Cultures of Transnational Adoption

Toby Alice Volkman is Deputy Provost at New School University. She is the author of "Feasts of Honor: Ritual and Change in the Toraja Highlands."

"This valuable collection offers an ethnographically rich, theoretically sophisticated, and engagingly written set of contributions to the interdisciplinary literature on transnational adoption."--Pauline Turner Strong, University of Texas, Austin "This outstanding collection--a rich mix of analyses and first person accounts--offers insights into an under-reported aspect of globalization: the ever-increasing circulation of children around the globe through transnational adoption. The kinship relations created through such processes have taken a distinctly postmodern turn as adoptive families nurture rather than sever their new children's cultural connections to birth countries. All of this is greatly facilitated by the Internet, video technologies, and the creation of social worlds that underwrite these new forms of cultural making."--Faye Ginsburg, New York University "Illuminating...The writings draw readers into communities little known to North American adoption workers and families and scarcely remarked upon in sociological and anthropological writings to date... This volume is accessible to motivated general readers."-- Library Journal "In this excellent collection of essays on adoption, Toby Volkman has brought together perspectives ... from the pens of eight gifted authors... Each of the writers provide excellent reference lists that will encourage readers to further explore the growing literature on adoption."--Phillip Capper, Adoption Australia "Provides an important perspective on what it means to travel to a distant country and adopt a child of a different ethnicity and, often, a different race... Deserves places on the academic bookshelf as well as the bedside table."-- Susan Poisson-Dollar, Multicultural Review "Historians would do well to follow where Volkman and her colleagues have pointed."-- Karen Balcom, Journal of American Ethnic History In its rich, transactional construal of the adoption experience, the present volume raises awareness of the increasing inadequacy of notions of plural identities, and the need to concede the existence of multiple levels of identification, calling for a timely rethinking of the nature-nurture equation on the 'global planet. '"--Adriana Neagu, Journal of American Studies "This is and will continue to be an important collection for adoption scholars and practitioners, adoptive families and adopted persons. It should also find a home on the shelves of researchers and educators with interests in kinship, political economy, transnational identity, and cultural narrative."--Sara Dorow, Journal of Comparative Family Studies "A well-designed volume of essays. Cultures of Transnational Adoption does the important work of interrogating the permeable boundaries between personal and national identity as defined by kinship... In compelling ways, the essays in Cultures of Transnational Adoption unsettle comfortable notions of home and homeland, speak to postmodernist notions of shifting identities, and demonstrate the power of adoption to reshape cultural and national landscapes of kinship."--Carol J. Singley, Women's Studies Quarterly