American Anthropological Association

In the August issue of American Ethnologist, Sara Dorow and Amy Swiffen develop what they see as an “underexplored conversation between the critiques of heteronormativity found in some of the new kinship studies and the scholarship of transnational-transracial adoption.”

From their interviews with US parents of children adopted from China, the authors found that parents often negotiated the discontinuity between the social and blood origins of their families “in relation to the foundational imaginary of heteronormative kinship, namely, the equivalence of biological and social family origins.”

The authors conclude that “the ‘secret’ of socially intelligible kinship is revealed in the shifting meanings of blood and social desire in ideas of kinship, which has important implications for new kinship studies as well as for adoption scholarship.”

AAA members can check out the entire article on Anthrosource; non-AAA members can read the article on Wiley-Interscience.

More about adoption from AAA publications:

Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption

Anthropology and Adoption

Adoption and Kinship in Oceania

More about kinship from past issues of American Ethnologist:

Nourishing Kinship Theory: A Commentary on Weismantel’s “Making Kin”

Batak Tape Cassette Kinship: Constructing Kinship Through the Indonesian National Mass Media

A Study of the Cultural Domain of “Relatives”

Kalapalo Affinity: Its Cultural and Social Contexts

Kin Selection and Culture

Demography and Kinship as Variables of Adoption in the Carolines

Comment on the Incidence and Purpose of Royal Sibling Incest

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