Resilience and Recovery in the Dry Chaco

Ecological Knowledge Encoded in Forager Wildfire Narratives

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7843952
AutoresMichelle Scalise Sugiyama (0000-0001-5323-1214, University of Oregon, autor correspondente), Marcela Mendoza (0000-0001-8163-8986, University of Oregon), María Belén Carpio (0000-0001-5344-6987, Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas (IIGHI), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Universidad Nacional del Nordeste (UNNE), Resistencia, Chaco, Argentina)
Ano2025
Volume45
Fascículo1
Páginas76-94
Data de publicação2025-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Ethnobiology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0278-0771 • E-ISSN: 2162-4496
EditoraSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/02780771241303896
OpenAlexW4406128345
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas67

The tropical forests, shrublands, and savannas of the South American Dry Chaco are fire-prone ecosystems. Humans have occupied this region for thousands of years, raising the question of how they coped with this recurrent problem. On this point, Indigenous oral traditions are known to encode a broad range of local ecological knowledge and to be capable of preserving this knowledge for centuries. Although the traditions of the Chaco's earliest human occupants are unknown, the story corpora of recent Chaco hunter-gatherer populations have been well documented by anthropologists. Accordingly, we searched these corpora for catastrophic wildfire narratives, which we then coded for the presence of specific types of information relevant to coping with conflagration. We predicted that these stories would contain information about conditions that cause or increase the likelihood of conflagration, fire behavior and effects, human survival strategies, and plant and animal recovery. We parsed this information into 11 distinct content themes: Ambient Conditions, Cause, Direction/Speed, Duration/Frequency, Intensity, Severity, Spread, Coping Strategies, Cues, Animals, and Plants. Results indicate that wildfire stories occur cross-culturally in the Dry Chaco, and reliably encode useful information about past local fire regimes. In so doing, these narratives provide a heretofore untapped source of longitudinal fire ecology data, and attest to the importance of including Indigenous observations in global scientific inquiry

Art · Biology · Climate change · Ecosystem · Ethnology · Fire regime · Geography · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Psychological resilience · Shrubland · Traditional knowledge · Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory · Fire effects on ecosystems · History · Psychology · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation · Ecology