In this seminar, Lars Risan will present his recent paper that explores the story of two Indian girls, in West Bengal in the 1920s, who allegedly were raised by wolves to become strikingly wolves-like in their behaviors.
Their lives and the published diary that told their story became a contested theme among North American biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s.
Risan’s claim is that the story challenged the making of new scientific understandings of human nature and wolf nature to the degree that the story became difficult to believe. He will explore the controversy of the time but also argue that we might now think differently about the events and the various beings that shaped the lives of the two girls.