Thinking with Wolves

Abstract

This article is an examination of the career of the “wolf child”—a human child lost or sacrificed by human parents but nurtured by wolf mothers—in imperial South Asia. Notably, wolf children become a particular concern of evangelical Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; for the latter, these children featured as subjects in a miracle narrative, in which they were preserved from harm against all odds by their divinely animated lupine foster mothers. This history limns the curious trajectory that begins with an anthropology of the cultures that sacrifice children to wolves and ends in a missionary theology that claims wolf children as evidence of Christian grace and redemption. It underlines how unexpectedly significant a reckoning with the nonhuman was for evangelical theology and narrative in the colony, and how the narrative depended on trans-species alliance for imagining the operations of grace in imperial zones.