Anthropological studies of forests increasingly attend to their social and political dimensions, considering non-human beings as important actors and subjects. However, fire is often relegated to the background of such ethnographies and remains largely under-theorized. At the same time, state and conservation agencies frame fire as a destructive force that needs to be suppressed, criminalizing swidden agriculture and indigenous fire regimes. Yet for many indigenous peoples, fire is a vital force that generates and sustains pyrodiverse forest ecologies.
Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Ifugao communities in the Philippine highlands, this paper argues that fire must be taken seriously as an ethnographic subject—not merely as a chemical event, but as a cosmological and ecological agent fundamental to forest worlds. I reveal how the forests of the Cordillera have long been shaped by anthropogenic flames. Although they are often framed as wild and pristine landscapes, Ifugao elders tell a radically different history: one in which their ancestors have planted the forests through the clearing and burning of grasslands. Harnessing the transformative power of fire, they generated a mosaic of forest landscapes and swidden gardens. However, with the enforcement of forestry laws and the imposition of modern agricultural practices, Ifugao farmers are increasingly abandoning swidden agriculture, framed as primitive and harmful. Consequently, agricultural expansion is leading to deforestation and forest degradation.
I argue that national fire suppression regimes emerge from the necessity of the state to make forests readable. Restraining the vitality of fire, which generates shifting, illegible landscapes, allows the possibility of capital accumulation. However, reducing fire to a set of chemical processes to be disciplined disrupts indigenous livelihoods while creating the conditions for devastating wildfires.