Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Feral Children
I was amazed to discover that there are over 100 reported cases of feral children. One case that caught my eye is that of a woman Oxana, living in Ukraine. When she was only three years old her alcoholic parents left her outside one night, so she crawled into a hovel where wild dogs lived. According to the story she remained with these dogs for five years "eating off meat and scraps" until the day she was found by a neighbor at the age of eight. By then she had lost what ever toddler language she knew. Oxana is now in her twenties but has the vocabulary of a six year old. She has also found it difficult to adapt to the human world, and currently lives in a home for the mentally disabled.
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The feral children thing is crazy. In a weird way its the sociologist's wet dream. A totally unsocialized human, it is what everyone wonders about. How much of everything we do all day is taught to us by other people, how much of it is nature? You'd think this would give us an answer but from this story, it looks like the feral child just became socialized by another species. So we will still never fully understand the nature versus nurture conundrum. But in the end, I think everyone kind of understands that this 'binary opposition' is itself socially constructed. There really is no distinction between the two things, or if there is, than two things are true: 1, everything has elements of both, and 2: it is completely pointless trying to figure out how much more of one is displayed than the other.
I think the most revealing part of the feral children thing is not how smart or stupid the child comes out being, but how society treats these children when they come back to civilization. This girl was put in a mental institution, maybe we're the crazy ones.
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