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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that the invention and rapid spread of barbed wire in the United States in the late nineteenth century provides a paradigmatic example of the violence embedded in the nature–culture divide.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the invention of barbed wire (patented in 1874 by Illinois farmer Joseph F. Glidden) as both a material and narrative technology of the nature–culture divide. Emerging in the wake of the Homestead Act of 1862 and the westward migrations it accelerated, barbed wire offered settlers a cheap and effective way to enclose land, restrain bison, and demarcate property. Yet its significance extends beyond its practical function: it became a powerful symbol within the mythic landscape of the “Wild West.” Barbed wire inscribed into the prairie a narrative of domestication and progress, transforming a boundless wilderness—inhabited by wildlife and Indigenous communities—into a space legible as civilized, cultivated, and owned. Folklore and popular culture quickly reflected and reinforced this transformation: frontier ballads, cowboy songs, and later Western films cast barbed wire alternately as the emblem of settlement and as the symbol of loss, fencing off freedom, open range, and Indigenous sovereignty. Drawing on Olivier Razac’s Barbed Wire: A Political History and on folkloristic approaches to myth and narrative, I argue that barbed wire epitomizes the violence of the nature–culture divide. It operates simultaneously as infrastructure and as myth, a device that narrates modernity while legitimizing exclusion. This case demonstrates how folklore and narrative are central to understanding the infrastructures of violence that continue to shape life in the Anthropocene.