How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm by Mei-Ling Hopgood

Author:Mei-Ling Hopgood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780230767652
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

On Adoption

As an adoptee, I’ve found that many people think of adoption as a novelty at best and something to hide at worst, even if is fairly prevalent in the United States these days. Loving adoptive parents fret over how (or whether) to tell a child she is adopted and how he or she might process that fact later, because the way their family came to be is considered by many to be outside the norm. Even with the changing definition of family these days, our society still tends to put great importance on the biological relationship between parent and child.

Yet in some cultures, adopting and fostering children are so commonplace that a lack of actual genetic ties is no big deal. In Botswana, Tswana relatives flat-out request to raise a child, and parents often acquiesce. Erdmute Alber observed that among the Baatombu in West African Benin “fosterage is not the exception, but the norm.” Alber reported that only 2 of 150 adults she interviewed while visiting the tribe said they grew up with their biological parents. In other African communities, children are fluidly circulated between co-wives. Chinese migrant workers will for years leave their children to be raised by relatives or neighbors while they live in faraway cities to earn a living. Among the Zumbagua people in the highlands of Ecuador, sex and pregnancy can bond two adults, but the adults who feed a child over an extended period of time can adopt a child into their family, according to Northwestern University anthropologist Mary Weismantel. Care trumps biology, and everyone seems to have lots of parents and children.

Signe Howell offered some of these examples in The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. “In societies where there is an institutionalised practice of bringing up the children of others as if they are one’s own,” she wrote, “children become kinned to those given responsibility for their care, and the relationship is expressed in conventional kinship terms.” These practices, she argued, “challenge western-centric notions of what kinship is all about—namely relatedness constituted through flesh and blood.”

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