Emiliana Cereceda

In an increasingly flammable worldwide context, this ethnographic project examines the unfolding of lifeworlds amidst the scars left by wildfires, from the perspective of slum dwellers in Quilpué, Central Chile—one of the most fire-prone regions globally due to prolonged megadrought, socio-environmental policies and sedimented deprivation rooted in the Pinochet dictatorship. Combining participant observation, life stories, visual methods, and archival work, the project will explore what it means to live in the aftermath of fire: the multiple ways in which fire continues to be materially and affectively present, what the world it disrupted looked like in residents’ eyes, what has changed as a consequence of the damage, how the future is deformed by it, and how a present is rebuilt. Engaging with studies of material culture and slums, anthropology of disaster and temporality, and ethnographical approaches to affect and violence, I will ask how life continues around the physical and affective scars left by fires amid and beyond the changing velocities of disaster. In this light, I aim to contribute to anthropological debates on collective survival in wounded environments through the under-researched perspective of material culture, conceptualisations of fire’s extended temporality, and theorisations of the multilayered affects summoned in survival.