ABSTRACT
Although the child-savage analogy was used in common parlance and reform literature throughout the nineteenth century (Cunningham 1991), it was not until the century’s final two decades that it became codified in an “objective” and “scientific” discourse (Garrison 2006). In 1904, G. Stanley Hall published his voluminous study Adolescence, which granted the child-as-savage analogy a respectable entrée into Western academic circles. The work synthesized several decades of European scholarship, and was largely informed by scholars who had been influenced by the colonial project. Of particular import to Hall were writings from the fields of anthropology (E.B. Tylor), criminology (Cesare Lombroso), sexual studies (Havelock Ellis), sociology (Herbert Spencer), embryology (Ernst Haeckel) and evolutionary biology (Charles Darwin). In drawing on this body of work, Hall crafted a theory of development in which individual children “recapitulated” the entirety of human history as they grew. Adolescents and teenagers, it is well known, were thought to inhabit historical stages that were primitive and backwards.
