Bamboo: A Socio-Material Approach to Past and

Present Bamboo Cultures

vorgelegt von

M. Sc.

Promotionsausschuss:

Vorsitzende: Prof. Dr. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum

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Bamboo is regarded as the most versatile woody plant worldwide. It accompanied humans from

prehistoric times and contributed much to the socio-cultural and technological development of

many small-scale and large-scale societies in Asia, the Americas, and Africa. Moreover, bam-

boo is still essential for subsistence-oriented farmers and their bamboo-based or -related indig-

enous technologies and material cultures. Through the study of historical records and anthro-

pological fieldwork, this book attempts to analyze past and contemporary bamboo cultures and

interprets human-bamboo relationships from an epistemologically symmetric view that re-inte-

grates things as part of the social. In so doing, this book reviews the debates concerning the

human–thing relations and examines the redefinition of the social from an interdisciplinary per-

spective. Thus, following socio-material theories, such as practice theory and Actor-Network

openness for nonhuman influence on the social sphere, a deeper understanding of bamboo’s

impact on peoples’ lives can be attained.

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Abstract (German)

Bambus gilt als das vielseitigste Nutzholz der Welt. Seit prähistorischen Zeiten begleitet es den

Menschen und trug so wesentlich zur soziokulturellen und technologischen Entwicklung vieler

Kulturen in Asien, Amerika und Afrika bei. Auch heute noch ist Bambus für Bäuerinnen und

Bauern der subsistenzorientierten Landwirtschaft und ihre auf Bambus basierenden traditionel-

len Technologien und materiellen Kulturen von wesentlicher soziokultureller und technischer

Sozialen aus einer interdisziplinären Perspektive. In Anlehnung an sozio-materielle Theorien

wie die Praxistheorie und die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie wird in diesem Buch die Wechselbe-

ziehung zwischen Menschen und Bambus untersucht, indem die charakteristischen Merkmale

ihrer Bestandteile und deren Beitrag zur Mensch-Bambus-Beziehung berücksichtigt werden.

Dazu gehören unter anderem: Menschen und ihre körperliche und sinnliche Beteiligung an der

Herstellung und Verwendung von Bambuswerkzeugen und Alltagsgegenständen als Teil all-

täglicher Aktivitäten; Bambus als ein forstwirtschaftliches Erzeugnis und Pflanze, Baumaterial,

Werkzeug, Gerät und Ware; die Rolle des Bambus in der vom Menschen geschaffenen Umwelt;

als auch sein immaterieller Gehalt. Hierbei wird dargelegt, dass mit Hilfe eines interdisziplinä-

ren Ansatzes und einer Offenheit für nichtmenschliche Einflüsse auf die soziale Sphäre ein

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Preface

historians. In my view, only a boundary-crossing synthesis of different theoretical concepts,

epistemologies, and methods would be able to provide a comprehensive study of bamboo and

demonstrate bamboo’s relevance for historical and present societies. It is estimated that bamboo

has more than 1,000 different uses and still serves millions of people throughout the world as

crucial raw and construction material. Moreover, bamboo is known as the fastest growing and

the most versatile and diversely used woody plant in the world and, in recent decades, has ac-

quired increasing importance as a sustainable resource and substitute for tree wood.

Trained as a sociologist, I was primarily taught to study the human being as a self-con-

tained being and as the only bearer of the social. Yet, in contradistinction to traditional sociol-

ogists’ anthropocentrism that commonly excludes nonhuman entities from the social, my entry

ever, my studies went deeply into the sources that provide insights into bamboo’s part in pre-

industrial everyday life and material cultures in China, Japan, the Americas, and Africa. Sim-

ultaneously, I gained additional data based on my anthropological fieldwork related to small-

scale societies’ current bamboo-based material cultures in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

On the one hand, this re-orientation resulted in a work much broader in scope and scale since I

discuss bamboo’s material history across time and space, which consumed more time than orig-

inally planned. On the other hand, and due to this work’s limited time and scope, I decided not

for this with my analysis of Japanese bamboo culture from the late nineteenth to the early