Anthropology as a discipline is really confused about adoption and how to frame it.

On one hand, anthropology studies kinship extensively and seeks to obviate ethnocentrism (seeing one’s own culture as better than all others) by insisting that non-biogenetic family formation in other cultures is every bit as valid as blood ties, and that to prioritise biological links in understanding family formation could lead to cross-cultural misunderstanding.

On the other hand, anthropology’s focus has been upon non-biogenetic family formation in non-western cultures, where what we might term ‘adoption’ tends to take place between members of a child’s extended family, and where the child’s original identity is retained. Anthropology has not turned its analysis back upon western adoption practices, whereby infants are commodified for paid adoption by strangers and their identities are legally overwritten without their consent.

Western anthropology has not noticed that, in its eagerness not to misunderstand other cultures, it has utterly failed to comprehend western adoption practices. With the 2022 Joint Committee on Human Rights report The Violation of Family Life: Adoption of Children of Unmarried Women 1949–1976 there is finally some recognition that coercing a woman to relinquish her baby for adoption is a human rights violation and that there were as many as 185,000 forced adoptions during that period.

Where is anthropology in this? Nowhere. It has framed what it defines as ‘adoption’ as being just as valid as biological ties, thus it has nothing to say in defence of western women’s reproductive rights which have been violated through forced pregnancy and/or forced relinquishment. When anthropology does approach adoption it is usually from the perspective of adopters.

What we haven’t had is adoptee-led anthropology, which centres the lived experiences of adult adoptees and seeks to understand the systematic aspects of historic forced adoption practices and how the aftershocks impact our lives. By using autoethnography (writing about my own experience) I will attempt to make good on anthropology’s deficiencies.

[EDIT: I was going to redraft this post because I wrote it last year right after I finished my anthropology BA and I’ve filled it with jargon. Then the post got 5 likes on WordPress when I literally only set up my site yesterday and was using this post as a test. So I guess I will keep it as it is, in thanks to those supportive 5 people. I will try and go lighter on the jargon in future though ✌️]