Ignition Stories: Indigenous Fire Ecology in the Indo-Australian Monsoon Zone

The use and control of fire is one of the defining characteristics of being human. Yet, fire remains remarkably understudied from a social science perspective. As a book-length ethnographic monograph, Cynthia Fowler’s Ignition Stories is the first of its kind to focus almost entirely on the subject of fire and its use by a specific people. Ignition Stories sets out to enlighten us on how fire is intricately tied to the primordial concerns of “identity, kinship, marriage, gender, exchange, religion, and politics,” while at the same time contributing to scientific understandings of fire ecology and environmental change (p. 8). Although this may seem like a logical and straightforward path for the narrative to take, addressing these dual concerns is an ambitious undertaking. It requires the narrative to simultaneously focus on the cultural importance of fire to a people (the ethnography of fire) and the ecological importance of people to fire (the “indigenous” fire ecology). Ignition Stories has trouble delivering on its promise to overlay these foci.