ABSTRACT
In the previous two chapters we saw how the oppositions between nature and culture, human and animal, have been used as a means for' grounding' the human sciences, and we discussed some of the difficulties inherent in the forms of dualism associated with the use of such oppositions. But specifying the terms of these oppositions is not just a problem for the contemporary human sciences. For just as the distinctions between nature and culture, the human and the animal, have a long history in western thought, so too the problems involved in making those distinctions explicit have an equally long history. A discussion of the themes of primitivism and wildness, and of stories of feral children, serves to elaborate these problems. The main figures associated with these themes - the noble/ignoble savage, the wild man, the wolfchild - cannot easily be fitted into any of the above categories. Indeed they disrupt the terms of the oppositions, since they reside in the space between the natural and the cultural, the human and the animal. Throughout both classical antiquity and the Middle Ages there were no hard and fast criteria for establishing membership of the human species and attempts to mark out the boundary between the natural and the cultural were always fraught with difficulties. Even when, during the eighteenth century, it was deemed possible - through the use of systematic classification based on observation and analysis - to distinguish human from animal with scientific rigour, the criteria put forward to establish that distinction were still by no means clear. It is here that stories of wolf children, discussed increasingly during the eighteenth century, become important. For such children were seen as possible subjects of the 'crucial experiment', an experiment designed to establish the limits of humanity, to answer one of the central questions of the Enlightenment, What is 'Man'?
