Rubber and the Making of Vietnam focuses on embedded practices and the process in which ideas and actions came to be grounded in social and material environments. The production of rubber was not merely a social affair, and to keep the latex flowing, humans had to negotiate their relationship to nonhuman nature, ranging from the transplanted hevea tree to plasmodia-bearing mosquitoes. I analyze the ways in which certain environments and social configurations retain “lessons” of the past, thus enabling certain behaviors while constraining others.
