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The Wild Man and the Extraterrestrial: Two Figures of Evolutionist Fantasy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Jean-Bruno Renard
Jean-Bruno Renard*
Affiliation:
Université de Montpellier
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Extract

The image of the Other, particularly in the Western World, expresses itself through a continuous flow of representations of fabulous peoples with strange physical appearance living in far-away places. In our day, the successors to the sirens, Cyclops, unípedes and cynecephala of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are the Sirians, Saturnians, Selenites and Martians of the 17th through the 20th centuries.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 32 , Issue 127 , September 1984 , pp. 63 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Henri Baudin, "Les Monstres dans la science-fiction", Circé, Revue du Centre de recherche sur l'imaginaire (Chambéry), n. 6, 1976.

2 Heinz Mode, Démons et Animaux fantastiques, Paris, Lib. G. Kogan and Editions Leipsig, 1977, p. 36.

3 Franck Tinland, L'Homme sauvage, Paris, Payot, 1968 (coll. "Bibliothèque Scientifique"), p. 23.

4 Richard Bemheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1952.

5 Jean-Dominique Penel, Homo caudatus. Les Hommes à queue d'Afrique cen trale. Un avatar de l'imaginaire occidental, Paris, Société d'études linguistiques et anthropologiques de France, 1983.

6 Bernard Heuvelmans, Les Bêtes humaines d'Afrique, Paris, Plon, 1974.

7 Boris Porchnev and Bernard Heuvelmans, L'Homme de Néanderthal est tou jours vivant, Paris, Plon, 1974.

8 Alain Jacob, "Les ‘sauvages' du Hubei", Le Monde, 23 November 1980.

9 Jean Ferguson, Les Humanoides. Les cerveaux qui dirigent les soucoupes volantes, Ottawa (Canada), Leméac, 1977, pp. 44-45. See also: Jader U. Pereira, "Les Extra-terrestres", 2nd special issue of the journal Phénomènes spatiaux, Paris, 1974; Eric Zurcher, Les Apparitions d'humanoides, Nice, Alain Lefeuvre, 1979 (coll. "Connaissance de l'étrange").

10 The constantly "elusive" character of the UFO phenomenon has been under lined by Bertrand Méheust, Science-fiction et soucoupes volantes, Paris, Mercure de France, 1978, pp. 252-253. This "elusivity" seems moreover to be a trait common to all phenomena called paranormal.

11 Jean Servier, L'Homme et l'Invisible, Paris, Imago/Payot, 1980 (1964), (coll. "Petite Bibliothèque Payot"). See the introduction and the first three chapters for a critical analysis of the evolutionist ideology.

12 Pierre Versins, Encyclopédie de l'utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction, Lausanne, L'Age d'Homme, 1972.

13 Jean Servier, Paris, L'Utopie, Presses Universitaires de France, 1979 (coll. "Que sais-je?", n. 1757).

14 "Entretien avec Jean Servier", Totalité, n. 15, 1982, p. 49.

15 Roland Villeneuve, Le Musée de la bestialité, Paris, Henri Veyrier, 1973; about fauns, apes and man-apes see pp. 73-88, 191, 218-265 and about extraterrestrials see pp. 11, 261-262. See also the article "Xénosexologie" in P. Versins, op. cit., p. 972.

16 Jean Gattégno, La Science-fiction, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1971 (coll. "Que sais-je?", n. 1426), p. 91.

17 Margaret Sachs, The U.F.O. Encyclopedia, London, Corgi Edition, 1981. See articles "Bigfoot", "Occupants".