Cross-cultural Approaches to Adoption

Front Cover
Fiona Bowie
Psychology Press, 2004 - Education - 279 pages

Adoption is currently subject to a great deal of media scrutiny. High-profile cases of international adoption via the internet and other unofficial routes, have drawn attention to the relative ease with which children can be obtained on the global circuit, and have brought about legislation which regulates the exchange of children within and between countries. However a scarcity of research into cross-cultural attitudes to child-rearing, and a wider lack of awareness of cultural difference in adoptive contexts, has meant that the assumptions underlying Western childcare policy are seldom examined or made explicit.

These articles look at adoption practices from Africa, Oceania, Asia and Central America, including examples of societies in which children are routinely separated from their biological parents or passed through several foster families. Showing the range and flexibility of the child-rearing practices that approximate to the Western term 'adoption', they demonstrate the benefits of a cross-cultural appreciation of family life, and allow a broader understanding of the varied relationships that exist between children and adoptive parents.

 

Contents

Adoption and the circulation of children A comparative perspective
3
Adopting a native child an anthropologists personal involvement in the field
21
Africa
31
The real parents are the foster parents social parenthood among the Baatombu in Northern Benin
33
Fosterage and the politics of marriage and kinship in East Cameroon
48
Adoption practices among the pastoral Maasai of East Africa enacting fertility
64
Asia and Oceania
79
Korean institutionalised adoption
81
The one who feeds has the rights adoption and fostering of kin affines and enemies among the Yukpa and other Caribspeaking Indians of Lowland S...
145
The circulation of children in a Brazilian working class neighborhood a local practice in a globalized world
165
Person relation and value the economy of circulating Ecuadorian children in international adoption
182
Choosing parents adoption into a global network
197
Intercountry and domestic adoption in the West
209
National bodies and the body of the child completing families through international adoption
211
The backpackers that come to stay new challenges to Norwegian transnational adoptive families
227
Partial to completeness gender peril and agency in Australian adoption
242

Transactions in rights transactions in children a view of adoption from Papua New Guinea
97
Adoption and belonging in Wogeo Papua New Guinea
111
Adoptions in Micronesia past and present
127
Central and South America
143
Adoption a cure for too many ills?
257
Index
274
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About the author (2004)

Fiona Bowie is Senior Lecturer and Head of Anthropology at the University of Bristol, where she specialises in anthropology of religion, kinship and African society.