The tree that responds: taming the rubber tree

Abstract

The starting point of this article is the assertion, common among tappers (or seringueiros) in plantations in the interior of São Paulo, that it is necessary to tame rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) at the beginning of each harvest. They use this phrase to indicate the need to accustom the trees, from the first cuts, to establish an optimal flow of latex. The process of taming the tree is also discussed here based on historical ethnographic materials regarding relationships established with rubber trees in the last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in the Amazon and in the nascent plantations in Southeast Asia. British naturalists from different colonies came to dispute who “discovered” the fact that the rubber tree possesses a mechanism that they called the “wound response”. Based on this diversity of references to the modes of relationship with the peculiar characteristics of the rubber tree, I seek to elucidate, by viewing the genesis articulated between technical and vital rhythms, what it means to affirm that a tree responds or is tamed.