Barbara Yngvesson, Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, And Transnational Adoption‪.‬

Barbara Yngvesson, Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 264 pp. Transnational adoption first emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry in the late 1990s and early 2000s as large numbers of children joined the intensified flows of people, commodities, ideas, and capital that constitute "globalization." Not only their numbers, but also their destinations made these border-crossing children increasingly difficult to ignore, as they entered into the home territories of Western anthropologists. Moreover, they troubled the boundaries among various categories of traveling things, raising questions about the nature of these circulations: are children in transnational adoption immigrants, commodities, fantasies, conduits of economic and social capital, or all of the above? Do their migrations and attempts at government regulation represent a liberalization of identity and family forms, or the consolidation of a Western-dominated vision of "right" children and families? For more than a decade, Barbara Yngvesson's work has been among the most valuable in providing critical theoretical frameworks for answering these questions. Her impressively expansive project attends to the complexity of adoption for all the social actors involved--parents, children, social workers, and child welfare advocates on both sides of the global North-South divide--as well as the legal technologies, international networks, and affective economies that govern it. Belonging in an Adopted World is a seamless monograph that refines and coalesces her previous theoretical and ethnographic contributions to powerful effect.