FERAL CHILD

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2009

A feral child is who, in legend or in fact, has been raised and protected from infancy by animals. The most famous example is the ‘Wild Boy of Averon’, a feral child who was discovered in 1800 at the age of eleven or twelve after having apparently been raised by animals.

Although considerable effort was made to ‘civilize’ the young man, there was little success and only a few words were mastered.

The case of feral child is offered in the social sciences to emphasize the importance of socialization and the social nature of the human species.

A more recent example of a feral child growing up in isolation from human contact is found in the story of Genie (Curtiss 1977).

The fera in feral child refers to wild, untamed, uncultivated.

FeralChildren.com : Discussion of isolated, confined, wild and wolf children.

Illicit Crossings - The Other at the Human/Animal Boundary
H. Peter Steeves (DePaul University)
Abstract: In an effort to understand what we mean by “human” and “animal,” how it is that we decide crises of Otherness and alterity along such axes, this paper looks at the question of feral children (“human” children raised in the wild by “nonhuman animals”) and Bigfoot creatures (“animals” that are very nearly “human”).
The existence of the former calls into question the firm boundary between human and animal, forcing us to reevaluate our understanding of ourselves and our world from one particular and well-documented perspective. A feral child is the human that has nearly become an animal--the familiar that has become the Other.
The line of demarcation separating human from animal is eroded from another direction, then, as well, as is evidenced by the myriad myths and stories of animals that are nearly human. Here the cases are not as well documented as feral children. It is possible that animals that are nearly human--the Bigfoot, the Sasquatch, the Yeti, etc.--do not exist at all. But the matter of their existence is not key, for the fact that we acknowledge the possibility--even as myth--is philosophically telling. Indeed, even that which is clearly fiction helps paint a picture of who we are and how we understand our humanity and the living world of which we are a part.
In this way these monstrous stories of familiar Others and feral Selves challenge the boundaries of our communities and metaphysical systems, forcing us to ask questions of our collective identity and the ways in which we experience ourselves in the world. Through an analysis of cases and illicit crossings at the border--coupled with an investigation into the irreality of species in general--we come to find that there is no acceptable scientific, ontological, or otherwise philosophical grounds for our conception of humanity, especially as it is constructed as a type of being radically different from all others.