A apropriação ecológica de seringais na Amazônia e a advocacia das rubber plantations

Abstract

Conflicting understandings of environment and property marked the history of rubber production in the Brazilian Amazon from 1840 to the early twentieth century. The local ecological approach to tenure - in which land was defined by the total forest ecology, and where the size and contours of property were delimited by the number of rubber trees that could be tapped profitably - clashed with the scientific-territorial meaning of land: a soil to be mastered through monoculture, with property defined by its territorial extension. The proponents of rubber plantations associated these properties to civility and progress, while associating the rubber-tapping economy to a lack of civilization and to primitivism, thus obfuscating the complex combination of ecological perceptions of the environment and modern notions of property and land tenure, which characterized the rubber extraction areas.