On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (review)

Turning a dissertation into a book is difficult enough. Matthew Desmond has upped the ante by doing this with his master’s thesis. On the Fireline is an artfully written, richly detailed and highly sentimental ethnography of the author’s summers home from college working as an Arizona wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. Desmond, a rural, white, working-class male, shares a similar demographic background as his fellow firefighters and arrives at his field site with three years of first-hand experience. This earns him the trust of his colleagues, which in turns gives him an insider’s view on how firefighters make sense of their organizational culture and the risks they face. What Desmond accomplishes is both a thorough ethnographic portrait of the everyday milieu of wildland firefighting and a fine example of a Bourdieu-inspired, but American-styled, ethnography of habitus. It is an impressive contribution to a small but growing genre of research that carefully documents the personal embodiment of organizational conduct within particular institutional settings. Furthermore, his arguments on class social reproduction echo those made in classic qualitative monographs of the working class, such as Willis’s Learning to Labor and Lamont’s The Dignity of Working Men.

The tale begins with a dramatic and perplexing state of affairs. Rick Lupe, a well-respected firefighter from another crew, has been killed in the line of duty. While the public commemoration of Lupe treats him as a fallen hero, Desmond is struck by his crewmates utterly blasé attitude toward the death. They assume it was Lupe’s own fault, regardless of the available evidence. The analysis that follows is, in a sense, a carefully analyzed case study of what sort of organization creates indifference to the death of one’s own. Along the way, we learn that firefighters tend to “view masculine aggression and courage as negative qualities,” prizing self-restraint, competence and prudence instead. This is precisely the worldview the U.S. Forest Service wants its employees to hold, and it is systematically reinforced via established policy and procedure, training, formal and informal social exchange, the framing and dissemination of fatality reports, and in general, the incessant message that tragedies such as Lupe’s are the result of the individual’s incompetence.

Desmond deftly points out that members of organizations are not socialized de novo, but come to their work with a well-developed disposition for the type of work they will engage in. Adding to the ever growing list of habitus that scholars modify with a group- or occupation-specific adjective, Desmond refers to this pre-requisite rural, working-class disposition as a “country-masculine habitus.”

Desmond’s central theoretical intervention is a critique of how scholars have conceptualized the relationship between motivation, risk and masculinity. I did not find this part of his analysis particularly compelling. His appraisal of Goffman’s discussion of masculinity and risk taking, taken from his famous essay, “Where the Action Is,” is rather narrowly conceived – the willingness to routinely charge face-first into danger, motivated by the desire for social recognition and honor. A more charitable reading of Goffman’s overall corpus would point out that he does treat the avoidance of embarrassment, a form of self-restraint, as the centerpiece of his analysis of conduct. Furthermore, Desmond does not consider a large body of historical scholarship on institutional conduct and masculinity, from such varied scholars as Norbert Elias, Gail Bederman and Raewyn Connell, which has repeatedly shown how modern Western ideologies of masculinity tend to prize shame, self-restraint and task-level competence above simplistic notions of courage in the face of danger.

Desmond’s critique of masculinity and risk also sits uneasily with his argument that firefighters possess an “illusio of self-determinacy,” a clunky phrase for the “belief that the uncontrollable force of wildfire is completely within firefighters’ control and therefore devoid of danger.”(14) Desmond suggests that by understanding the risk of...