Wood is considered to be one of the oldest materials and as such it is currently receiving new attention: As renewable raw material, non-contaminated building material and versatile usable material – as „material of the future“, wood is woven into a variety of action chains that connect allegedly remote fields. Such as private living and global environmental protection, traditional material connotations and political interventions, economies of the rural and constructions of the urban, the beautiful and the useful, things and landscape, art and everyday life. – In these accumulations, interlinkings and simultaneities the article locates the potential of an analysis of wood by cultural studies: Precisely because wood shows itself as an omnipresent, variously connoted material and is at the same time used and negotiated in everyday living environments, an ethnographically oriented cultural-scientific analysis of the network of action around wood can disclose prioritizations and classification systems. A particular interest of the author lies in the economies and policies that constitute the network of action around wood and are constituted by it at the same time. On a broad empirical basis, she discusses how wood is currently used and given meaning and to what extent access via a material enables cultural scientific analyzes of economic and political fields.

Keywords
material, economization, politicization, (investments in) meaning, sustainability, nature, rural area, urban building, future, crafts, wood