Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century #2)

Kathryn A. Mariner

$35.94

Publication Date: April 30th, 2019

Publisher:

University of California Press

ISBN:

9780520299566

Pages:

256

Available in 3-7 business days

Description

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.

About the Author

Kathryn A. Mariner is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

Praise for Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century #2)

"This is a beautifully written, gripping ethnography."
— PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review

"Contingent Kinship speaks to the critical potential of anthropology to unsettle narratives of a post-racial society and the universality of (US American) progress. With lucid and embodied analytic focus, it teaches us to be skeptical about any idealistic speculation on future life, which is so often symbolized in the figure of the child, especially when speculation sidesteps, or ignores entirely, the history of racialized exploitation and structural violences that persist into the present."
— Current Anthropology

"This book will be of use to those interested in and can be taught as part of graduate courses on kinship and race in the United States, gender and reproduction, and objects, gifts and commodities."
— Anthropology Book Forum

"Mariner’s overall characterization of US transracial adoption as an individual-level approach for mitigating multi-layered structural inequities, using intimate speculation, is thoroughly captivating and compelling."
— Transforming Anthropology

Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century #2)

Description

About the Author

Praise for Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century #2)

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