In international conventions as well as in the national discourses of many countries, children who do not grow up with their biogenetic parents have the right to receive information about their origin. The meaning of origin in intercountry adoption, however, is not necessarily the same as in artificial donor insemination (AID). Through an analysis…

Among the Maasai of southern Kenya, child circulation in the form of adoption is widespread. It persists despite increased family nuclearization and pervasive sedentarizing discourses depicting "modern" family life as small, settled and nuclear. Through the perspectives and experiences of 10 families having undergone adoption, this…

This article introduces a special issue on the meaning of children in violent, uncertain times. It is framed in terms of the political-economy aspects of adoption, focusing on the local occurrences that make international adoption possible, from legal determinations of abandonment to wartime and postwar parenting. The article argues that…

This article examines 20 fostering arrangements in a growing urban community in northwestern Cameroon from the perspectives of those involved. Analysis of interviews with caregivers and birth mothers suggests that the nature of adult relationships is central to children's living arrangements. Three caregiver-mother relationship profiles are…

Examining the adoption of Guatemalan children by US citizens, this article argues that adoptive parents make meanings and form identities through their participation in the adoption process and in their production of both Internet-based and spoken narratives about adoption. Using theories of globalization and narrative theory, the article…

To explore meanings attached to children in Mexican society, this article examines two changing aspects of child circulation, a widespread reproductive disruption to the families of Mexico City's working poor. In the late 1890s, a rapid rise in admissions to the public foundling home was matched by a striking increase in retrievals. At the other…

This article explores how recent federal legislation has increased the extent to which US children's citizenship is dependent upon their parents' citizenship, by contrasting children who are adopted internationally by US citizens and second-generation US children. Two interconnected phenomena are examined: (1) the broader material and theoretical…

This article takes an ethnographical approach to explore the "state of exception" through which legal technologies of abortion and adoption of "war-babies" (children born as a result of wartime rapes) in the Bangladesh war enabled the dekinning and elimination of certain childhoods while the raped women were rekinned within…