This thesis focuses on the ideas and experiences of transnationally adopted children regarding place and identity, and how their perspectives compare to those of their parents’. Although anthropologists have long been interested in child circulation, the growing transnational nature of adoption has sparked new interest in kinship studies. However, anthropological literature on transnational adoption largely focuses on the perspectives of adults including adoptive parents, adoption professionals, and adopted adults, while children’s opinions are rarely elicited. I interviewed ten transnationally adopted children using semi-structured interviews and drawing exercises to explore how they come to know about their migration and birth places as well as what places they find important sources of their identification. I also interviewed 14 parents of transnationally adopted children to examine how they emplace their children, physically and socially, upon adoption. Parents understand birth places to be a significant source of their children’s identities and construct ideas of this place that are meant to foster children’s ethnic and cultural connections to their birth places. However, children do not always conceptualize place or themselves in the same way as their parents. Rather than articulating abstract ethnic identities based on birth places, children draw on particular locations, people, and events that are important in their daily lives. By solely drawing attention to dichotomous dual ethnicities, or dual places of belonging, multiple other places that play an important part in children’s lives may be neglected. Through child-focused research, children can be viewed as competent social actors who are subject to their parents’ practices and desires but they also hold divergent perspectives on place and identity that shape their lives and influence those around them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/2892 |
| Date | 07 July 2010 |
| Creators | Shaw, Jennifer |
| Contributors | Mitchell, Lisa Meryn |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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