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.
In November 2019 my Ngaju friend Jonedi and I were driving through Central Kalimantan’s peatlands.1 To our left and right charred trunks loomed into the sky. Shrubs covered the landscape. Two months before, fires had haunted the area. We spotted a large banner in the middle of the destruction and stopped. The heat was unbearable and a remarkable silence permeated the place. Yet what looked, felt, smelled, and sounded like abandoned, idle land was much more than a “forest cemetery” of exposed peat soil, scrub, stumps, downed trunks, and lost species.2 Below the thick layers of peatland lay histories of migration, kinship formation, livelihood pursuit, conflicting territorial claims, capitalist nightmares, and developmental dreams. The banner read: “Strongly forbidden !!! entering this area of customary prohibition. If you violate, you will be punished with customary fines.” Jonedi explained that the local customary head had sealed off the burnt area with a customary prohibition to mark the site as taboo. Officials, journalists, and NGO staff had tried to inspect the burnt area in their search for the “fire villain” (Ind. penjahat Karhutla).3 Since the region’s peat fires were frequently blamed on local people, the customary head and other local leaders had decided to use “custom” (Ind. adat) to prevent villagers from getting criminalized, while emphasizing local ownership over the area.
This article explores how Ngaju Dayak villagers in Indonesia’s province of Central Kalimantan engage with the region’s recurrent peat fires and the discourses, knowledge, and politics of blame that have emerged around them. How do they navigate these structures of blame to evade culpability? What role does ignorance play in all this? How are the fires’ pyrogenic agencies and other nonhuman entities implicated in these dynamics of blame and circuits of unknowing? And what implications does this have for reconfiguring questions of agency, causality, and responsibility for this Anthropocenic blight?
As fires go feral across our planet, Indonesia’s peat fires are considered “unique in exhibiting a rapidly escalating scale of fire extent, frequency and severity.”4 Smoldering through carbon-rich peatland, these fires produce what is euphemistically called “haze” in the public and policy discourse but in reality is a toxic smoke of noxious substances (e.g., carbon monoxide, cyanide, ammonia, and formaldehyde) penetrating human and nonhuman bodies; disrupting local, national, and regional economies; polluting regional air quality; and spreading into the atmosphere. In 2019 alone, Indonesian fires burned across 3.11 million hectares (Mha) of land.5 This exceeded the devastating fires of 2015 that burned 2.6 Mha and caused an estimated economic loss of US$16 billion.6 The 2015 fires topped the fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) release rate of the European Union and caused approximately 100,300 cases of premature death, not to mention their long-term, irreparable impacts on both human and nonhuman health.7
Environmentalists have compared the sea of flames and blankets of haze with an “eco-apocalypse.”8 In these representations, fire has become a villain of our age, working synecdochally for the “human-sparked breakdown in the Earth System” caused by capitalist exploitation.9 These narratives of decline, however, risk overlooking what Stephen J. Pyne has described as the “paradox . . . of the Earth’s firescapes,” namely that “we have too many bad fires” and “too few good ones—fires that enhance ecological integrity and hold fires within their historic ranges.”10 Pyne calls for granting anthropogenic fire “more geographic space, more legal space, more political space, more conceptual space.”11 Though fire sustains livelihoods across Kalimantan, given peat fires’ dramatic immediate and long-term effects, it is hard to imagine them as good. I nevertheless take Pyne’s call as an invitation to think with and through the region’s fires to investigate how questions of environmental blame and victimhood are negotiated, contested, and reconfigured in a particular setting.
In 2019 most fires occurred in Central Kalimantan’s peatlands.12 Since the 1960s, these peatlands have been logged, drained, and dried mainly for the production of agricultural commodities in the effort to develop one of Indonesia’s key resource frontiers. State-led and corporate frontier development has radically transformed local environments, livelihoods, and social orders, as large-scale extractive and infrastructure projects have created overlapping territorial zones and disrupted socionatural landscapes.13 As elsewhere, these frontier dynamics have provoked resource conflicts, marginalized Indigenous communities, eroded their customary rights, and rendered the province’s peatlands easily flammable, especially during El Niño years.14 Peatlands only become prone to fire if they are drained over large hydrological areas.15 This makes peat fires not so much a spatially and time-bounded event but rather a socioecological process embedded into a broader temporal and scalar framework of biophysical, climatic, social, and political-economic factors.16 The fires’ causes are basically unknowable—not just because of the fires’ temporal and scalar complexities and pyrogenic agencies but because knowing involves risks. Ignorance, I argue, sits at the heart of peat fires, partly because their origin cannot fully be known, but also because of the way in which diverse actors engage in willful blindness to attribute blame and avoid responsibility.
In criminal law, where the term willful blindness has its origin, the notion means to deliberately avoid knowledge to evade self-incrimination.17 Yet, as Judith Bovensiepen and Mathijs Pelkmans have remarked, in everyday language the term refers to a much wider “spectrum of phenomena, behaviours and mental states” ranging from unconscious disregard to strategic ignorance, with a “myriad of slippages in between.”18 An examination of willful blindness is closely linked to studies of ignorance that have scrutinized how ignorance serves as a strategic tool in power dynamics and is deliberately produced by epistemic and governance structures,19 for instance, by debasing the knowledge of particular individuals or groups.20 In his seminal work on “agnotology [which] is the study of ignorance making,” Robert N. Proctor, for example, showed how the tobacco industry generated and manufactured ignorance “to keep the question of health harms open.”21 Other scholars, by contrast, call to move beyond tactics and suggest that ignorance is a banal aspect of political and corporate cultures that evolves out of specific sociocultural and ecological contexts.22 Ignorance about the environment, in particular, seems to have “multiple dimensions.”23 Since the concept of willful blindness encompasses both strategic and embodied forms of ignorance, its value is its capacity to apprehend a broad spectrum of conscious and unconscious disregard.24
According to Bovensiepen and Pelkmans, scholars frequently attribute deliberate blindness to corporate and state actors and see ordinary people’s lack of knowledge as embodied and/or embedded within particular sociocultural and historical settings.25 This distinction, however, makes little sense in the context of Central Kalimantan’s peat fires. Here the different actors involved—local people, plantation companies, NGOs, and government members—engage dynamically in various forms of conscious and unconscious disregard to attribute or evade responsibility that does not match the conventional narratives of blame.
Agribusiness stakeholders and government officials blame rural communities practicing shifting cultivation (also known as swidden agriculture).26 They often pejoratively label this form of agriculture as “slash and burn” due to the misbelief that it causes deforestation.27 Yet blaming communities ignores the ethnoecological knowledge of swidden agriculturalists.28 It moreover conflates distinct forms of fire and overlooks the heterogeneous actors igniting fires for various reasons.29 Members of NGOs, farmers, and state officials, by contrast, blame palm oil and pulpwood companies for clearing land with fire. And company staff are said to pay locals to light fires to expand their area.30 However, solely blaming corporate villains contradicts research that shows that most emissions do not originate from concessions land.31 Singaporean and Malaysian media and governments hold the Indonesian government responsible for the fires.32 This, however, disregards the investment of Malaysian and Singaporean capital in Indonesia’s plantation sector through transnational patronage networks.33 Moreover, by reinforcing a long-standing dichotomization between the smallholder and estate model,34 such simplified explanations ignore the messy and ambivalent relational dynamics between actors on the ground, while they overlook the fires’ pyrogenic agency. Because peat fires burn below ground, persist even in wet conditions, and smolder for days or weeks, their origins are extremely difficult to locate.35 Even though the fires’ biophysical materialities and their scalar and temporal socioecological complexities complicate efforts to ascribe responsibility,36 these factors are often either deliberately ignored or actively mobilized to attribute blame and evade responsibility. Willful blindness, I thus suggest, is an immanent feature of these structures of blame.
Exploring these various forms of unknowing gives insights into the conceptions of human and nonhuman agency, causality, and responsibility that underpin these structures of blame. The concept of willful blindness helps to lay bare these dynamics of blame across a wide spectrum of people—how and why diverse actors attribute, respond to, and even refute blame. Thus, more than an object of analysis, willful blindness here works analytically to capture how those living with fires engage with this Anthropocenic blight and its discourses, knowledge, and politics to claim their rights. For my Ngaju acquaintances, not knowing is not simply a way to evade culpability but a means to deal with structural injustices. As the concept of willful blindness covers various ways of unknowing, it reveals how blindness—from strategic ignorance to unconscious disregard—is key to people negotiating their rights in diverse situations.
More than this, however, I aim to show how the fires’ biophysical agency complicates efforts to tag fire villains and in this way adds to unknowing or willful blindness. While most scholarship emphasizes the enabling capacities of nonhumans, a growing body of literature challenges this positive view by revealing how nonhuman entities not only inform processes of capitalist exploitation, accumulation, and dispossession but are actively recruited to reinforce structural inequalities and violence.37 For instance, in his exploration of illegal migrants’ death along the US-Mexican border, Jason de León argues that US immigration policy employs a “hybrid collectif”—that is, an assemblage of patrol officers, smugglers, the desert, unbearable heat, and vultures—to annihilate people “while . . . absolving itself of any blame connected to loss of life.”38 Building on these works, this article shows how in Central Kalimantan’s peatlands, pyrogenic agency, science, remote technologies, and spirits are drawn into circuits of blame and unknowing, thus pushing the conceptual framework of willful blindness beyond its current formulation. An examination of willful blindness and its dynamics, I argue, needs to reckon with these nonhuman actors.
Witnessing under Conditions of Unknowing
Building on twenty-eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Central Kalimantan between 2009 and 2019, this article focuses on Dahanen, a small Ngaju Dayak settlement of around four hundred people. Dahanen is surrounded by a waterlogged landscape of swamp and peat forest where people fish, collect timber and other forest products, and occasionally mine for gold. As is common across Borneo, Dahanen’s residents traditionally practiced swidden agriculture.39 Yet, due to the fire policies and the environmental changes brought about by “frontierization,” they nowadays primarily live from fishing and wage labor in a palm oil plantation, Perseroan Terbatas Sejahtera (PTS), operating in the area since 2009.40
Drainage and deforestation in the course of timber extraction and plantation development cause regular floods that prevent people from setting up swiddens; nonetheless, Dahanen has experienced large fires in 1982–83, 1997–98, 2005, 2006–7, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2018, and 2019. Between January 2013 and April 2016, 1,185 fire hot spots were identified in the regency in which Dahanen is located.41 These geospatial investigations show where fires happened but they don’t explain why they happened, that is, “the contingent histories that have produced these new (landscape) entities and processes” and caused fires.42 Anna Tsing and colleagues suggest that anthropologists can observe such “mundane empirical details.”43 Yet this task brings its own challenges.
Just as my acquaintances felt “dizzy” (ND pusang) because of social disintegration, rising inequalities, conflicts, dispossession, and environmental degradation caused by frontier development, I grappled to make sense of these disturbing realities, their ambiguities and contradictions. Telling stories about people, peat, and fires entailed various dilemmas. These stories neither matched with the common structures of blame nor with my own academic and personal background informed by Western environmentalist logics and political ecology scholarship, which considers environmental change to be the result of power imbalances and therefore easily overlooks how more-than-human agencies are implicated in processes of violence and dispossession.44 I struggled over how to attest to the fires’ socioecological complexities without reproducing simplistic accounts of fire villainy and doing harm to my interlocutors under constant conditions of (un)knowing.
Rather than building on direct observations of fire ignition, my account largely depends on my acquaintances’ stories, speculations, and rumors. As is common in peat environments, I usually just witnessed smoke without knowing its origin, not forgetting that ignition alone does not explain fires.45 That is, the fires’ biophysical materiality and their scalar and temporal histories also stymied my own knowing and rendered me implicated in a modality of not knowing. Witnessing a socially and ecologically complex and highly politically charged phenomenon such as peat fires and the responsibilities emerging from that moved me “beyond a position of innocence or neutrality.”46 What follows are fire stories emerging from my interactions with my interlocutors under specific ecological, socioeconomic, and political conditions potentially full of blind spots.
Histories of Environmental Blame
In the midst of the 2015 fire season, Indonesia’s minister for environment and forestry, Siti Nurbaya, declared that the fires were due to “small-holder farmers who opened land in a traditional way with the system of burning.”47 Similarly, during the 2019 fires, she explained that, to reduce fires, one of the main priorities would be “to end slash-and-burn practices among agricultural communities.”48 Beside lumping together the heterogeneous group of small-scale farmers, such a rhetoric ultimately stigmatizes those practicing swidden agriculture as putative fire villains, with severe consequences. By November 2019, 35 farmers in Central Kalimantan had been convicted and 121 detained as suspects. The arrests were a manifestation and continuation of strict law enforcement against alleged fire perpetrators, which President Jokowi had ordered during the 2015 haze season. The fire ban caused food insecurity, loss of food sovereignty, and an arbitrary criminalization of local people.49 Across Kalimantan, farmers faced the dilemma either to burn their fields and risk sanctions or to follow the ban and jeopardize food security.50 However, villagers, environmental activists, and members of Indigenous rights groups have challenged the villainization of swidden agriculturalists, and during the 2019 fire season a solidarity movement in support of Indigenous farmers’ rights emerged across Kalimantan.51 In a thirteen-point statement delivered to the regional and central governments in mid-December, forty-two civil society organizations requested that the government and law enforcement officers stop criminalizing swidden farmers and release those who had been arrested.52
Such anti-fire discourses and policies that villainize smallholder agriculture are widespread across the tropics and reflect long-standing histories of environmental blame.53 Michael Eilenberg has elaborated how Dutch colonial officers framed swidden agriculture as inefficient and destructive “robber farming” (roofbouw), which carries pejorative connotations of inefficiency, overexploitation, and environmental destruction.54 A Dutch encyclopedia described the agricultural practices of Central Kalimantan’s Indigenous population, for instance, as follows: “The swidden harvest is less and of poor quality, so that this culture, which is nothing else than robber farming, does not meet the needs of the population.”55
The villainization of swidden agriculturalists continued under President Soeharto’s dictatorship (1966–98), when epistemic and governance structures produced ignorance about swidden for strategic reasons. Guided by developmentalist ideas of progress, government rhetoric branded swidden agriculturalists as culturally inferior, backward “isolated tribes” (Ind. suku terasing) and devalued their economic practices as inefficient and destructive in order to turn them into productive, developed citizens through modernization efforts, especially plantation development.56 The demotion of swidden farmers and their modes of production served the development of the capital-intensive commodity production that prevails today.57 Immanent to the government’s unbroken belief in the estate model is a “political economy of ignorance” that spreads myths about swidden agriculture to justify external control over land for large-scale capitalist exploitation, mainly of palm oil.58
The devaluation of swidden agriculturalists’ ethnoecological knowledge is paralleled by an industry-affiliated discourse that frames palm oil and palm oil farmers as overtly positive, even heroic, while actively creating ignorance about the crop’s adverse social and environmental implications.59 For instance, during the national meeting of Indonesian palm oil farmers in 2019, the coordinating minister for maritime and investment affairs stated, “Because palm oil makes a big contribution to the economy and has an important role for Indonesia, you are national heroes.” Alternate scientific “facts” (Ind. fakta) spread by the Indonesian Palm Oil Association (Ind. Gabungan Pengusaha Kelapa Sawit Indonesia; GAPKI) back such official positions by providing “objective” evidence about oil palm’s positive properties and seeding doubt about its negative effects, or what GAPKI labels “palm oil myths” (Ind. mitos kelapa sawit).60 Actively producing ignorance through “science” serves here not just to confront critics and to evade any responsibility for the development of fires but to legitimize state and corporate developmentalist agendas.61 Taken together, these epistemic and discursive structures illustrate how government and corporate actors engage different mechanisms of willful blindness to villainize and heroize particular groups and production systems to govern Kalimantan’s peatlands and their putative fire villains.
Governing Fire Villains
In August 2019 the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF) posted a video on social media that showed how high-ranking officials from different ministries, the police, and the army inspected a burned area near Central Kalimantan’s capital. The video’s central message was a quote from then coordinating minister of political, legal, and security affairs, Wiranto: “We search, we arrest, we punish the culprits of forest and land fires.”62 As an attempt to demonstrate state power, the video exemplifies the government’s efforts to make fire villains responsible.
Since the 2015 fires, the government has established a broad range of policy and technological fire management measures, including a ban on using fire for agricultural purposes, extending the moratorium on developing palm oil on peatland, construction of wells, cloud seeding, formation of community fire brigades, and incentives for fire-free land management practices.63 Central to these salvation efforts has been the attempt to develop more effective legal-disciplinary tools, surveillance technologies, and enforcement mechanisms.64 Although there has been some success in preventing fires, major challenges remain.65 In Dahanen, for instance, none of the wells funded by the Peat Restoration Project (BRG), the government’s main initiative responsible for restoring the country’s peatlands, carried water during the dry season. Elsewhere in Central Kalimantan, the BRG’s dam-building activities overlapped with people’s land and led to flooding during the wet season, which caused people’s newly planted sengon (Albizzia spp.) trees to die.66
The government’s restoration policies have been supported by various attempts from NGOs and religious organizations that likewise seek to promote anti-fire behavior.67 Yet these initiatives can bring their own challenges, as I observed during an NGO-led permaculture training aimed at initiating a “shift from an unsustainable economy to green income-generating activities.” Given the long history of permaculture, the NGO trainers couched it as an ancestral practice and recommended returning to the agricultural patterns of “people in the past” (ND uluh uran) to overcome the dependency on the food and agrochemical industries. “Food is the most basic thing we need, not money,” the men said. Even though the participants bemoaned a loss of food security and sovereignty as result of the fire policies, they seemed not convinced. “If we have lots of money, we can simply buy whatever we want,” an elder countered skeptically. The homage to the past and downplaying of money contrasted with the participants’ ideas of well-being.68 Yet, even more, some participants initially understood permaculture to be swidden agriculture because, in Ngaju theory, that’s what “people [did] in the past.” “We are forbidden to burn, someone was caught by the police,” a woman complained. Nodding, another person explained people’s dilemma: “If we don’t burn, the land isn’t fertile.” “Permaculture is a way out of this situation,” the trainers suggested, because “it doesn’t need burning. If we burn, the soil bacteria die and the soil becomes increasingly infertile.” The participants looked confused. In their theories, burning did not cause “dead land” (ND petak matei), but as part of the swidden cycle it actually created life in a socioeconomic, ecological, and spiritual sense.
Despite their good intentions to support people to regain food sovereignty in face of the government’s fire ban and push for industrial agricultural production, such NGO attempts risk reproducing the logics of the state’s fire mitigation efforts. With their strong emphasis on “technofixes” and disciplinary technologies targeted at specific groups, they easily misread people’s ethnoecological knowledge, conflate distinct forms of fire, and render the fires foremost a “technical” problem.69 Such an approach perpetuates the long-standing structures of environmental villainization, which elides the fires’ qualities as well as temporal and structural complexities.
From Development Dreams to Capitalist Nightmares
Over the last decades different extractive forces have shaped Central Kalimantan’s fire landscapes; this complicates efforts to attribute blame. State, corporate, and NGO actors have turned the province’s peatlands, long imagined as underutilized resources, into sites of potential.70 Whether they frame peatlands as sites of capitalist investment to be exploited for national economic development (Ind. kemajuan), hot spots of biodiversity, or important carbon sinks, these developmentalist and environmentalist visions share a willful blindness, which is not so much an “accidental by-product of these visions” but an “indispensable component.”71 Embedded in political and/or corporate cultures, diverse actors tend to overlook how their interventions affect the region’s fire landscapes, like those seen around Dahanen. Also, here, fires are bound up with local frontier development initiated by forest concessionaries in the 1970s. The decades of logging, the associated construction of canals (Ind. parit) for log extraction, and the massive deforestation and drainage to establish the PTS plantation since 2009 have produced a landscape that burns easily not just for ecological but also structural reasons.
Institutional blindness is inherent in Indonesian land-use planning processes, which frequently ignore Indigenous land ownership in the context of plantation development. This structural blindness also caused territorial overlaps, conflicts, and dispossession in Dahanen when the PTS plantation was set up.72 Common tropes of the Indigenous people as victims of palm oil villains easily dismiss my acquaintances’ desire for plantation wage labor as well as the nuanced complexities of people’s everyday interaction with corporations.73 Yet Dahanen’s residents tried to maintain their agency by seeking a mutually beneficial relationship with PTS, which most villagers first imagined as a development hero that would bring a processing mill, jobs, infrastructure, and economic betterment (Ind. kemajuan).74
To realize their developmentalist dreams, the local administration leased one hundred hectares of community land to PTS and expected annual rent and village infrastructure development in exchange. People’s requests were not based on the company’s corporate social responsibility but were informed by local norms of reciprocity (ND tolong dohop), a fundamental Dayak principle guiding social and economic relationships.75 Yet, against people’s expectations, PTS revealed itself as a powerful villain that never paid rent, built its mill elsewhere, polluted local fishing grounds, failed in its promise to develop local smallholder farms (Ind. plasma), and repeatedly grabbed people’s land. All attempts to hold PTS responsible failed, up to an official hearing at the provincial parliament. Villagers claimed that company staff gave politicians an “envelope” (Ind. amplop), a local euphemism for the widespread corruption of companies to deliberately produce blindness among officials for strategic reasons. It is in this fraught space that my acquaintances navigate questions of fire blame and villainy to evade culpability.
Managing Culpability
Shortly after the 2019 fires broke out around Dahanen, government, media, and NGO actors began to search for the assumed culprits. Law enforcement officers of the MoEF interrogated local leaders for hours “to trap us” (Ind. menjebak kita), as one of them recalled the investigation. “I told them that Indigenous people don’t burn forest deliberately. Maybe someone had forgotten to extinguish the fire, when frying fish,” the person explained with unconscious disregard. Not only local leaders engage in willful blindness by ignoring or downplaying community fire use for social and moral reasons.76 In Central Kalimantan’s peatlands, various actors seek to live with the fires and the broader socioeconomic and political structures implicated in them through modalities of unknowing. In this way, the fires’ pyrogenic agency—locally expressed by the saying “it’s called peat” (Ind. namanya gambut)—frequently serves government officials, corporate actors, and local people to evade responsibility, which shows how nonhuman actors are drawn into circuits of not knowing to negotiate questions of blame. Yet, despite their unpredictable, invisible agencies, the fires are neither seen as naturally induced nor as involving any spiritual potency, as in the case of Tibetan explanations of COVID-19.77 My interlocutors considered them to be caused by a conscious, yet unknown human actor preparing land, frying fish, cleaning paths, extending fishing grounds, opening access to locate and access fish and game, warding off insects and cold, or setting fire for structural reasons.
Although none of these ignition sources necessarily leads to subsurface fires, they allude to the fact that, like in other places across Kalimantan, Dahanen community fire use persists as a “tolerated crime” regardless of diverse regional and national regulations.78 Low-ranking officials who face the dilemma of “shifting allegiance” turn a blind eye to fire—whether it is because of their lack of technological, financial, or human resources or their social obligations toward fellow villagers.79 Although such “atmospheres of consent” challenge the structures of blame, my acquaintances held that the fire politics have nevertheless created a climate of fear that would lead people to “operate in the shadows” (ND njuri-njuri), and, as a result, lead to conscious even if unintended disregard.80 Instead of burning during the day, when satellites, the army, or policy detect fires more easily, some people would burn in the evening and simply run off to evade responsibility.81 Thus the interplay between villagers, local leaders, low-ranking officials, time, satellite technology, and pyrogenic agency also generates atmospheres of unknowing that help villagers to avoid becoming a victim of arbitrary law enforcement. Trapped in the dilemma of either fulfilling the president’s order to find a fire culprit and keeping their job, or not arresting someone and risking losing their job, police officers would simply “search for a sacrifice” (ND manggau tumbal). As shown above and examined by Eilenberg, this criminalization of rural people has forged new coalitions between communities and environmental and Indigenous organizations across Kalimantan, and raised attention about the structural inequalities of land access and food insecurity.82 However, sometimes these community-NGO-company interactions play out unexpectedly, as seen in my acquaintances’ response to the NGO investigations after the 2019 fire.
Inspecting the customary barrier (ND hinting), Jonedi remembered environmental activists calling him:
“Can you take us to the burned area? We are coming with a journalist to talk with people about the fire,” they asked. I told them that I am away and they should call the village head. I knew they wanted to find out who set the fire and that this might cause villagers to get called by the police and become suspects. So, I called people in Dahanen and said, “If anyone asks about the fire, just say that you don’t know.”
For Jonedi and his fellow villagers, ignorance not only was a means to avoid becoming a “sacrifice” of the investigation process, but surprisingly, people’s modality of not knowing also avoided the repeated incrimination of PTS.
A few months earlier, the provincial court had found PTS responsible for fires occurring within its concession in 2015, which added to its long history of social and environmental violations. PTS had no forest conversion permit from the MoEF, no environmental impact assessment, and operated on peatland protected under Indonesia’s Forest Moratorium.83 The verdict followed the principle of strict liability, which stipulates that concessionaires are responsible for fire occurring on their land, whether or not they can be proven to have ignited it. The underlying assumption is that activities within concessions can be ascribed to companies, while activities outside result from farmers.84 Although this ignores peat fires’ qualities, the assumption allows government and NGO actors to compare hot spot data from satellites with concession maps to attribute responsibility. However, since Indonesian land-use maps are seriously inaccurate, there is often a “mismatch between de jure status and de facto land ownership.”85 Given this territorial fuzziness, geospatial investigations are insufficient to ascribe culpability and easily turn into an execution of blindness.86 Remote technologies not only oversimplify the biophysical materiality of peat fires; they also obfuscate the social dynamics on the ground.87 This further complicates efforts to ascribe responsibility and destabilizes common narratives of blame.
When fires burned on PTS’s concession in 2015, locals were hired as firefighters. Since their payment was apparently “not bad” (ND palar), some villagers hoped for a long dry season. Although fires destroy livelihoods across the region, Central Kalimantan’s landscapes of fire and their inherent structural injustices likewise create perverse incentives.88 People speculated that some individuals deliberately set new fires to extend their employment. Others ostensibly set uncontrolled fires close to the concession to clear agricultural land. Rumors, moreover, told that individuals set fire to protest their dispossession. Though observed elsewhere, such fire conflicts are hard to verify in a context in which knowing is not only stymied by pyrogenic agency but involves risks.89
Lauded by environmental activists, PTS’s conviction brought little relief for the villagers but created anxieties about unemployment. NGOs requested to revoke PTS’s permit, arguing that in 2019 its concession burned once again. “They [the activists] asked me to send photos of the burned area,” Jonedi recalled about the phone calls. “But I hesitated. I didn’t want them to report the company again. Only the employees would be affected, receive delayed wages or lose their job.” “And,” he continued, “if we said that the concession burned, we would acknowledge that the land belongs to the company.” Not knowing was not simply a way to evade culpability but a means to deal with structural injustices. Facing the dilemma of either blaming PTS and risking unemployment and loss of land, or claiming the area and risking culpability, local leaders set up a hinting. A ritual response by Ngaju villagers in land disputes with corporations, the hinting calls the spirits for help.90 Anyone violating the hinting—be it government officials, journalists, activists, or company actors—could face supernatural punishment. A few months later, the head of Kalimantan’s Law Enforcement Agency of the MoEF explained that the criminal proceedings against PTS for the 2019 fires would “not be continued because the land was claimed by people.”91 The fire villain remained unknown.
Conclusion
More than a socioecological process, Kalimantan’s peat fires represent an Anthropocenic “problem space” that invites us to reflect about broader questions of responsibility, blame, and inequality in the Anthropocene.92 Following others who have criticized the Anthropocene concept for its underlying assumption of a universal singular humanity that ignores inequalities and differences shaped by capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and Eurocentrism,93 my colleagues and I have proposed seeing the Anthropocene not so much as “an encompassing condition to be interrogated”; rather, we foreground the relational dynamics, processes, and politics through which Anthropocenic spaces like those of peat fires emerge.94 Such a move, we have argued, sheds light on often obscured issues of legitimacy, inequality, and injustice that pervade Anthropocenic realities and makes visible their differential impacts on the ground.
Along similar lines, this article has shown that for Ngaju villagers living with Kalimantan’s peat fires, the fires and their discourses, knowledge, and politics raise concrete material concerns about food security and sovereignty, land tenure, and culpability. The fires are largely a matter of injustice emerging from a deeply engrained institutional blindness, its power imbalances and structural inequalities shaping the interactions between people, peat, and fire on the ground. It is with and through fire that highly pressing questions of Indigenous self-determination, rights, and ownership are negotiated. In the face of livelihood pressures, dispossession, and imminent criminalization, the claims of state, NGO, media, and corporate actors can only be rejected, fragmented, and even ignored to confront environmental blame and evade culpability. For my Bornean acquaintances, then, willful blindness has become a means to live within an Anthropocenic reality marked by environmental destruction, economic uncertainty, Indigenous marginalization, and injustice and their inherent structures of blame and villainy.
As a response to the fires’ governance structures and their associated structural inequalities, willful blindness takes on various shades—from unconscious disregard to the active production of ignorance. However, as “non-knowledge,” or perhaps “anti-knowledge,” my acquaintances’ willful blindness reveals a fundamental contradiction inherent in the fires’ epistemic, political, and legal structures: namely, that the fires’ causes are unknowable not least because knowing implies risks—culpability, unemployment, delayed income, or land loss. These conditions make willful blindness a core element of structures of blame. Actors thereby recruit scientific facts, pyrogenic agency, remote technologies, and even spirits to negotiate blame. In Central Kalimantan’s peatlands, various nonhuman entities are drawn into the dynamics of willful blindness, which complicates the governmental and NGO search for fire villains. Here, messy interactions between people, fire, and peat disrupt and reconfigure questions of fire causality, blame, and responsibility in surprising ways that neither match with common tropes of Indigenous victimhood nor correspond to conventional thoughts of fire villainy. In the midst of the choking haze, complex, often unknown relations between human and more-than-human agencies blur the idea of fire villains.
Acknowledgments
I thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their thorough engagement with my manuscript. My thanks also go to Anu Lounela and Liana Chua for their valuable feedback as well as to the participants of the Heroes and Villains webinar series and the members of the GLO and POKOK projects. Above all, I am indebted to my Ngaju Dayak interlocutors for sharing their experiences and stories with me. My research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 758494) and was approved by the Brunel University Research Ethics Committee (ethics approval no. 13249-LRNov/2018-15114–2) and the Indonesian Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education (research permit no. 5/SIP/FRP/E5/Dit.KI/I/2019).
Notes
To protect people’s identities, all names in this article are pseudonyms.
The abbreviation “Ind.” refers to Indonesian words, while “ND” stands for the local Ngaju Dayak language.
Haniy, Hamzah, and Hanifah, “Intense Forest Fires.” Central Kalimantan has an area of 15 Mha, of which roughly 2.6 Mha are swampland.
See, for example, Galudra et al., Hot Spot of Emission and Confusion; McCarthy, Vel, and Affif, “Trajectories of Land Acquisition”; Lounela, “Making and Unmaking Territories”; and Schreer, “Longing for Prosperity.”
See, for example, Tsing, “Friction”; Eilenberg, “Frontier Constellations”; Schreer, “Longing for Prosperity”; Lounela, “Erasing Memories.”
For example, see Mathews, “Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance”; High, Kelly, and Mair, Anthropology of Ignorance; Dilley and Kirsch, Regimes of Ignorance; and Proctor and Schiebinger, Agnotology.
For example, see Dove, “Theories of Swidden Agriculture”; Vitebsky, “Is Death the Same Everywhere?”; and Mathews, “Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance.”
Bovensiepen, “Banality of Wilful Blindness”; Rajak, “Waiting for a Deus Ex Machina”; Chua, “To Know or Not to Know?”; Lou, “Art of Unnoticing.”
Shifting cultivation involves clearing fields by machete, axe, or fire, followed by cultivation for a short period and fallowing for a longer one.
For example, see Dove, “Theories of Swidden Agriculture”; Dressler et al., “Recalibrating Burdens of Blame,” 349.
Anu Lounela, pers. comm., January 2023.
See, for example, De León, Land of Open Graves; Navaro et al., Reverberations; Dewan and Nustad, “‘Fluid Dispossessions’”; Lounela, “Making and Unmaking Territories.”
Whereas in remote parts of Central Kalimantan people continue to practice swidden agriculture, close to the provincial capital and the province’s peatlands most people have stopped this practice because of the fire policies.
Translated as “limited liability company,” the perseroan terbatas is Indonesia’s most common business entity.
Schreer, “‘Only Gold Can Become Hope,’” 929.
De León, Land of Open Graves; Navaro et al., Reverberations; Dewan and Nustad, “‘Fluid Dispossessions’”; Lounela, “Making and Unmaking Territories.” See also Rudge, this issue.
See, for example, Thung, “Persistence of Swidden Agriculture”; Hartmann et al., “Indonesia’s Fire Crisis”; Ansori, “Fingertips of Government”; Eilenberg, “Last Enclosure.”
See also Eilenberg, “Last Enclosure.”
See, for example, Dove, “Theories of Swidden Agriculture”; Fox, “Blaming ‘Slash and Burn’ Farmers”; Smith and Dressler, “Forged in Flames”; Carmenta, Coudel, and Steward, “Forbidden Fire”; Eilenberg, “Last Enclosure.”
Zondervan, Winkler Prins, 18; author’s translation.
Dove, “Theories of Swidden Agriculture”; Eilenberg, “Last Enclosure,” 5; Zeng et al., “Political Ecology of Knowledge,” 168.
See also Rudge, this issue.
Gabungan Pengusaha Kelapa Sawit Indonesia, GAPKI (Indonesian Palm Oil Association), “Mitos & Fakta Kelapa Sawit” (“Myths and Facts about Palm Oil”), https://gapki.id/mitos-fakta-kelapa-sawit (accessed July 13, 2022).
Tacconi, “Preventing Fires and Haze”; Carmenta et al., “Perceptions across Scales”; Sloan, Tacconi, and Cattau, “Fire Prevention in Managed Landscapes.”
Schreer, “‘Only Gold Can Become Hope.’”
Lounela, “Climate Change Disputes”; Lounela, “Contested Values”; Schreer, “Longing for Prosperity.”
Bovensiepen, “Banality of Willful Blindness,” 497.
On palm oil labor, see Rudge, this issue; see also Tsing, Friction; Li, Will to Improve.
Not everyone was enthusiastic about palm oil. Some elders raised concerns about potential loss of land and adverse impacts on fishing grounds.
See also Ansori, “Fingertips of Government,” 61.
Emily Harwell has shown how the 1997–98 fires were frequently depicted as a natural disaster caused by climate anomalies (“Remote Sensibilities”). On the Tibetan case, see Van der Valk, this issue.
Dressler et al., “Recalibrating Burdens of Blame,” 349. On subsurface fires, see Goldstein et al., “Beyond Slash-and-Burn,” 201; see also Thung, “Persistence of Swidden Agriculture”; and Ansori, “Fingertips of Government.”
Gaveau et al., “Overlapping Land Claims,” 261; on land-use maps, see McCarthy, Vel and Affif, “Trajectories of Land Acquisition,” 527.
Jenny E. Goldstein provides an in-depth analysis of how geospatial investigations enable the persistence of blame narratives and avoidance of responsibility in ways that benefit both state and nonstate actors (“Volumetric Political Forest,” 1073). See also Harwell, “Remote Sensibilities.”
See, for example, Harwell, “Remote Sensibilities”; Suyanto, “Underlying Cause of Fire,” 69; Tomich et al., “Indonesia’s Fires”; and Purnomo et al., “Fire Economy,” 25.
See, for example, Malm and Hornborg, “Geology of Mankind?”; Davis and Todd, “On the Importance of a Date”; Yusoff, Billion Black Anthropocenes.
