natureculture

variously attributed to Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and others, this portmanteau fuses the concepts of nature and culture problematizing their differentiation and eliminating their distinction. Nature as a concept derives from the Greek physis which includes notions of emergence into being (from nothingness or chaos), growth and genesis. Culture, a rather recent borrowing into English, has its roots in the Latin colere which means to tend or cultivate, related to the word colonia which refers to a territory outside the city walls which has come into cultivation. Culture thus refers to the extention of the city order to previously undomesticated terrain.