KINNING: THE CREATION OF LIFE
TRAJECTORIES IN TRANSNATIONAL
ADOPTIVE FAMILIES
Signe Howell
University of Oslo
With empirical material obtained from a study of transnational adoption in Norway, an
argument is made for the concept of kinning. By this is meant a process by which a
foetus, new-born child, or any previously unconnected person, is brought into a signiﬁcant
and permanent relationship that is expressed in a kin idiom. Through a focus on
adoption within a cultural setting that emphasizes the ﬂesh and blood metaphor as central
for kinship, the ambiguities and contradictions embedded in the relationship between
biological and social relatedness are thrown into sharp relief. Questions of race and ethnicity
also become pertinent to the kinning drama of adoptive parents which involves,
it is argued, a process of transubstantiation of the adopted child.
Despite the strong desire to be a ‘normal family’, families with transnationally adopted
children always remain different in some sense.To obtain a child, and to create a family,
is so demanding that those who succeed learn a lot about themselves in the process.
(Norwegian mother of a daughter adopted from Colombia)
Due to a sharp decline in the number of Norwegian-born babies being made
available for adoption, transnational adoption has become, since the late 1960s,
an increasingly popular means for involuntarily infertile couples to create a
family. Despite advances in new reproductive technologies, the volume of
adoption of children from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and former Soviet
bloc countries is steadily growing. As a social practice, adoption has received
surprisingly little attention from anthropologists, yet it goes to the very root
of what we take to be kinship, and can throw new light on established
questions concerning the nature of relatedness. For the past four years, I have
been studying transnational adoption in Norway, using a number of different
sources and networks.1
My main interest has been to treat adoption as a means
to throw new light on cultural values concerning procreation, reproduction,
family, kinship, children, and the perceived relationship between biogenetic
and social relatedness. On the basis of this, I argue in this article for an unexplored
aspect of kinship studies which I call ‘kinning’. By kinning, I mean
the process by which a foetus or new-born child (or a previously unconnected
person) is brought into a signiﬁcant and permanent relationship with
a group of people that is expressed in a kin idiom. I wish to suggest that to
kin is a universal process, marked in all societies by various rites of passage
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2003.
J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 9, 465-484
that ensure kinned subjectivation (see below), but that it has not generally
been recognized as such. Because transnational adoption in Norway today is
such a public practice, taking place in a cultural climate that predicates kinship
on biogenetic connectedness, and because adoptive parents engage so deliberately
in transcending the fact that they are not biologically connected to
their children, my attention was led towards this previously ‘hidden’ aspect of
kinship. Through a process of kinning, which, I shall argue, involves what I
call a transubstantiation of the children’s essence, adoptive parents enrol their
adopted children into a kinned trajectory that overlaps their own. Issues pertaining
to time and place as well as bodies become central in this process.
It is a process which, in most cases, is fraught with tensions, ambiguities,
ambivalences, and contradictions, not least because the parents are faced
with the dilemma of incorporating the child into their own kin group at the
same time as they must acknowledge the existence of unknown biological
relatives.
I am concerned here primarily with the efforts engaged in by adoptive
parents to make their adopted child into a relative. I do not focus directly
upon the processes through which adoptees make themselves into persons that
take account of their radically changed circumstances. However, it is clear that
kinning affects all parties involved.The adoptees certainly undergo very radical
changes to their former selves, and the parents also emerge affected. In fact,
I wish to suggest that adoptive parents and their children recreate each other
intersubjectively.Through being kinned, the adoptees qualify their personhood
through their relations to others (primarily their adoptive parents), just as the
adoptive parents, through kinning, adjust their personshood through their relations
to others (primarily their adopted children). Moreover, they all become
ﬁxed as kinned persons by virtue of their particular relationship (cf. Faubion
2001: 11-12).
Norwegians’ perceptions about their own personal belonging in the contemporary
social world are contrived through personal trajectories worked
out in an idiom of kinship. The idiom of kinship, moreover, is one that is
grounded in a biological connectedness of shared substance. Understanding of
substance in these contexts is not only material, but includes the insubstantial
(invisible essence, see below) elements carried in the substantive ones.What
is important, however, is not so much what substance is, but what it does (cf.
Carsten 2001). Blood, for example, is a substance, but the signiﬁcance of its
meaning in contexts of kinship is the relational quality of blood as shared
between deﬁned categories of kin. To share the same blood means to share
certain physical resemblances as well as insubstantial qualities, such as personality,
interests, and abilities inherent in, for example, ‘being an Andersen’.This
may be said to provide the social dimension of kinship, which creates continuity
over time, and gives people a sense of belonging to ‘a life’, to something
bigger than the individual (Roalkvam 2001). A kinship system implies
certain necessary relationships, some of which are asymmetrical and carry
asymmetrical expectations of sociality. Thus a mother without a child is by
deﬁnition an impossibility; a son or daughter without a mother is not. For its
development of personhood, a child needs to be ﬁxed in relation to others
and, through its relatedness to them, to society at large. Plotting their identities,
the adoptees have to negotiate two sets of signiﬁcant interlocutors in their
466 SIGNE HOWELL
kinning drama: biological and adoptive parents. Whereas the adoptive parents
are active partners in this drama, the biological parents are, in most cases, silent
and insubstantial interlocutors – but in Norwegian discourses on kinship,
where a constituting emphasis is placed on the blood-tie metaphor, no less
important for that.
Biology – a universal signiﬁer?
In a fascinating study of adoption practices among an indigenous community
in the highlands of Ecuador, Weismantel (1995) attacks what she regards as a
persistent dichotomy between nature and culture in kinship studies, and argues
that the Zumbagao make no such distinction in their understanding of parentchild
relationships. Rather, while
The physical act of intercourse, pregnancy, and birth can establish a strong bond between
two adults … other adults, by taking a child into their family and nurturing its physical
needs through the same substances as those eaten by the rest of the social group,
can make of that child a son or daughter who is physically as well as jurally their own
(Weismantel 1995: 695, emphasis added).
This ethnography, and that of others who have studied societies where
adoption represents no challenge to epistemology (Bowie forthcoming; Meigs
1986), clearly deﬁes any attempt at universalizing a biogenetic understanding
of procreation and kinship.They provide a useful corrective to those societies
where the dominant discourse is one that privileges biological connectedness.
Weismantel’s argument is that, through eating the same food over time, a child
may be made one’s own physically, and not just jurally. She contrasts this with
the Euro-American insistence ‘upon a strictly genetic notion to physical relatedness
… [which] denies the impact of history on the physical self, the regimes
of diet and exercise … through which societies produce speciﬁc human bodies
at speciﬁc times’ (1995: 697). I ﬁnd this extremely suggestive because it highlights
notions I have encountered among many Norwegian adoptive parents.
To Weismantel’s list of kin-constituting factors – ingesting food, sharing emotional
states, being in close physical proximity to people and objects – (1995:
694), I would add a shared creation of the family’s destiny. All these factors
reﬂect Norwegian adoptive parents’ understanding of the relationship between
themselves and their children. But this understanding is not one shared by
society at large; here, biogenetics occupies a dominant explanatory position.
Adoptive parents have to take this into account when they kin their children.
Their task is thus much more challenging and complex than is that of the
Andeans. I have suggested elsewhere (Howell 2001) that the adoptive families
do not operate a form of either/or as regards the constitutive and deﬁning
role of biology and sociality, but that in different contexts they foreground
one at the expense of the other. They thus employ a dynamic model of
kinship. This is, moreover, a model that allows for conceptual, semantic, and
moral space for both genitor and pater and genetrix and mater.
If kinship is regarded as an institutionalized means for enacting a process
of effectuating enduring relationships – through a process of kinning and subjectivation
(cf. Faubion 2001: 13) – then I suggest that it must also be regarded
SIGNE HOWELL 467
as something that is necessarily achieved in and through relationships with
others. Categories are ﬁlled with meaning by all the partners concerned. In
the case of adoption, this becomes very clear. Because a doxic premise of
biological connectedness is challenged, that very assumption is thrown into
self-conscious relief. What my material shows is that the path of adoptive
kinning is a bumpy one, but that where it is successful, it ends by privileging
the social – the social quality of kinship – at the expense of the biogenetic.
Temporal practices of kinning
In what follows, I wish to explore some of the social and temporal practices
of kinship – and of kinning – as commonly practised in Norwegian adoptive
families. My main focus is on the ways in which a sense of belonging is
transmitted to the adopted children after they have been allocated to their
new parents. I suggest that this may be analysed as transubstantiation. In order
to achieve this, parents must take account of the children’s different biological,
geographical, and cultural origins, as well as of their former relationships,
and at the same time ﬁx them permanently not only into the present, but
also into the past of their new family and kin. Only then may the children
become integral partners in the shaping of the familial future. It is a process
that I have characterized elsewhere as one of self-conscious kinship (Howell
2001) rather than, as has been suggested by Modell (1994: 238), a situation of
artiﬁcial or ﬁctive kinship – terms which seem to privilege biology. After a
brief consideration of the stages of the ‘kinning work’ that adoptive parents
engage in with regard to their adopted children, I discuss some implications
of ‘return visits’ or ‘motherland tours’ – sometimes called ‘roots tours’ –
wherein families with adopted teenagers or young adults travel to visit the
child’s country of origin. Such trips are increasingly popular in Norway, and
may be regarded as an expression of the increased attention being paid to
issues of ‘roots’.
Examination of the media, parliamentary debates concerned with amendments
to various family laws, and the research of several graduate students
involved in the project (Howell & Melhuus 2001) demonstrated very clearly
that family values are highly emphasized in Norwegian social life today.
Despite a national divorce rate approaching 50 per cent, the nuclear family
still remains the ideal.A large proportion of Norwegian adults engages in serial
monogamy, often marking each such relationship with a child. What most
adult couples seem to visualize for themselves is a kind of idealized family life
based on a unit of father and mother, two to three children, a house with a
garden and a cabin in the countryside, and a great deal of close contact with
grandparents and adult siblings. This is endorsed politically, and Norwegian
birth leave is amongst the most generous in the world.There is a strong normative
encouragement, backed by ﬁnancial incentives, for fathers to participate
actively in the bringing-up of their children, and many fathers today take
a minimum of one month’s birth leave once the mother returns to work.2
The ideal of the heterosexual nuclear family is thus not challenged by
Norway’s high divorce rate; it is just that the partners comprising a couple
relationship may change at fairly frequent intervals.
468 SIGNE HOWELL
To my open-ended question,‘Why did you want to have children?’, almost
every adoptive parent answered that they wished to become ‘a normal family’.
Comparatively speaking, a large proportion of Norwegian women give birth.
By the time they have reached the age of 40, approximately 92 per cent of
them have given birth to a child (Sundby and Schei 1996). This fact, taken
together with a cultural emphasis on the desirability of children and family
life, means that, for most adults between the age of 25 and 45, much of their
social life is centred round having and bringing up children. For those couples
who fail to give birth, the pressure becomes great indeed. Again and again, I
have been told by adoptive parents how much they longed to be engaged in
the wider social life around them, but that without children, without being a
‘normal family’, they were unable to do so and therefore thought of themselves
as permanently excluded from the social world surrounding them.The
changing gender models are such that childlessness may be as painful for men
as it is for women. Once failure to conceive is faced, however, and is then
followed by the failure of assisted conception, adoption becomes a joint
venture of the involuntarily infertile couple. Indeed, many couples argue
retrospectively that through adoption they have both contributed equally to
the ‘birth’ and subsequent kinning of the child. This is regarded as a positive
aspect of the practice. There is a noticeable change in the adopting couples’
attitudes during this time, as they shift from seeking to produce children from
their own bodies to seeking children produced by other, and unknown, bodies.
They become unequivocal in praising adoption as a desirable procreative
method. ‘To adopt is the natural way for us to have children,’ a father told
me. At the same time, it cannot be disputed that other bodies produced their
children. Not only other bodies, but also, usually, bodies who have appearances
which are different from the Norwegian norm and who therefore have
given birth to children who do not look like their new parents. Moreover,
these children were born in distant lands whose traditions and culture are
alien. Not surprisingly, these facts give rise to ambivalent attitudes in the adoptive
parents.There is no way in which they can hide from them, and they are
obliged somehow to deal with them in their relationship with their children
and with the world at large. I have argued elsewhere that they handle this
through a process of biologizing or de-biologizing the quality of the relationship
according to particular contexts, and according to the stages of the
child-parent relationship. Thus, in certain contexts they will foreground the
biological nature of the relationship while ‘backgrounding’ the social; in other
contexts they will reverse the order. Parents create cognitive boundaries
between the contexts and handle what appear to the anthropologist as contradictory
positions with apparent ease (Howell 2001).
Transubstantiation of selves: from foreign to Norwegian
Blood is a common metaphor for descent and kin relatedness in Norway as
much as it is amongst the Americans studied by Schneider (1968). Relatedness
predicated on blood-constituted categories carries an automatic expectation
of meaningful sociality. Previously unknown persons alter the quality of
their interaction upon learning that they are related (i slekt), however distantly.
SIGNE HOWELL 469
The passage of time, geographical distance, and absence of interaction are
not in themselves barriers to an experience of being related once the blood
connection is established. Meaningful belonging in the present is contingent
in Norwegian thinking upon a demonstrable belonging to the past. Of course,
the future becomes predicated upon such continuity, and the reproduction of
continuity is anchored in kinned relationships and kinned places. This is the
opposite to the adoptive situation. Where blood is the dominant metaphor
for expressing kinned relationships, adoptive families have a problem.Temporal
and spatial closeness of the moment do not in themselves compensate for
the absence of shared ﬂesh, blood, and history.Adoptive parents somehow have
to compensate for this absence in order to achieve kinning, I suggest that
much of the work adoptive parents engage in, before and after the arrival of
their adopted child, may be interpreted in terms of the transubstantiation of
the child.
According to the Shorter Oxford English dictionary, transubstantiation means,
ﬁrst, ‘the changing of one substance into another’, and, secondly, in the case
of the Eucharist, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and
blood of Christ, as a result of which ‘only the appearances (and other “accidents”)
of bread and wine remain’ (my emphasis). I ﬁnd this suggestive in trying to
understand the processes that the adoptive parents engage in. Unlike transformation,
which changes the form as well as possible content, transubstantiation
effects a fundamental change while the appearance remains
simultaneously unaltered. In the case of transnationally adopted children, their
incorporation into their parents’ kin transcends the constraints of the blood
tie, while the outward appearance remains unchanged. The substance (biological
body) remains; the social essence (being, self ) is changed. I therefore
argue that transubstantiation is effected over time and that it is illuminating
to divide the temporal process into four main stages: pre-pregnancy, pregnancy,
birth, and daily life. The terms ‘pregnancy’ and ‘birth’ are employed by the
people concerned. (For a more detailed exposition of these stages, see Howell
2001.)
The kinning of adopted children
The ‘pre-pregnancy’ stage begins when a couple decides that they want to
have a child. The persistent failure to conceive leads to a round of medical
check-ups, which may, or may not, include the use of new reproductive technology.The
process that leads to a decision to adopt can be a long and painful
one. ‘Almost everything in our lives centred around a wish that was never
granted,’ I was told by an adoptive father. Once they have decided on adoption,
however, most couples put the grief of infertility behind them and focus
on the hope and expectation of becoming a family. The criteria for acceptance
as adoptive parents are restrictive and normative. Couples register with
an adoption agency through which children are allocated, and choose a
country. When the national adoption bureau gives the go-ahead, a formal
application is sent to the country in question. This is a time when couples
are still adjusting their expectations from that of having their own ‘home-
470 SIGNE HOWELL
made’ child, as the jargon runs in adoptive circles, to adopting a stranger. Most
engage in a fair amount of self-examination during this period. Starting from
an unreﬂective focus upon biology, they end up with a rather assertive culturalist
approach favouring adoption. This is the time when they create the
mental and emotional space for a non-biological child, born of unknown
biological parents in a foreign country, and looking quite different from
themselves.
Pregnancy may be said to start the moment the couple is approved by the
Norwegian authorities. However, unlike biological pregnancy, the duration of
the pregnancy is uncertain.The prospective parents must wait until a child is
made available to them in the country concerned. Depending on the donor
country, this can take from six months to three years. During this time, the
agencies put much effort into preparing them for the event. They provide
prospective parents with journals, pamphlets, and books that deal with
many different issues pertaining to transnational adoption.They also organize
preparatory courses in which prospective adoptive parents meet to discuss relevant
literature and talk together about individual hopes and fears.The agencies
are thus a major force in shaping attitudes. In such communal settings
parents are made to face some possible implications of their choice.3
The pregnancy
period is a time of hybrid discourses and rapid shifts between biology
and sociality as constituting reference points. It is also a period during which
the as-yet-unidentiﬁed child is being incorporated into its adopters’ sense of
their own identity as expecting parents.
When a child is allocated to a couple, I suggest that the birth may be said
to begin. It extends through the time following allocation, arrival, and the
initial period after arrival. Upon allocation, expecting parents are sent a
photograph of the child and its personal details. From this time onwards, the
kinning of the distant and unseen child is actively pursued. The photograph
is duplicated and widely distributed and the child’s room made ready.The following
statement by an adoptive mother is typical. ‘From the moment of the
telephone call [from the agency] that boy, Savran, was our son. We had not
seen him, not even in a photo, not held him, but I felt so strongly that this
boy was our son’ (Beheim Karlsen 2002: 15). However, it may still take several
months before parents may collect their child.The emotional investment that
expecting parents put into their identiﬁed, but as-yet-unencountered child was
well illustrated in a report about a couple whose allocated child had died
before they had collected her. The parents organized a memorial service in
the local church in which they publicly mourned their daughter in the
company of family and friends (Adopsjonsforum April 1999: 21).
On their arrival in Norway, adopted children are treated as tabulae rasae.
Indeed, they undergo something akin to a rebirth. The main actors in this
process are the parents, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary, all of whom are
concerned with the transubstantiation of the child. Each child is given a new
name, new citizenship, new birth certiﬁcate, new kin and home, new social
and cultural expectations, and new relationships beyond the family. This is a
time characterized by an extreme effort to de-biologize origins and to transubstantiate
the child’s essence. The ultimate aim is to kin the adopted child
into his or her parents’ network.
SIGNE HOWELL 471
Planting the child in the ancestral land
Kinship relates people together in a shared temporal and spatial universe.
Belonging to a place plays an integral part in personal narratives that are constituent
in the make-up of Norwegian identity. Until recently, the Norwegian
population consisted largely of small freehold farmers whose land was passed
patrilineally from generation to generation. Kinned personal relatedness to
others is linked to kinned places and is a constituent factor in the formation
of identity and personhood. In the light of this, the question for adoptive
parents and their children becomes one of how to compensate for the absence
of a shared history.To acknowledge and handle the fact of a past that occurred
in a foreign land and with unknown foreign people, and at the same time to
render this irrelevant for their child’s emerging Norwegianness, becomes a
challenging project. Placing the child in localities that are associated with kin,
and dressing him or her in Norwegian regional costumes (bunad, see below),
is a common way to facilitate this transubstantiation.
Having examined a number of reports which parents have to send to donor
institutions in the countries of origin for some years after the arrival of their
child, it is clear to me that attempts are made to distance adoptees from their
origins and to incorporate them into their new social environment. In the
reports, the parents stress how well received their child has been by its grandparents,
uncles, and aunts, how happily he or she plays with cousins, and how
easily she or he adapts to the new home. The accompanying photographs
conﬁrm and elaborate this message. The children are photographed in places
that epitomize the ideals of Norwegian family life and kinned relatedness: in
the company of grandparents and other relatives in ancestral places; at home
on the ceremonial occasions of Christmas and major family anniversaries;
taking part in celebrations of the Norwegian National Day; in the country
cottage in the mountains, in the forest, or by the sea, engaging in typical
outdoor activities. In these photographs little or no concession is made to the
child’s country of origin.The clothing is relentlessly Norwegian, ranging from
national costume on important occasions to standard children’s outdoor
clothing.The message of these reports to the donor countries is that the child,
despite its non-Norwegian appearance, is nevertheless changing into a typical
Norwegian child.
Through photographing the adopted child in places of parental descent or
belonging, the child is being symbolically planted in them. During this process,
hardly a single reference is made to the child’s place of origin.As the children
learn to speak Norwegian, they also learn to like Norwegian food and engage
in Norwegian activities. From the point of view of adoptive parents, their new
child has ‘come home’.This is the jargon employed by all the agencies. In their
annual reports, they provide ﬁgures for how many children have ‘come home’
from the various countries from which they adopt. By ‘coming home’, they
seem to be saying that the child has ﬁnally arrived where it was meant to have
been all the time, thus ‘backgrounding’ biological and national origins. By
means of a linguistic sleight of hand, the biological parents in the country of
origin are transformed into temporary caretakers.
Thus, one way to kin the adopted children is by effecting their transubstantiation
through a series of measures that symbolically plant them in the
472 SIGNE HOWELL
soil of one’s ancestors. They are thereby incorporated into parents’ kin, and
biology is rendered irrelevant. Another way is to create an origin narrative
that involves a discourse of fate.4
Many parents I have talked to believe that
the orphanage directors put a great deal of effort into choosing a child that
will be most compatible with themselves – if not in looks, then in personality
traits or interests. Parents rarely feel that the choice of a particular child is
a matter of mere chance. Somehow they ‘are meant for each other’. Commenting
on the sturdy physique of his newly allocated Ethiopian son, the
burly, muscular father told me that, of course, this 6-month-old baby was his
son. Not only were they built alike but, just like his father, the little boy was
clearly made for the outdoor life of farming, ﬁshing, and hunting.
In certain contexts, however, the fact of the child’s different origins is
emphasized.Adoptive families gather at annual social get-togethers of the India
Association, the Columbia Association, and so on. They eat food and decorate
the venue with artefacts from the children’s country of origin; they may
also dress the children in costumes from their birth country. On such occasions,
the very fact of being different constitutes the families as ‘normal’.The
special quality of their shared situation in itself creates a sense of community
between adoptive parents (Howell 2002). Furthermore, those who travelled
and lived together when they collected their children often develop a
common history.The strange town, orphanage, or hotel become shared places
of origin for them. Those who met during the preparatory period may also
forge close bonds with each other. Such couples visit each other during
holidays and they send Christmas and birthday cards to each other’s children.
They talk of each other as being kin (i slekt). In maintaining these relationships,
parents seek a resolution to the paradox of their special situation by
engaging in Norwegian sociality in the name of Korean (or whichever) origin.
Everyone knows that they are not real kin, but they interact in ways that
are recognizably kin-like and the get-togethers of adoptive parents can be
interpreted as family reunions. Despite appearances to the contrary, what
is celebrated on these occasions is not, I would argue, Koreanness, but
Norwegianness.
A Norwegian mind in a Pakistani body?
Closely linked to an increased interest in genealogical knowledge in Norway
is an increased interest in acquiring national costumes (bunad). The bunad is
worn on occasions of rites of passage within the kin group, including baptism,
conﬁrmation, weddings, and birthdays, and also at Christmas. They are also
worn on Norwegian National Day, an occasion which is also widely known
as ‘Children’s Day’ (barnas dag). There are many different styles of bunad and
each style is associated with a particular region of the country. For girls
and women, the bunad consists of an embroidered woollen skirt and bodice
worn with a white blouse, apron, and head-dress, together with a variety of
silver brooches. Each region also has a male variant: woollen breeches, an
embroidered waistcoat with silver buttons, and a peaked felt hat. In theory,
only those who can put forward a legitimate claim of descent from a particular
region may wear the national costume associated with it.The bunad is
SIGNE HOWELL 473
largely a product of the mid-nineteenth-century romanticism which found its
inspiration in nature and life in the countryside, and, as such, is an example
of the invention of tradition. Nevertheless, it has taken root in Norwegian
imagination and is incorporated into a sense of national identity (Witoszek
1998).
An interesting incident occurred recently in connection with the celebration
of Norwegian National Day in Oslo, which exempliﬁes the signiﬁcant
links between birth, blood, place, and nationality.5
It involved Rubina Rana,
a woman immigrant born in Pakistan of Pakistani parents, who arrived in
Norway as a young girl. She subsequently obtained Norwegian citizenship
and is one of the very few immigrant members of Oslo City Council. She
had been appointed to head the planning committee for the celebration of
the 2000 National Day celebrations. This position involves leading the huge
procession of school children who wind their way through the centre of the
city. Waving Norwegian ﬂags and singing national songs accompanied by
numerous school bands, the procession reaches its culmination in front of the
Royal Palace where the royal family greets its whole Norwegian ‘family.’The
appointment of ‘a Pakistani’ to lead this procession provoked heated debates
in the media. She received anonymous letters urging her to stand down; some
contained death threats. The question arose as to what she should wear on
the day. Other Norwegians would, as a matter of course, wear a bunad. In contradistinction
to ethnic Norwegians, however, the woman councillor could lay
no claims to the Norwegian fjords and valleys. She was therefore not entitled
to wear a bunad; yet if she had chosen to wear some form of South Asian
national dress – a salwar kameez or sari – many would have found this also to
be provocative.
As it happened, the city of Oslo, which had not hitherto had a bunad, had
commissioned one to be designed for the city’s thousand-year jubilee the following
year. Rubina Rana was invited to inaugurate this on the occasion of
the National Day. This was much less controversial. The Oslo bunad, like this
Pakistani-born woman politician, is without history in Oslo and Norway. Or
rather, together they initiated an historical trajectory. Both Rubina Rana and
the Oslo bunad are linked to Oslo the place.Yet they are both newcomers in
terms of Norwegian identity and do not ﬁt into the larger order of things.
Symbolically, the event marks a new fact of Norwegian social life. A previously
homogeneous and mainly rural population must give way to a heterogeneous
and increasingly urban one. Wearing a bunad – the ultimate symbol
of belonging to a place, although one without tradition – she signals the
advent of a different future.The event marks a future where immigrants have
come to stay and to participate in Norwegian social and cultural life: a population
who share place, but not history. What the incident demonstrates is
the strong associations made in Norwegian cultural life between place of
origin, kin relatedness, and identity. Time is of the essence. That is, claims to
Norwegianness can be put forward only within a discourse that privileges a
temporal kin-based connectedness extending back in time and linked to a
place. Personhood is achieved through both shared substance and shared
essence. Only the idiom of kinship can provide such a connection. The new
Oslo bunad, however, provides an opening for accommodating new citizens
both to the city of Oslo and to the nation-state of Norway. In situations where
474 SIGNE HOWELL
one cannot claim kinship on the basis of genealogy, attachment to a place can
serve as a substitute. In an oblique sort of way, the example highlights the
problem faced by adoptive families.
However, unlike the Pakistani immigrant who could not make any claims
to a temporal or spatial link to Norway beyond her own personal history of
arrival, adopted children from overseas are ‘sponsored’ into existing kin-based
networks and histories by their adoptive parents, who employ whatever
measures are available to them to transubstantiate their children’s subjectivity.
To this end it is very common to give adopted children a bunad. Photos of
them wearing the bunad that has its origins in their mother’s or father’s ancestral
place are frequently published in magazines published by the adoption
agencies and are also sent to the donor countries. Framed photos of them in
bunad adorn their relatives’ homes. In contrast to the Rubina Rana case, it is
unlikely that anyone would regard the wearing of the bunad by adopted children
as illegitimate. Being adopted, kinned, and transubstantiated, they are,
from a formal as well as an emotional point of view, equal to biological children.This
further highlights a question of sameness and otherness.With regard
to adopted children, otherness is negated and an ‘imagined sameness’
(Gullestad 2000: 45) is achieved, something which is not achieved by other
immigrants. In this case, kinship may usefully be thought of as ‘a regime of
subjectivation’ (Faubion 2001; see below). Through the processes of transubstantiation
and kinning, adoptive parents negate the separation between the
‘social’ and the ‘biological’ which is encountered elsewhere in society. This
enables the children to develop their sense of self and personhood as an integral
part of their relatedness to non-biological relatives.
Paradoxes inherent in the kinning of
transnationally adopted children
Successful transubstantiation of the transnationally adopted child involves
ﬁxing it in a wider set of relationships expressed in a kin idiom. This is a
process that adoptive parents actively engage in from the moment of their
child’s arrival. As stated above, the overriding motivation for adopting a child
is to create a family, to live out normal family life, and to establish new forms
of relatedness with existing kin, for couples that are unable to do this themselves.
While not being able to create one’s own family is, in some profound
sense, to reduce one’s value as a man/husband and a woman/wife, once a
child has arrived the parents put much effort into ensuring that the child
becomes involved in a wider kin network. Indeed, studies have shown that
adopted children spend more time with their grandparents than biological
children do (Botvar 1994: 18).This may be interpreted as a deliberate way to
incorporate the child into its parents’ kinned trajectory, thereby ensuring them
a kinned future. Through frequent social interaction with their own kin, the
lack of biogenetic relatedness is rendered irrelevant.
As was noted above, adoptive parents are very concerned with being ‘good
parents’. They are helped in this by the number of activities organized for
them, primarily under the auspices of the adoption agencies. The mere fact
of being adoptive parents in Norway makes them both highly self-conscious
SIGNE HOWELL 475
and reﬂexive about their status. It also leads to an anxious and continuous
examination of the child’s development. Undoubtedly, the kinning of adopted
children requires much more effort than does that of biological children. I
suggest that adoptive parents are torn between wanting to be a ‘normal family’
on the one hand, and taking account of the special circumstances of becoming
a family on the other. This leads, in most cases, to ignoring (except in
superﬁcial ways) the special origins of their child and putting their trust in
the efforts made at transubstantiating it. But they also pay attention to the
increasing demands from outside forces (adoption agencies, psychologists, and
other experts) that they take full account of the child’s difference and thus
teach him or her to take pride in their ‘original culture’. Implied in this and
similar expressions is an assumed natural desire to know one’s roots, something
which ﬁnds its counterpart in discussions both in the media and in the
national Parliament. One of the most popular television programmes in
Norway is called ‘Tore tracks them down’ (Tore på sporet).The programme presenter,
Tore Strømøy, has won Norway’s ‘Television Personality of the Year’
award several years running. The format is simple: members of the public
request Tore’s help in ﬁnding a long-lost family member, and the climax of
each programme is the reunion between them. Several people adopted from
overseas have featured in the programme, and this makes for particularly dramatic
and emotional viewing. Many adoptees have told me that following one
such screening, they were urged by friends and acquaintances to undertake
the same kind of search. It is very common to believe that all adoptees experience
a desire to meet their biological relatives. When those sections of
Norway’s 2002 Bio-Technology Act that dealt with assisted procreation –
especially sperm and egg donation – were debated in Parliament, the politicians
repeatedly demonstrated their unquestioned assumptions that, in order
to grow up into harmonious adults, people need to know the identity of their
biological progenitors.They therefore voted against anonymous donation.The
Adoption Act of 1986, which, together with some minor amendments of
1999, regulates current adoption practices, gives a rather ambiguous message.
On the one hand, it states unequivocally that adopted and biological children
are legally and socially equal. At the same time, it states that, upon reaching
the age of maturity, adoptees have the right to know the identity of their biological
parents. According to my research and that of others (Botvar 1999;
Brottveit 1999), only a small minority of transnationally adopted people experience
a strong desire to know this. Those that do, however, receive much
publicity and conﬁrm a widespread cultural belief (see below).
In keeping with a growing focus on biological relatedness in Norwegian
society at large, it is noticeable that the adoption agencies have increasingly
encouraged adoptive parents to learn about the donor country and to familiarize
their children with its culture. However, the conceptualization of
‘culture’ is here both reiﬁed and superﬁcial, conﬁned to certain cultural
markers such as food, dress, and artefacts that are easily consumed. More signiﬁcant
social and cultural differences are rarely, if ever, confronted. In their
handouts to prospective parents, the agencies provide virtually no serious
information about social, economic, or political institutions and conditions in
the donor countries, and few parents interviewed expressed much interest in
matters of this kind.
476 SIGNE HOWELL
As the children grow up, many parents seem to be more open in acknowledging
the non-biological quality of the relationship; perhaps because they
feel secure in having successfully effected a transubstantiation. Now parents
may begin to foreground the fact that the child has a biological and ethnic
origin that they do not share. I wish to suggest that one solution to what
may be called the adoptive parents’ dilemma (handling the socio-cultural
and emotional challenges of taking account of the biological origins of the
child in the kinning process) is found in family return visits to the child’s
country of origin. It is a solution that more and more families are taking
advantage of.
‘Roots’: return visits (or ‘motherland tours’)
The importance attributed to origins, descent, and genealogy is widespread in
a number of different Western discourses on personhood and identity. Increasingly
linked to this discourse is the notion of roots, which has found a place
among the shapers of opinion in Norwegian transnational adoption circles.
Until recently, a transnationally adopted child was regarded as tabula rasa, but
today such children are talked of in terms of arriving with a ‘backpack’ full
of unknown experiences and genes (Howell forthcoming). As the children
grow up, some of the contradictions of their situation often become unavoidable,
and parents, together with their adopted children, have to ﬁnd some kind
of solution. Current thinking in adoptive circles focuses on ‘roots’, which have
become a key symbol, giving rise to a key scenario (cf. Ortner 1973) that
includes ‘return’, ‘motherland’, or ‘roots’ visits to the adoptees’ country of
origin. In what follows, I argue that adoptive parents increasingly make such
visits a key feature of their understanding of being adoptive parents.This, too,
can be traced to what I see as a growing Western cultural emphasis on roots,
as expressed, for example, in the increasing preoccupation among Norwegians
and other Euro-Americans with genealogies, and also in the high value
attached to individuals’ place of origin, and in an increasing focus on genetics
in the media. Motherland tours demonstrate the confusions that exist in
discourses about race, nature, and culture.
Although a widespread concern with ‘roots’ has emerged only recently,
the adoption agencies have been organizing return (or motherland) tours to
the adoptees’ country of origin for some time.6
To go on a family tour to the
adopted child’s country of origin is increasingly recommended by the agencies.
Everyone who took part in the parenthood preparatory courses that I
attended said that it was not only important for their children to develop a
sense of pride in their country of origin, but also that it was essential for the
children to see their birth country for themselves. Contrary to popular belief,
the stated purpose of these tours is not to ﬁnd biological relatives, but to
enable the adopted child to acknowledge the dual source of its identity. I shall
suggest, however, that an underlying motive is the conﬁrmation of the child
as a kinned Norwegian person.
Reports of ‘motherland tours’ appear regularly in the agencies’ journals.
There are also articles about individual adoptees who set out on a quest in
search of some biological relatives (usually the mother). Only success stories
SIGNE HOWELL 477
are reported; I have not yet seen a story about a return visit being a failure.
A recent article in one of the journals exempliﬁes this interest.The title reads,
‘Adult and transnationally adopted: found her “roots” amongst the street children
of Bogota’. It tells the story of a girl who came to her Norwegian family
as a 3-year-old from an orphanage in Colombia. Although she never lived on
the streets, she is portrayed as having narrowly escaped this fate. She says that
she understands herself much better as a result of the trip, although she did
not meet (or want to meet) any biological relatives (Adopsjonsforum September
1999: 17).
The demand for organized return visits is increasing. Given the new-found
interest in the contents of adoptive children’s ‘backpacks’, parents wish to give
their children (and themselves) an opportunity to open the backpack and look
inside. Not only do they wish to ﬁnd out about the children’s ‘cultural roots’,
but they also hope to ﬁll gaps in their personal histories. Parents on the Korea
tour were constantly exclaiming that yet another piece of the puzzle had fallen
into place. But the motivations of both parents and children for undertaking
such return visits are complex. As so much else within the world of transnational
adoption, attitudes towards these return visits emerge as full of ambivalences
and ambiguity.There would appear to be a real possibility that parents
are not primarily interested in ﬁnding out about their children’s birth country
or individual pasts, and that their overriding concern is to conﬁrm the reality
of the new family they have made.
A ‘motherland’ tour to South Korea
Blood Is Thicker Than Water is not only axiomatic in studies of kinship, it is a fundamental
axiom of European culture. Even if this axiom were true as a biological fact, even
if the most extensive scientiﬁcally acquired evidence showed it to be true … the point
remains that culture, even were it to do no more than recognize biological facts, still adds
something to those facts.The problem remains of just what the socio-cultural aspects are,
of what meaning is added, of where and how that meaning, as a meaning rather than as
a biological fact, articulates with other meanings … But the axiom … does not hold water
even for the sociobiologists … They only claim to account for some aspects of some
of the relations between very close kin. This leaves a good deal to be accounted for
(Schneider 1984: 199).
These observations by Schneider are helpful in interpreting the reactions to
the Korea visit of the thirteen families that made up the return visit to South
Korea in which I also took part. I interviewed them all before departure.The
children ranged in age from 13 to 30; the majority were between 15 and 17
years of age. Most had arrived in Norway at the age of 2 or less.The adoptees
expressed a vague wish to ‘see for themselves’ their ‘country of origin’. Some
said that they wanted to see the orphanage where they had lived before
coming to Norway, others that they wanted to visit the town in which they
were born. The tour seemed, however, to be more important to the parents
than to the children, an impression that was conﬁrmed during and after the
tour. In all cases, it was the parents rather than the children who had taken
the initiative in arranging to go on the tour.The parents’ active role in undertaking
the journey and the fact that they evaluated the trip more positively
than their children did were conﬁrmed by a questionnaire survey undertaken
478 SIGNE HOWELL
with families who have been on similar visits to India (Howell & Hermansen
2001). All Korean adoptees in Norway have come via one organization, Holt,
which was started by an American in the wake of the Korean War. Its headquarters
are in Seoul, where they maintain several institutions, including an
orphanage for handicapped children who have been deemed unadoptable, and
a short-stay orphanage for children from the whole country who have been
released for adoption by the Korean authorities. Temporary foster-mothers
look after them until they move to their new families abroad. The return
visit to South Korea was centred on this organization, and one of their employees
accompanied the families on the week-long coach trip to many parts
of the country.
In Korea, it was the parents who insisted upon the signiﬁcance of the
moment when ﬁrst arriving at the orphanage, when inspecting the child’s ﬁle,
when visiting the hospital of birth, or when standing at the steps of the town
hall where the basket containing their child had been left.The children went
along with all this quite happily but, on the surface at any rate, were less
engaged in the events and were if anything more interested in the shops and
the food. On one occasion, however, they seemed to experience the signiﬁcance
of the special quality of their own pasts.Visiting the rooms where babies
were lying in rows of cots awaiting the arrival of their adoptive parents, the
adoptees were impressed. They were told that the dormitories had not been
changed for about twenty years. This meant that even the paint on the walls
was the same as when they themselves had been there.This information provoked
exclamations from them, such as,‘Just imagine, I might have laid in this
cot’, or ‘I can’t remember anything of this room, but it is strange to think
that I was here’. Even though the personal ﬁles contained little or no information
that was new to them, it seemed to be important for them simply to
make direct contact with these documents. Reading the documentary details
of their early lives in their original form and holding the photographs taken
on their arrival at the orphanage gave them tangible conﬁrmation of their
existence. One boy of 17 told me, ‘I now feel that I have a past’. The materiality
of the dormitory and the ﬁles gave the past substance.
Through these return visits, the children in a sense return to their original
identities. The transubstantiation is temporarily suspended. By analogy, they
are – at least for a while – merely wine and bread. Or are they? This neutralization
of their Norwegian identity is assisted by the attitude of the Korean
adoption organization which emphasizes the children’s Koreanness. Everywhere
we went there were welcoming banners proclaiming ‘Welcome to
Korea. 1999 Holt [the organization’s name] Family & Motherland Tour’.
Parents bought their daughters expensive silk Korean national costumes which
they wore on the last evening. Parents commissioned calligraphers to draw the
children’s original Korean names.Yet the messages transmitted to the adoptees
are contradictory. Numerous actions and utterances from the Norwegian
adults also told them that they are Norwegian. They are Korean and not
Korean at the same time. They may look Korean in the midst of millions of
other Koreans, but most do not feel Korean.7
They cannot speak the language
and hence have no means to communicate with the people they meet. They
know little or nothing about Korean history, customs, institutions, or moral
values. In this respect, they are as ignorant as their adoptive parents. All were
SIGNE HOWELL 479
unfamiliar with the food, and parents and children were equally inept in the
use of their chopsticks. More importantly, there are no persons here to whom
they felt that they were related. I have been told by many transnationally
adopted people that whenever they look in the mirror and see a nonNorwegian
face they are reminded that they are different and in a minority.
This can provoke disorientation. When in Korea, they conveyed to me that,
contrary to expectations, they failed to feel empathy with the people whose
looks resembled theirs. They said that this produced a sense of confusion,
which was even more strongly experienced by the young people born in India
whom I interviewed after their return visit. In the course of these interviews
with Indian-born adoptees, I was repeatedly struck by their sense of being
among people whose way of dressing, moving, and behaving was even more
alien to them than was the case for the Korean-born adoptees.
Thus, during the visit to Korea, the Norwegian families chose to focus on
place and objects rather than on persons. They apparently desired history
without people – or rather without kinned people. Any person who might
have looked after the child after its abandonment, such as paid foster-parents
or nurses at the orphanage, was always of interest, whereas the identity of biological
relatives was hardly mentioned. The politics of memory, the ‘selective
character of familial stories’ (Youngblood 2001: 64) is clearly at work here.
When actually in the country of origin, roots became synonymous with
place, food, costume, and so on, and with people who were non-signiﬁcant
from a biogenetic point of view. For those involved in these searches for the
child’s personal history, the ﬁrst identiﬁable place of signiﬁcance was the
orphanage. The second was the place where the child was born or had been
found. Similar ﬁndings emerged from the survey of those who had visited
India and from conversations with people who had visited different countries
of origin. Many parents have told me that their returning children were
‘more Norwegian’ after the motherland tour than before it. In this sense ‘ﬁlling
in the gaps in the jigsaw puzzle’ may have served a purpose, even though at
ﬁrst sight the new-found pieces might seem insigniﬁcant. By and large, they
do not threaten the integrity of the family while they acknowledge the different
origin of its members.The transubstantiated identity of the child is not
seriously challenged. In fact, pursuing the child’s past together becomes a
family adventure, and the events become incorporated into subsequent family
history.
Most ‘roots’ or ‘motherland’ tours do not in fact live up to their names.
In most cases, the adoptees conﬁrm their Norwegian identity, rather than
embrace their origins. This may be attributed to an effective transubstantiation
of the adoptees’ essence. The children have obtained their personal and
social personae by virtue of their sociality within a Norwegian kinned
context. Nevertheless, there is, I suggest, an ambivalence in parents and children
alike regarding what they really want from the visit.8
One might argue
that the parents take a risk. What if the transubstantiation had been unsuccessful?
What if their children turned away from Norway and from them? I
never met anyone who voiced such fears. Rather, the journey was described
in glowing terms – perhaps because they did not have their worst fears conﬁrmed?
The point often made is that the trips strengthened family bonds, and
that travelling in groups with other families made the experience all the more
480 SIGNE HOWELL
valuable. Indeed, the trips might even be interpreted as a kind of extended
family adventure. Certainly, the feeling expressed by many adoptees was that
they had much more in common with the other adoptees than with the
Indian or Korean youths whom they met in their birth countries.
Some adoptees do express a desire to locate biological relatives – and some
do succeed.The reasons for wanting to do this are complex and I can allude
only brieﬂy to some of them. By and large, those who actively search are a
small minority who, for a number of different reasons, have failed to settle in
Norway and ﬁnd the fact of adoption difﬁcult to live with.They may seek a
solution to their personal problems in the country of their origin and in biological
relatives. However, from conversations and interviews, a much more
common reason for wishing to meet biological relatives is a desire to see who
one looks like. Babies and children in Norway, as elsewhere in northern
Europe, are always being compared to their relatives: ‘she has grandfather’s
nose, her mother’s eyes’, and so on. Through such preoccupations the continuity
of the bloodline is marked – and voiced. For obvious reasons, this is
never said of adoptees (although common personality traits or physical type
are often emphasized), and many experience this as a loss. They are deprived
of the opportunity to situate their own physiological make-up in relation to
that of others whose biogenetic substance they share. Meeting biological
relatives often satisﬁes this need. However, when actually faced with them, the
fact of shared natural substance often seems to lose its signiﬁcance. There is
so little else that the adoptees and their biological relatives have in common.9
One may therefore conclude that relationship of nature by itself is no basis
for signiﬁcant sociality.
Conclusion
Unlike immigrants who cannot make any claims to a socially embedded
spatial or temporal link to Norway beyond their own personal history of
arrival and residence, adopted children from overseas are ‘sponsored’ into
existing kin-based networks and histories by their adoptive parents. In the
introduction to The ethics of kinship: ethnographic enquiries, Faubion develops an
argument for regarding kinship ‘as a system – or array of systems – of
subjectivation, if perhaps many other things as well’ (2001: 13). With this
reference to subjectivation, he follows Foucault and suggests that the term
has a double meaning, ‘all those processes through which individuals are
labelled or made into subjects of one or another kind’ and ‘all those processes
through which individuals make themselves into subjects of one or another
kind’ (2001: 12). This notion of subjectivation complements my analysis of
parents’ attempts to make their children into Norwegian persons (subjects).
The attempt to transubstantiate the transnationally adopted child into a
person whose identity is constituted through relationships with kinned
Norwegian people can be regarded as a process which may have the effect
of ﬁxing the child on a path of subjectivation. The result of this is that
manifestations of difference may be glossed over and, by and large, the biological
parents emerge only as minor characters in the adoptees’ personal
trajectory.
SIGNE HOWELL 481
These concepts and these practices evoke prevailing concerns in the anthropology
of kinship. Ever since Morgan (1870), it has been an anthropological
truism to claim that kinship is a sphere where nature and culture meet in different
ways in different societies. Nevertheless, a privileging of the natural as
a point of reference has persisted in the discipline (Schneider 1984;Weismantel
1995). It was not until M. Strathern (1992) examined some implications of
the new bio-medical research, including new reproductive technology, that
‘nature’ ﬁnally received its analytic death blow.This does not mean, however,
that for many people the category of nature is irrelevant. Re-emerging in the
guise of biology, genes, DNA, and related terms, nature is certainly meaningful
to most adoptive families. As I have tried to show, it is precisely the
juggling act of keeping both biology and sociality as meaningful, but not
hopelessly contradictory, that is especially challenging for those involved.
The practice of transnational adoption highlights several aspects of the
ambiguities of Norwegian notions and values of personhood and of kinned
relatedness.The process of kinning in Norway, whether of biological or adoptive
children, must take account of a perceived fusion between blood, ﬂesh,
land, place, and people which has a strong temporal dimension. The task for
adoptive parents is to kin their adopted children as if they were biological
children.The children are made to exist as social beings ﬁrst and foremost by
virtue of all their relationships within a Norwegian kinned context. In this
case, then, kinship may usefully be thought of as a ‘regime of subjectivation’
in Faubion’s terms. But a kinship system then becomes much more than ‘our
most secure safety net’ for individuals ‘whose project in the wider world is
threatening, or under threat’ (2001: 16). Although I agree with the adoptive
mother quoted initially that ‘families with transnational adopted children
always remain different in some sense’, we have seen that, through a process
of kinning and transubstantiation, adoptive parents not only incorporate their
children into their own kin but also transform themselves into parents, thereby
negating the separation between the social and the biological that is encountered
elsewhere in society.
NOTES
This project started in 1998 as part of a collaborative project with Marit Melhuus, ‘The
meaning of kinship in contemporary Norway’, supported by the Norwegian Research Council.
Generous co-operation has been offered throughout by the adoption agencies Verdens Barn
and Adopsjonsforum. Earlier versions have been presented at the Departments of Anthropology
at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, the University of Helsinki, and the University
of Bergen. I am grateful for all their comments as well as for those of the two anonymous
JRAI readers. Keith Hart also read a revised version and pointed to some remaining weaknesses
of presentation.
1
The research has necessarily been multi-sited and wide-ranging. Serendipity has played a
signiﬁcant role and I have had to be imaginative in seeking alternative ethnographic strategies.
While I have not been in personal touch with more than a proportion of the families with
adopted children from overseas, I have participated in a wide range of relevant arenas and activities
in different parts of the country, as well as abroad. The fact that I am the mother of a
daughter adopted from Nepal has undoubtedly eased my access into such intimate parts of
people’s lives. I have spent time with adopted parents, families, and adoptees by joining groups
at various social gatherings. I have participated in several courses for prospective adoptive
parents, courses for parents whose adopted children approach puberty, and support groups for
482 SIGNE HOWELL
parents whose children fail to settle down in their new lives. I have conducted informal interviews
with 120 parents based on a questionnaire. I also accompanied a group of families on a
return vist to South Korea and a group of prospective parents when they travelled to Ethiopia
to collect their children. Fieldwork was conducted in one of the adoption agencies; I collected
further material by means of interviews and informal conversations with a variety of individuals
including civil servants, politicians, social workers, and psychologists.
2
Provided the father takes a minimum of one month’s leave, a year’s birth leave may be
claimed with 80 per cent income.
3
Earlier assumptions that adopted children would effortlessly become Norwegian have now
been replaced by an (uneasy) emphasis on the importance of biological relationships and of
the child’s ‘original culture’.
4
Prospective parents are required to send the orphanage a dossier about themselves, with
photos. When a child is made available, a couple is sent pictures and a brief description of a
child, and they are given a couple of days to decide whether they want to accept him or her.
I have not yet met a couple who refused. One look at the picture and the report was enough
to ﬁnd some quality that somehow resonated within them. ‘As-if’ blood relations are created
immediately and consolidated in different contexts during ‘pregnancy’ and ‘birth’, and through
subsequent recapturing of the moment of ‘birth’.
5
The same event was mentioned, for different interpretative purposes, by Gullestad in a recent
article (2002: 55). Other important aspects of the practice of transnational adoption are, of
course, those of race and nationhood. These will be dealt with in a future article.
6
Many adoptive families have made such visits on their own. In some cases, the adoptees
have travelled without their families. The increased participation in organized tours indicates,
I suggest, a desire to share the experience with others in the same situation.While such return
visits are undertaken from most of the European countries that carry out transnational adoption,
as well as from the USA, Norwegians are, according to an employee at the Korean adoption
agency, the keenest.
7
I am referring to the majority. A small minority of adoptees have a profound desire to
reunite with their original national identity. Some of them move to the country to study its
language and history, and try to locate biological relatives. There are several adoptees whose
meeting with biological relatives develops into a lasting relationship. My impression is that this
applies only to a minority, although one that conﬁrms a common perception about being
adopted. Such stories receive a disproportionate amount of public attention.
8
The parents are faced with the dilemma of free will.The children must feel free to choose.
Many adoptees may be torn between a curiosity actually to see biological relatives and
ﬁnd out the reason why they were abandoned and a conﬂicting sense of loyalty towards their
parents.
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Création de liens de parenté et construction d’itinéraires de
vie dans les familles adoptives transnationales
Résumé
À partir d’observations empiriques faites dans le cadre d’une étude de l’adoption transnationale
en Norvège, l’auteur formule des arguments en faveur du concept de kinning
(création de liens de parenté). Cette notion désigne le processus par lequel le fœtus, le
nouveau-né ou toute personne non apparentée jusqu’alors entre dans une relation permanente
et signiﬁcative exprimée par l’idiome de la parenté. En se concentrant sur l’adoption
dans un contexte culturel où la métaphore des «liens du sang» est fondamentale dans les
relations de parenté, l’auteur pointe les ambiguïtés et les contradictions de la relation entre
parentés biologique et sociale. Les questions de race et d’appartenance ethnique peuvent dès
lors être posées au cheminement de création de liens de parenté que suivent les parents
adoptifs, dont l’auteur pense qu’il implique une transsubstantiation de l’enfant adopté.
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, PO Box 1091 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway.
signe.howell@sai.uio.no
484 SIGNE HOWELL