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Fire (and) Infrastructure: Addressing Environmental Burden of Indigenous Peoples in Indonesia

Figure 1. Villager and military personnel combating the blazing fires in Central Kalimantan, August 2019. Photo by author, 2019.

You will see results soon, and in three years, we will have solved this.

Joko Widodo, President of Indonesia[1]

The Indonesian president made this promise amid the fire and smoke haze disaster in September 2015. He was troubled by the fact that the 2015 fires severely impacted the nation’s environment, economy, and politics. Soon after, he established the Badan Restorasi Gambut (BRG, or Peatland Restoration Agency),[2] a new institution with the main purpose of restoring the degraded environment. After enforcing coercive approaches for decades, this moment was the very first time the Indonesian government took a formal, coherent, and scientific-driven approach to tackle fire-related problems. One striking maneuver of the BRG was the way it created thousands of infrastructures as part of its fire governance. These were the facilities BRG expects Indigenous communities like Ngaju people in Central Kalimantan to operate and maintain to achieve an ideal environmental future—to fulfill the promise of the government.

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Supermythologies and Superenvironments

I’ve been thinking a lot about superheroes and their worlds. This past term I taught a class, The Anthropology of Superheroes, where the big question posed was, “How can we study superheroes as anthropologists?” In addition to reading graphic novels and discussing cosplay and real-life superheroes, we also did collaborative event ethnography (Brosius and Campbell 2010) at the Alamo City Comic Con. I called it a swarm ethnography. I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a nerd and certainly a fan of the genre. However, what really interest me about superheroes are the imagined futures and alternative multiverses in which they live.