Abstract
The Spring 2010 conference of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture — held just an hour’s drive from the Massachusetts college where author Barbara Yngvesson holds a professorship in anthropology — was abuzz with the pivotal work of the next wave of transnational/transracial adoption scholars, many of them adult adoptees. Belonging in an Adopted World seems a fitting bridge to this new generation of analysts and interpreters. Written by a respected adoption scholar who is also an adoptive mother, the book foregrounds the meanings and implications of race, kinship, and nation for experiences of “belonging” among adults who were adopted twenty or thirty or forty years ago. It does so more to politicize than to psychologize questions of identity and belonging.
As Yngvesson’s first full-length book on transnational adoption, Belonging synthesizes and also significantly builds on the accumulated wisdom of her work over the last fourteen years. In a half-dozen widely cited articles she has interrogated some of the key tropes of adoption, from “the gift child” and “the clean break” of adoptive kinship to “home,” “loss,” and “return.” Belonging weaves these themes into a meta-inquiry of the constant making and unmaking of identity, taking the adoption of children from Asia and Africa to Sweden as its central case.
The book’s seven chapters move in both temporal and spatial arcs. The first third of the book draws on Yngvesson’s fieldwork in several cities in India to interrogate the legal and social processes that over the last few decades have made children available and valued as “national resources” for adopting out (or, in some cases, keeping in). The middle part of Belonging then moves to the context of the “receiving” nation of Sweden, which has had not only a high rate of intercountry adoption but also, concomitantly, a recent history of ambivalence toward racially and culturally diverse immigrant populations. The tensions these national and transnational histories create for the “belonging” of the adoptee then carry into the last two chapters, where Yngvesson highlights the narratives of individuals who as children were adopted into Swedish families from Africa and Asia. Their experiences undo any easy claim to belonging that family or nation might make on them, including as they make “return” trips to countries of birth and back again.
The arc of Belonging in an Adopted World gives the book its fullness, but its latter chapters are its most welcome contribution. The insights of the first part of the book – on the uneven forces of love, desire, commodification, and law that haunt adoption kinship across racial and national “difference” — have become fairly well embedded in recent adoption scholarship, due in part to Yngvesson’s earlier work. Less established but of immanent significance are the perspectives of the adopted people who have lived and negotiated these forces. The first half of the book thus necessarily establishes the weight of the historical and social relationships that form the stuff of adoptee identity and belonging.
One of the key themes bridging the middle and latter chapters of Belonging is adoption’s contrapuntal dance with immigration, a question that has begun to capture the imaginations of a number of us doing adoption research. Sweden is a fascinating place to examine the complex play of race, kinship, and nation that make adoption both recognized and disavowed as a form of immigration, where adoptees both embrace and distance themselves from being an immigrant. Yngvesson deftly teases out the tensions present in her conversations with adoptees about immigration, as in statements like: “[Immigrants] remind me that I, too, am a kind of immigrant, even though I feel that I am not” (p. 127).
Throughout the book Yngvesson draws equally well on cultural, socio-legal, and psychoanalytic theory to puzzle through the questions of belonging that are surfaced by adoptive kinship. She does so in the elegant style many of us in the field have come to admire. But even more admirable is that Yngvesson maintains such theoretical sophistication while keeping her narrative close to the deeply intimate and sometimes unnamable character of human relationships in adoption.
Yngvesson accomplishes this intimacy in two ways. First, she does so through the respect she shows her research material. One of the violations done by adoption scholarship has been the infantilization of adoptees, no matter what their ages. The adoptees in Yngvesson’s book come across not as objects of study, but as co-researchers whose insights on their own lives are offered almost auto-ethnographically. In this way Yngvesson’s representational choices mirror an entreaty from an adoption practitioner — to “allow the child its own history” — that becomes one of the main sensitizing concepts of Belonging.
Secondly, Yngvesson integrates into the book her own personal experiences with adoption, beginning with a prologue that relates the enchainment across birth and adoptive families that began even before she formally adopted her son Finn. She does so with a light hand, always turning her gaze toward the interplay of real and fictive kinship that constitutes the main artery of the book.
If there is any criticism to be made, it is that the book could have more fully theorized the cultural operation of law. Yngvesson covers some of the history of adoption policy and regulation, and occasionally discusses the social force of law (in relation to blood or immigration, for example), but the book may have benefited from further application of her unique expertise.
In the end, Yngvesson offers a book that should be taken up by those interested in adoption scholarship at its best, as well as researchers and students of race, kinship, identity, and transnationalism.