Indigenous Knowledge and Material Histories
The Example of Rubber

Develops a new version of the history of rubber and offers a critique of the standard narration on its invention.

Jens Soentgen (Author)

9781009517089, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 June 2024

76 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.6 cm, 0.233 kg

This Element deals with stories told about substances and ways to analyse them through an Environmental Humanitie's perspective. It then takes up rubber as an example and its many stories. It is shown that the common notions of rubber history, which assume that rubber only became a useful material through a miraculous operation called vulcanization, that is attributed to the US-American Charles Goodyear, are false. In contrast, it is shown that rubber and many important rubber products are inventions of Indigenous peoples of South America, made durable by a process that can be called organic vulcanization. It is with that invention, that the story of rubber starts. Without it, rubber would not exist, neither in the Americas nor elsewhere. Finally, it is shown that Indigenous rubber products also offer some ecological advantages over industrially manufactured ones.

1. Introduction
2. The rhetorical and literary tradition of stories of stuff
3. Research on the history of individual materials
4. Substances and materials
5. Histories
6. Rubber
7. Rubber histories and the representation of Indigenous peoples of South and Central America
8. Indigenous knowledge
9. Indigenous rubber products
10. Problems of untreated rubber
11. The place of Indigenous knowledge in the history of rubber
12. Rubber and Rubbish: tire dumps and microrubber.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]