Feral ecologies: the making of postcolonial nature in London

Abstract

Through an ethnography of parakeets and other denizens in London, this article expounds the concept of the feral and foregrounds its purchase for an anthropological inquiry into urban life. Ecological, cultural, and political connotations of ferality impinge upon evaluations of what counts and is allowed to flourish as metropolitan nature. Ferality is constructed through nativist and racial taxonomies which promote a biopolitics of eradicating parakeets. At the same time, parakeets trigger new ‘recombinant' ecological associations when they enter into relations with other avian life. They also foster affective alignments with people that create possibilities for a more just politics of dwelling. The feral recasts London's metropolitan nature as postcolonial and opens up novel ways of doing urban anthropology.