A Sealed and Secret Kinship

A Sealed and Secret Kinship PDF Author: Judith S. Modell
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571810779
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Adoption is a controversial subject in the United States, particularly in the last 30 years. Why that is and how public attention affects the decisions made by those who arrange, legalise and experience adoption forms the subject of this book.

A Sealed and Secret Kinship

A Sealed and Secret Kinship PDF Author: Judith S. Modell
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571810779
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Adoption is a controversial subject in the United States, particularly in the last 30 years. Why that is and how public attention affects the decisions made by those who arrange, legalise and experience adoption forms the subject of this book.

A Sealed and Secret Kinship

A Sealed and Secret Kinship PDF Author: Judith S. Modell
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571813244
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Adoption is a controversial subject in the United States, particularly in the last 30 years. Why that is and how public attention affects the decisions made by those who arrange, legalise and experience adoption forms the subject of this book.

A Sealed and Secret Kinship

A Sealed and Secret Kinship PDF Author: Judith Modell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781571810786
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Bitterroot

Bitterroot PDF Author: Susan Devan Harness
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496219570
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
2019 High Plains Book Award Winner for the Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn’t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later. Harness’s search for answers revolved around her need to ascertain why she was the target of racist remarks and why she seemed always to be on the outside looking in. New questions followed her through college and into her twenties when she started her own family. Meeting her biological family in her early thirties generated even more questions. In her forties Harness decided to get serious about finding answers when, conducting oral histories, she talked with other transracial adoptees. In her fifties she realized that the concept of “home” she had attributed to the reservation existed only in her imagination. Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real—but culturally constructed—concept of race helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes, a sense of nonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance. In the process Bitterrootalso provides a deep and rich context in which to experience life.

The Kinning of Foreigners

The Kinning of Foreigners PDF Author: Signe Howell
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845453305
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Since the late nineteen sixties, transnational adoption has emerged as a global phenomenon. Due to a sharp decline in infants being made available for adoption locally, involuntarily childless couples in Western Europe and North America who wish to create a family, have to look to look to countries in the poor South and Eastern Europe. The purpose of this book is to locate transnational adoption within a broad context of contemporary Western life, especially values concerning family, children and meaningful relatedness, and to explore the many ambiguities and paradoxes that the practice entails. Based on empirical research from Norway, the author identifies three main themes for analysis: Firstly, by focusing on the perceived relationship between biology and sociality, she examines how notions of child, childhood and significant relatedness vary across time and space. She argues that through a process of kinning, persons are made into kin. In the case of adoption, kinning overcomes a dominant cultural emphasis placed upon biological connectedness. Secondly, it is a study of the rise of expert knowledge in the understanding of 'the best interest of the child', and how the part played by the 'psycho.technocrats' effects national and international policy and practice of transnational adoption. Thirdly, it shows how transnational adoption both depends upon and helps to foster the globalisation of Western rationality and morality. The book is an original contribution to the anthropological study of kinship and globalisation.

Population, Reproduction, and Fertility in Melanesia

Population, Reproduction, and Fertility in Melanesia PDF Author: Stanley J. Ulijaszek
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571816443
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Human biological fertility was considered a important issue to anthropologists and colonial administrators in the first part of the 20th century, as a dramatic decline in population was observed in many regions. However, the total demise of Melanesian populations predicted by some never happened; on the contrary, a rapid population increase took place for the second part of the 20th century. This volume explores relationships between human fertility and reproduction, subsistence systems, the symbolic use of ideas of fertility and reproduction in linking landscape to individuals and populations, in Melanesian societies, past and present. It thus offers an important contribution to our understanding of the implications of social and economic change for reproduction and fertility in the broadest sense.

The Reproductive Industry

The Reproductive Industry PDF Author: Vera Mackie
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498570666
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Starting in 1978, when the first babies conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) were born in the UK and India, assisted reproduction has become a global industry. Contributors to this edited collection reflect on the global dimensions of IVF and assisted reproductive technologies, examining how people have used these technologies to create diverse family forms, including gay, lesbian, and transgender parenthood, as well as complex configurations of genetic, gestational, and social parenthood. The authors examine how IVF and other reproductive technologies have and have not circulated around the globe; how reproductive technologies can be situated historically, nationally, locally, and culturally; and the ways in which culture, practices, regulations, norms, families, and kinship ties may be reinforced or challenged through the use of assisted reproduction.

War on the Homefront

War on the Homefront PDF Author: Shawn D. Haley
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571813237
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
About half of the women in the United States and Canada have been physically or sexually assaulted after the age of 16. The figures in other countries are similar. Written by an outsider (an anthropologist) and an insider (a spousal abuse survivor), this book offers a humanistic, rather than statistical, overview of the problem of spousal abuse. It is based on an extensive set of interviews with abused women and individuals who seek to help them (shelter workers, police officers, marriage counselors). More particularly, it follows four women as they move through the steps they must follow to extricate themselves from an abusive relationship and then get on with their lives. The reader witnesses their success and failures as they face a task that is both necessary and daunting, and the effects that spousal abuse (and at attempts stopping the abuse) have on an ever-widening circle of people. This book illustrates how society in general and individuals and organizations in particular help and hinder the process of extrication - often at the same time. By analyzing the solutions, and their implications, that have been offered to and by the abused women, the authors arrive at a set of alternative solutions that could significantly reduce the incidence of spouse abuse in the future.

Giving Up Baby

Giving Up Baby PDF Author: Laury Oaks
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479867527
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
“Baby safe haven” laws, which allow a parent to relinquish a newborn baby legally and anonymously at a specified institutional location—such as a hospital or fire station—were established in every state between 1999 and 2009. Promoted during a time of heated public debate over policies on abortion, sex education, teen pregnancy, adoption, welfare, immigrant reproduction, and child abuse, safe haven laws were passed by the majority of states with little contest. These laws were thought to offer a solution to the consequences of unwanted pregnancies: mothers would no longer be burdened with children they could not care for, and newborn babies would no longer be abandoned in dumpsters. Yet while these laws are well meaning, they ignore the real problem: some women lack key social and economic supports that mothers need to raise children. Safe haven laws do little to help disadvantaged women. Instead, advocates of safe haven laws target teenagers, women of color, and poor women with safe haven information and see relinquishing custody of their newborns as an act of maternal love. Disadvantaged women are preemptively judged as “bad” mothers whose babies would be better off without them. Laury Oaks argues that the labeling of certain kinds of women as potential “bad” mothers who should consider anonymously giving up their newborns for adoption into a “loving” home should best be understood as an issue of reproductive justice. Safe haven discourses promote narrow images of who deserves to be a mother and reflect restrictive views on how we should treat women experiencing unwanted pregnancy.

Reframing Transracial Adoption

Reframing Transracial Adoption PDF Author: Kristi Brian
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439901856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Until the late twentieth century, the majority of foreign-born children adopted in the United States came from Korea. In the absorbing book Reframing Transracial Adoption, Kristi Brian investigates the power dynamics at work between the white families, the Korean adoptees, and the unknown birth mothers. Brian conducts interviews with adult adopted Koreans, adoptive parents, and adoption agency facilitators in the United States to explore the conflicting interpretations of race, culture, multiculturalism, and family. Brian argues for broad changes as she critiques the so-called "colorblind" adoption policy in the United States. Analyzing the process of kinship formation, the racial aspects of these adoptions, and the experience of adoptees, she reveals the stifling impact of dominant nuclear-family ideologies and the crowded intersections of competing racial discourses. Brian finds a resolution in the efforts of adult adoptees to form coherent identities and launch powerful adoption reform movements.