ABSTRACT
'Wild' is a heavily freighted adjective, and as applied to rubber is well-suited to obscuring the fact that tapping is a production form and process. Regardless of the interpretation of how and why the rubber industry rose and fell, it is hard to ignore the fact of commodity production, and the concept of commodity chain may provide a way to link the dynamic of the rubber industry to realms well beyond the regional or national economy. The variant accounts of commodity chain – Global Commodity Chain and Global Value Chain – draw attention to the similarity between the theoretical object capitalist world system and the conventionalized, holistic object of anthropological object of analysis – a tribe, a people, and so on. In light of the celebration of a monumentalist, rubber-boom-Amazonia, it is not difficult to discern something of the scale of local consumption during the height of the rubber industry.
