Cross-cultural Approaches to AdoptionFiona Bowie 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 |
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References to this book
The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective Signe Howell No preview available - 2006 |