Schäfer, Anna Céline (2024): Of Weed and Values: Encounters with the Stinging Nettle in the Urban Wilderness of Cologne. Köln: Kölner Ethnologische Beiträge, 64.
The study by Anna Céline Schäfer, supervised by Dr. Clemens Greiner, engages with the stinging nettle, a plant probably better known for painful encounters than for its many beneficial properties. Reflections on this plant’s ambivalence led Schäfer to explore experiences and notions of urban ‘wilderness’ in the City of Cologne.
In this accessible and highly readable ethnography, Schäfer explores Western cultural memories of ‘wilderness’ and traces the history of wilderness thinking from the Middle Ages through the Romantic period to the present day. The subsequent ethnographic exploration of the world of the urban stinging nettle is beautifully organised into four tropes: Chaos (the uncontrollability of wilderness in an over organized space), Contamination (the risks for more-than-human wellbeing through pollutions), Danger (fear of intoxication), and Feral Culture (contemporary struggles about the meaning of ‘wilderness’).
Schäfer explores the world of urban foragers who try to educate and sensitize their contemporaries for the nutritional benefits of wild herbs, which grow at their doorsteps and can be used as complementary food source. Their foraging trips, Schäfer argues, are embodied and sensory encounters with more-than-human worlds. In this way, urban food foraging practices help those alienated from nature to re-familiarize with these worlds and to rethink prevalent nature-culture dualisms.
Connecting wild ecologies, urban foraging practices and current debates about ‘superfoods’, this work touches a wide range of pressing issues relating to the crisis-ridden relationships between humans, the environment and beyond. It brings these topics literally to our doorstep and thus contributes in an exemplary way to an ‘anthropology at home’.
Learn more about Kölner Ethnologische Beiträge under: University of Cologne | Faculty of Arts and Humanities | Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology | Kölner Ethnologische Beiträge Bd. 51 – ff (uni-koeln.de)
