Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption (review)

Transnational adoption first emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry in the late 1990s and early 2000s as large numbers of children joined the intensified flows of people, commodities, ideas, and capital that constitute “globalization.” Not only their numbers, but also their destinations made these border-crossing children increasingly difficult to ignore, as they entered into the home territories of Western anthropologists. Moreover, they troubled the boundaries among various categories of traveling things, raising questions about the nature of these circulations: are children in transnational adoption immigrants, commodities, fantasies, conduits of economic and social capital, or all of the above? Do their migrations and attempts at government regulation represent a liberalization of identity and family forms, or the consolidation of a Western-dominated vision of “right” children and families? For more than a decade, Barbara Yngvesson’s work has been among the most valuable in providing critical theoretical frameworks for answering these questions. Her impressively expansive project attends to the complexity of adoption for all the social actors involved––parents, children, social workers, and child welfare advocates on both sides of the global North-South divide––as well as the legal technologies, international networks, and affective economies that govern it. Belonging in an Adopted World is a seamless monograph that refines and coalesces her previous theoretical and ethnographic contributions to powerful effect.

Yngvesson’s (1997) earliest work on adoption examined “open adoptions” in the US, in part inspired by her own experience with such an arrangement at a time well before they had become conventional practice. In Belonging in an Adopted World, Yngvesson writes in detail of the circumstances that brought her son Finn into her family, as well as of the relationships that formed around him––between Finn’s adoptive and birth families. This experience literally frames the book (appearing in the Prologue and the Epilogue); yet rather than merely functioning as a reflexive or confessional vignette, it is effectively deployed as autoethnography in the most analytical sense, demonstrating how the author’s knowledge of the dynamics of kinship and identity––which adoption throws into relief and radically into question––is located within the scope of her own unfolding family relations. Yngvesson explains how American adoption law provided the model for adoption laws in Europe and how it has become the standard in international legal conventions, which promote “strong” or plenary adoptions that cancel prior kinship relations and replace them with as-if genealogical adoptive ones. Open adoptions cut against the grain of this standard, but in the process create a hierarchy among birth mothers––those in the global North who are empowered to choose the adopting parents and the extent of their relationships to their children, and those in the South for whom relinquishment is complete and final. For American adoptees of previous generations and transnational adoptees today, the closed, plenary form of adoption produced the opposite effect of the closure intended by legal permanence. Instead, it generated a heightened longing for the “real,” the pre-adoption histories and relations that seem to promise “answers,” truth, resolution, and plenitude. Yngvesson, as a legal anthropologist and participant in an open adoption, understands well the power of the law to instantiate legal fictions as truths against the complexity of people’s lived experiences with the connections and disconnections of kinship. With this understanding of “the work of adoption,” she turns her attention to the domain of transnational, transracial adoption to Sweden, seeking to capture the ways in which the particular structure of transnational adoption provokes a desire for “the real,” motivating searches for genealogical “origins,” and “returns” to the birth mother or birth country. As adoptees who have engaged in searches and returns recognize, “the real” of adoption may promise closure, but, in fact, resists it. Questions to which adoptees sought answers open on to more questions, and the ground of identity threatens to become unstable. The real, as Yngvesson delicately shows, is constituted by the ongoing relations among adoptees, adoptive parents, and...