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Book Review
| Isle of Fire: The Political Ecology of Landscape Burning in Madagascar. By Christian A. Kull. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, xiv + 314 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, glossary, index. Paper, $25.Igniting the Caribbean's Past: Fire in British West Indian History. By Bonham C. Richardson. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, xvi + 233 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.
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| Two regional histories of fire and burning join analyses of political-economic and environmental change and continuity, one in Madagascar and the second in the British eastern Caribbean. Kull's and Richardson's meticulously documented accounts serve as counterpoint approaches to historical scholarship by geographers. Both books define regions within their island environments based on fire-related phenomena, analyzed in a global political-economic context. Beyond the physical nature and material effects of fire and burning, both works examine fire's varied and contested cultural and political significance. Both books are highly readable. Each would be an engaging graduate-level text in geography, human ecology, or environmental history. |
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Christian Kull's Isle of Fire presents a masterful theoretical framework to analyze rural land and forest burning in Madagascar during the island's colonial history under France (1896–1960) and its subsequent independence. Kull defines and challenges an "antifire received wisdom" that demonizes widespread burning to extend and maintain cropland and pasture, serving a continuity of elite, urban, and "metropolitan" (French, in colonial times) interests with a limited range of failed regulation. Kull shows how criminalization of most peasant burning has reflected dominant misunderstandings of fire practices and their actual effects. Emblematic narratives from Kull's own extended field studies complement archival data from French colonial and independent Malagasy government agencies, bringing immediacy to politically-charged historic disputes. |
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Kull refocuses contemporary debates about deforestation and Madagascar's "fire problem" in view of the stalemate achieved by a century of futile government attempts to stop burning at the expense of Malagasy peasants' continued assertion of their own livelihood needs and capabilities, using fire to manage productive landscapes. Kull argues that the real problem is not that fires are ruining the island, but, instead, is actually a century-long political struggle over appropriate land use and the character of Madagascar's landscape, encompassing conflicts over access to natural resources and appropriate means to manage them. This study echoes kindred approaches in political ecology modes familiar in work by Nancy Peluso, Melissa Leach and James Fairhead, and Lucy Jarosch. |
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Kull's nuanced typology of fire in Madagascar, like Stephen Pyne's for other regions, identifies fire's causes or goals, and effects of burning, mediated by contextual factors and problematized since fire setters can remain anonymous and their intentions ambiguous. This history focuses on fire's effects on land, and effects of anti-burning regulation on people; it avoids portraying fire as a significant hazard to communities. Kull's elegant analytic framework is adaptable to other places where debate on burning and anthropogenic fire is explosive. Highlighting examples from his own research in Afotsera and other areas, Kull illustrates how continued burning resists broad assumptions of governance. He criticizes exclusionary land and forest conservation programs that impose arbitrary rules against burning as sharply as he does private and state-sponsored logging and land conversions. |
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