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Loading... Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature: With the Complete Text of the Wild Boy of Aveyronby Lucien Malson, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  karl.steel | Apr 2, 2013 |  no reviews | add a review
"The idea that man has no nature," Malson begins, "is now beyond dispute. He has or rather is a history." In these provocative words, which form the theme of this essay, Malson carries one step further the assumption of behaviorists, structural functionalists, cultural anthropologists, and evolutionists that "human nature" is a constant. If the content of the analysis made by anthropologists is not affected by a "human nature" that lies outside of history, humanity to all effects and purposes becomes its history. So-called wolf children are children abandoned at an early age and found leading an isolated existence. They are thus natural examples of complete social deprivation and Malson explores their history in this complete study. His essay is followed by Itard's account of Victor, a wolf child found in the forests of central France at the end of the eighteenth century. Itard's two reports have become a classic of psychological and educational literature, and are presented here as the most important first-hand account of a wolf child. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)155.4567Philosophy and Psychology Psychology Developmental And Differential Psychology Childhood Special needs Feral ChildrenLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.2)
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Wikipedia in English
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Fundamentally Marxist and existentialist argument against 'human nature' (and against racism (19), Malson's Wolf Children offers further context for the late 50s and mid 60s assaults on transhistorical naturalisms in Foucault and other thinkers. The roots of Butler's Gender Trouble, inter alia, can be found in here.
Malson--better known as a jazz writer!--is irredemably humanist. Humans alone, per Malson, can be completely altered; only humans can really be said to use tools (32), to have true intelligence (and here he uses Merleau-Ponty), or to make gifts. The savage character of feral children proves the open character of human: it is not that feral children 'revert' but rather that they lack what humans need to be human, namely, a society of their peers: "deprived of the society of others man becomes a monster. He cannot regress to his pre-cultural state, because such a state never existed" (35). Without hailing, without the symbolic, without historical thrownness, there is no human, at least per Malson: "the search for human nature among 'wild' children has always proved fruitless precisely because human nature can appear only when human existence has entered the social context" (12). "Pure thought" no more exists than the "purely human" (18); there is no universal human nature, nor are there "naturally existing" ethnic differences.
Truffaut clearly read this book: it's the basis for his Wild Child, but also includes an anecdote of a child surviving a defenestration that appears in L'argent de poche.
The book includes Itard's account of Peter of Aveyron, taken from the 1802 English translation.