ABSTRACT
The concepts used in this book – ‘nature’, ‘civilization’, ‘animals’, ‘humans’ – contain the complex and contradictory detritus of their intellectual history. Culture/nature, along with mind/body, rational/emotional, male/female, self/other, civilized/primitive, is among the dualistic couplets considered to frame Western thought. Jennifer Price (1999, pp160-161) suggests that, for the postwar generation, the opposition between Nature and Artifice became an urboundary, used to ‘mark and challenge the boundaries of aesthetics, taste, class, reality, sexuality’. In this formulation, nature is all that is authentic; the rest is all that is culture, artifice. As can readily be imagined, there are a number of problems in using these simple oppositions to carve up the known universe. For example in focusing on the human-nature divide, we possibly neglect human-machine relations. Perhaps computers are replacing pets in some households: electronic products are marketed as ‘personal companions’ including palm-size personal computers, handheld electronic books, the smart card (Millar, 1998, p121; Turkle, 1991, pp230, 232-233).
