RHN 53/2023 | Call
Organisers: Historia Agraria de América Latina, HAAL
Deadline for proposal submissions: 1 August 2023
Call for Articles:
Dossier Fire in the rural world. Cultures and social practices
in history
Historia Agraria de América Latina, HAAL (ISSN 2452-5162) announces a call for articles for the dossier “Fire in the rural world. Cultures and social practices in history”, coordinated by guest editors Dr. Wilson Picado-Umaña, (Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica) and Dr. Sandro Dutra e Silva (Universidade Estadual de Goiás y Universidade Evangélica de Goiás, Brasil). The deadline to submit article manuscripts is 1 August 2023. Manuscripts must be original and not in the process of being evaluated at another journal, and they can be submitted in Spanish, Portuguese or English. HAAL is an academic, peer-reviewed journal published by the Centro de Estudios de Historia de América Latina (CEHAL), in conjunction with the Asociación Latinoamericana de Historia Rural (ALAHR).
Please submit your manuscript at the following link:
https://www.haal.cl/index.php/haal/about/submissions
Learning to control fire has been a form of civilization, as Johan Goudsblom suggested. Fire has been used as a “biophysical technology” to manage the use of biomass in traditional societies, for example by burning grasslands for cattle ranching and forests for land clearing. Even modern, technologically advanced sugarcane plantations in the present continue to make use of fire during theharvest. But fire has also been more than an agricultural practice. It has been a social practice loaded with cultural symbolism, a kind of language that expresses the relationships between human beings and their landscapes. And it has also been a social practice that, in the past, evidenced the conflicts between peasants and landowners, and more recently, between peasants, the state and forest conservation areas. If the control of fire was a civilizational indicator in the past, it is also a civilizational indicator in the present Anthropocene times, albeit in an inversely negative sense. The “Pyrocene”, as Stephen Pyne defined it, is an indisputable example of the impact of human activity on landscapes. This dossier invites articles that study fire in rural history from different cultural, symbolic, social, agricultural and ecological perspectives. The objective is to situate fire as a decisive factor in the ecological history of the planet, as well as a symbolic construct that evidences the relationships between society and nature.
Guest Editors:
Dr. Wilson Picado-Umaña, Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica. E-mail: wpicado@gmail.com
Dr. Sandro Dutra e Silva, Universidade Estadual de Goiás/Universidade Evangélica de Goiás, Brasil. E-mail: sandrodutra@unievangelica.edu.br
Author guidelines: https://www.haal.cl/index.php/haal/instruccionesenvio