Ageing with a Captive Society in London: Audrey, Ron and Smokey at the Zoo

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the spatio-temporal capacity of a set of relationships as they are identified by a group of older people who are regular visitors to London Zoo. It explores the intersections between the time of retirement and the scales and directionality of time commonly invoked by zoological forms of knowledge about species and biodiversity. This includes a look at how both positive and negative theories of futures, including the future of the zoo itself, become a prism through which individuals examine their relationships to time towards the end of life. In addition, the essay focuses on those visitors who seek, in a hopeful manner, to reorient themselves in the city through engagements with individual captive animals.

KEYWORDS:

• Zoo
• city
• inter-species encounter
• extinction

Acknowledgements

Of course, I would like to thank those visitors to the zoo I worked with. My special thanks to Morten Nielsen for inviting me to contribute to this special issue. I am also grateful for the comments and feedback of Matei Candea, Alberto Corsin Jimenez, Shari Sabeti and Tom Yarrow. A version of this paper was given at the anthropology department seminar series at UCL and I thank that audience too.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.