Transnational families: the globalisation of adoption norms and the kinning of strangers

Department of Anthropology public lecture

The adoption of infants from Asia, Africa, Latin America and former Soviet republics to involuntarily childless people in Western Europe and North America has increased dramatically since the late 1960s. With a special focus on the situation in Norway – a country which per capita adopts more children than any other country - I shall examine the implications of this practice on Norwegian understanding of kinship and how adoptive parents overcome the culturally elaborated divide between biology and sociality. Secondly, I shall explore how Western values regarding childhood and parenthood are being globalised through the international treaties that supervise the transaction.

Signe Howell did her postgraduate training at the University of Oxford where research for her D.Phil. was undertaken amongst a hunting-, gathering- and shifting cultivating group of people in the tropical rain forest of Malaysia. She has also done fieldwork in Indonesia and has published widely on religion, kinship and gender. Her research on transnational adoption has resulted in numerous articles and The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective (2006).

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