The Beggfredla (A Bamberg Hand Hoe). On the Cultural Biography of a Tool

Among the tools of Market Gardeners in the southern German city of Bamberg, a small hand hoe for loosening the soil and weeding seedlings was common. Neither its form nor its dialect name — Beggfredde/Beckfreddla — was found anywhere else in the German-speaking area. Based on field observations, interviews from 2008—2012 and 2019, and recent data from websites, the author traces the development of relations between the producing human and this tool. Using Igor Kopytoff’s concept of the cultural biography of things, I show that the beggfredla, being a local invention, gradually went out of use, giving way to mechanisms, and underwent transformation into a museum object. But even as an exhibit, the beggfredla remains a potent symbol that appears in the narratives and visual images of vegetable farm advertising, producing authenticity in the form of souvenir copies of itself, and becomes the center of the conflict around the new museum concept