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  • No bico da cegonha: Histórias de adoção e da adoção internacional no Brasil
  • Nara Milanich
Abreu, Domingos . No bico da cegonha: Histórias de adoção e da adoção internacional no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, Núcleo de Antropologia da Polítíca, 2002. 184 pp.

As a graduate student in France, Domingos Abreu taught Portuguese classes in order to support himself. In one classroom, his students included five French couples that had adopted children from Brazil and wanted to learn their children's language of origin. Abreu's book, No bico da cegonha: Histórias de adoção e da adoção internacional no Brasil, grew out of this encounter. While in another work he has dealt with the question of how French families incorporate children who are culturally and racially "different," this study focuses on the Brazilian context as well as on transatlantic conversations about adoption. Abreu conducts interviews with French adoptive parents, Brazilian biological mothers, [End Page 151] lawmakers, and intermediaries. He is also interested in treatments of adoption in the press, arguing that the media is a site not only of representations but also of the production of discourses about adoption.

As Abreu describes, after being largely accepted by the Brazilian public for fifteen years, international adoption became extremely controversial in the mid-80s. Where once adoption had been accepted as an unmitigated good—an act of charity benefiting children, childless couples, poor mothers, and Brazil in general—it was now reframed as an illegal traffic in human beings. This is charged terrain, and one of the book's strengths is Abreu's sensitivity in negotiating it. On the one hand, he must contend with vociferous opposition to international adoption, which in its more extreme versions holds that it is a front for organ trafficking. As one Brazilian official declares, "I prefer a living child in a favela to a dead child in France" (168). On the other hand, Abreu has frequent contact with French adoptive parents who, in response to such allegations, sarcastically point out to the ethnographer that their children are alive and intact.

Abreu is not interested in taking sides in this polemic; he never reveals whether he is "for" or "against" foreign adoption. Instead, he seeks to make explicit some of the unstated assumptions, practices, and discourses surrounding adoption, or what he calls the Brazilian "adoptive habitus" (175). On one level, he explores such empirical questions as: How does international adoption work? Did international adoption represent a continuation of or a rupture with long-established cultural patterns of domestic adoption? On a greater level of abstraction, he seeks to illuminate the symbolic field within which adoptive practices are embedded.

Abreu first explores Brazilians' cultural familiarity with child circulation, which long predates international adoption. Most domestic adoptions involve extralegal or illegal jeitinhos. Especially common is the practice known as adoção à brasileira, in which individuals falsely register someone else's biological child as their own. Abreu shows that this is done with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, collaboration of judicial authorities. He further explores the significance of cegonhas, middle-class women who act as informal intermediaries to place children. Adoptive and biological parents have little faith in the courts and public social services and prefer the informal mediation of cegonhas, whose efforts are steeped in the language of charity. Cegonhas receive money from adoptive parents, but this is understood as a "donation" to their charitable activities (which may involve running private crèches as well as arranging adoptions) rather than as financial recompense for their labors.

In contrast to domestic adoptions, foreign ones require formal paperwork in order for the child to leave Brazil and enter another country. While Abreu concludes there has been rampant illegality in the production of these documents—just as opponents of international adoption charge—he contends the procedures have been no more subject to illegality than domestic adoption. What made international adoption unacceptable was not, therefore, illegality but the notion of children being bought and sold. This was so insofar as international [End Page 152] adoptions, which required well-paid lawyers to navigate the bureaucratic process, came to be associated...

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