Adoption is a controversial subject in the United States, particularly in the last 30 years. Why that is and how public attention affects the decisions made by those who arrange, legalise and experience adoption forms the subject of this book.

Adoption is a controversial subject in the United States, particularly in the last 30 years. Why that is and how public attention affects the decisions made by those who arrange, legalise and experience adoption forms the subject of this book.

Following periods of intense debate and eventual demise, kinship studies is now seeing a revival in anthropology. New Directions in Anthropological Kinship captures these recent trends and explores new avenues of inquiry in this re-emerging subfield. The book comprises contributions from primatology, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. The authors review the history of kinship in anthropology and its theory, and recent research in relation to new directions of anthropological study. Moving beyond the contentious debates of the past, the book covers feminist anthropology on kinship, the expansion of kinship into the areas of new reproductive technologies, recent kinship constructions in EuroAmerican societies, and the role of kinship in state politics.

Ideas of kinship play a significant role in structuring everyday life, and yet kinship has been neglected in Christian ethics, moral philosophy and bioethics. Attention has been paid in these disciplines to the ethics of 'family,' but with little regard to the evidence that kinship varies widely from culture-to-culture, suggesting that it is, in fact, culturally constructed. Surveying notions of shared substance (e.g. blood ties), house, gender and personhood, as theorised and practiced in the Christian tradition, Torrance critiques the special privileging of the 'blood tie'. In the place of European and American cultural assumptions to the contrary, it is kinship in Christ that is presented as the basis of a truly Christian account for social ties. Torrance also aims to stimulate the moral imagination to consider Christian kinship might be lived out in miniature, in everyday life.

2019 High Plains Book Award Winner for the Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn’t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later. Harness’s search for answers revolved around her need to ascertain why she was the target of racist remarks and why she seemed always to be on the outside looking in. New questions followed her through college and into her twenties when she started her own family. Meeting her biological family in her early thirties generated even more questions. In her forties Harness decided to get serious about finding answers when, conducting oral histories, she talked with other transracial adoptees. In her fifties she realized that the concept of “home” she had attributed to the reservation existed only in her imagination. Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real—but culturally constructed—concept of race helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes, a sense of nonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance. In the process Bitterrootalso provides a deep and rich context in which to experience life.

Since the late nineteen sixties, transnational adoption has emerged as a global phenomenon. Due to a sharp decline in infants being made available for adoption locally, involuntarily childless couples in Western Europe and North America who wish to create a family, have to look to look to countries in the poor South and Eastern Europe. The purpose of this book is to locate transnational adoption within a broad context of contemporary Western life, especially values concerning family, children and meaningful relatedness, and to explore the many ambiguities and paradoxes that the practice entails. Based on empirical research from Norway, the author identifies three main themes for analysis: Firstly, by focusing on the perceived relationship between biology and sociality, she examines how notions of child, childhood and significant relatedness vary across time and space. She argues that through a process of kinning, persons are made into kin. In the case of adoption, kinning overcomes a dominant cultural emphasis placed upon biological connectedness. Secondly, it is a study of the rise of expert knowledge in the understanding of 'the best interest of the child', and how the part played by the 'psycho.technocrats' effects national and international policy and practice of transnational adoption. Thirdly, it shows how transnational adoption both depends upon and helps to foster the globalisation of Western rationality and morality. The book is an original contribution to the anthropological study of kinship and globalisation.