Cultural fire regime in the Comiteca Tojolabal Plateau, Chiapas, Mexico

Background: Climate change, public policies, and deterritorialization have altered cultural regimes that have historically guided the use of fire as part of productive and community practices. In the region known as the Comiteca Tojolabal Plateau, in Chiapas, Mexico, these regimes refer to the way in which fire is used in small farming communities and indigenous territories for productive and cultural activities, aimed at reproducing collective life according to community values and interests. This study presents a comprehensive approach to the cultural regime of fire, based on ethnographic research that included semi-structured interviews, life stories, focus groups, walking transects, social mapping exercises, and participatory observation. Based on cultural knowledge as an analytical category, local ways of understanding the cultural regimes of fire are analyzed.

Results: The findings show an adaptive cultural management of the territory based on the knowledge derived from the historical experience of territoriality itself, providing guidelines and tools for the most effective management of fire in the territory.

Conclusions: The fire regime must be understood as a component of a pyrobiocultural framework, where fire articulates relationships between nature, culture, and territory over time, integrating its symbolic and identity dimensions. The conceptual analysis of cultural fire regimes integrates the sociocultural cognitive dimension and the historical processes that have shaped them. Generalized policies of colonization and exclusion of fire have eradicated or weakened these ways of territorializing spaces, with effects during times of climate crisis.