare and terrorized Acholi villages along the way. The Ugandan government sent one and a half million Acholi to stay at internal displacement camps to allow for better protection and support of civilians. Two decades and a peace treaty later, family and clan members are finally able to reconvene at homesteads overgrown in tall grass. They return to familiar places to rebuild huts, replant maize, remember forgotten boundaries, and reestablish what it means to be at home—at least for them, in Acholiland. What is seen in this photo of an African hut is a window into the unseen: evidence of cultural legacies, lived experiences, and hopefully, many possible futures for this home’s people, and this peoples' home. (1) Bachelard, G., 1958. Poetics of Space 2nd ed., Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (2) Porteous, J.D. & Smith, S.E., 2001. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, Montreal and Kingston, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press.