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Usages de l'enfant sauvage

Usages de l'enfant sauvage

Edited by Jean-Luc Chappey

Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines



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Uses of the wild child

We are familiar with the wild boy from Aveyron, whom Truffaut brought to life in his film of 1970, and with other wild children too. But why do they crop up so regularly in nineteenth-century human science writing, and beyond? From anthropology to linguistics, psychiatry to didactics, the 'wild child' or noble savage became a sort of obligatory reference, a way of constructing a fiction of origins, or to defend certain positions within a discipline. In this issue, specialists from different fields in the humanities examine these resurgences: the questions that crystallised around them, how they contributed to the emergence of new knowledge areas and, in certain contexts, how they redrew the boundaries of established knowledge.