Burned. Wildfires, Emotions, and Mechanisms of Social Endurance in Southern Argentina

Abstract

This paper analyzes the social emotions associated with forest fires in Cholila (Chubut, Argentina) from the perspective of the sociology of bodies and emotions. Based on semi-structured interviews with local residents and community actors, the study approaches fire not merely as an environmental phenomenon but as a situated social experience that produces social pain, regulates sensibilities, and shapes the possibilities of collective action. The analysis identifies two main emotional clusters. The first—resignation, sadness, and impotence—reveals processes of loss of agency and the social learning of endurance. The second—structured around distrust, anguish, anger, and resentment—expresses a latent conflict that faces significant barriers to being translated into sustained collective action. These emotional ecologies are understood not as individual reactions but as socially produced, embedded in relations of domination that tend to naturalize devastation and suspend conflict. The article concludes by proposing future lines of inquiry focused on collective interdictions, waiting practices, and emotional interstices where the interruption of social endurance and the reactivation of collective conflict might become possible in socio-environmental disaster contexts.