Roots, Routes, and Return: Barbara Yngvessons Exploration of the Self in Transnational Adoption Circuits Rachael Stryker, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor Department of Human Development and Womens Studies California State University, East Bay rachael.stryker@csueastbay.edu

Introduction In 1964, sociologist David Kirk published his seminal book, Shared Fate: A Theory of Adoption and Mental Health. He used this study of 2,000 adoptive families in Canada and the U.S. to demonstrate that, put simply, adoptive families are different from families created by birth. At the time of Kirks writing, this concept of differentness was a new idea. (Moe 2007: 160); prior to his study, adoptive parents were encouraged to hide the fact that they adopted their children to avoid social stigma. Kirks encouragement for adoptive families to come out of hiding and his validation of adoptive family as a flexible, valid form of kinship has now shaped assumptions of, and practitioners engagement with, adoptive families for almost 50 years. When I first read this instrumental treatment of making family through adoption, it was 1997, and the great inter-country adoption boom to the United States was just picking up speed. I was in the middle of dissertation fieldwork in Evergreen, Colorado with adoptive parents who embraced biomedical knowledge regimes and extreme nonevidence-based fringe therapies to explain and rectify why their adopted children (usually formerly institutionalized children) were not adjusting well to new adoptive homes. These adoptive parents were products of what I have now come to think of as a sort of

ironic post-Kirk paradigm, influenced by Kirks work, they had no intention of hiding the fact that they themselves were adopting; however, once children moved to the adoptive home, they still commonly enlisted various legal, educational and biomedical resources to mitigate or discipline the differences out of adoptees as much as they could, using doxic notions of biological family to shape adoptee identity and futures. In the mid-1990s, I thus read Kirks work with great interest, and of course, I thought that its central premise that creating families through adoption was nothing to be ashamed of was on point. However, I felt oddly disconnected from the fact that the book remained the referendum not just on adoptive parent experience, but on adoptee experience, some thirty years later. I felt particularly unsettled by one of its central claims about adoptees sense of belonging namely, that even if adopted parents had nothing to be ashamed of, their fates were inextricably linked with adoptees who had to live with doubts about their own inauthenticity (Herman 2010, paraphrasing Kirk, 1964) and accept a shaky (ibid) hold on belonging. This seemed terribly not phenomenological to me. And what I mean by not phenomenological is that the study [and its unmitigated acceptance over thirty years later] reflected a dogged determination to emically locate adoptees as objects of circulation rather than as subjects who were perfectly capable of perceiving, making sense of, performing, and responding to, their own circulation in ways that reflected and expressed a much more complex experience of their adopted status than simply feeling like they didnt belong anywhere. For me, Kirk represented a philosophical disconnect between adult perceptions of what adoptees must feel like and adoptees multiple, possible perceptions of themselves.

In recent years, autobiographies and first-hand accounts of adoptees particularly those of first- and second-wave adult Korean adoptees -- and the work of a handful of child-centered critical ethnographers of adoption such as Eleana Kim and myself demonstrate clearly that, in fact, the ontological categories that adoptees, both young and old, use to make sense of themselves in the midst of their own circulation actually transcend a characterization of the adopted self as one marked primarily by negotiating difference. My own work (Stryker 2011, in press) demonstrates that adoptees of all ages contextualize and perform their own circulation in a variety of ways, and they narrate it using many different stories of cohesion that include, among other things, complicated metaphors of movement, time, and space. As anthropologist Eleana Kim (2000) has demonstrated, they also use philosophically coherent constructions of self that incorporate notions of nation, community, family, kinship, and idiosyncratic forms of connection. Barbara Yngvesson has had a large and important hand in pioneering and championing this important emerging genre of critical ethnography of adoption that expressly unmoors adoptees from the fixed physical and social locations that important and popular but inherently problematic studies such as Kirks normalize. Today, I would like to spend some time identifying one strategy through which Barbara has done this. Particularly, Ill talk about how she has illuminated, defined and theorized the notion of return as a set of circulations through which adoptees engage the (de)construction of their own belonging, and thus, their very selfhood. Ill conclude with some thoughts about how this expansive rethinking of the notion of return is influencing the work of anthropologists of childhood more broadly.

Return as Metaphor Barbaras use of the concept of return to destabilize notions of fixed adoptee identity has been a through-line in her work at least since the 1990s. Barbara first talked about the concept of return as a context for juxtaposing the flow of children to adoptive families with adult adoptee roots trips to native countries in a talk in 1997, which she later published as an article titled Going Home: Loss of Bearing, Adoption and the Mythology of Roots in 2003. This article was based on data she collected in 1998 during a roots tour to Chile with Swedish families who had adopted children during Pinochets dictatorship in the early 1980s. In Chile, she followed adoptees and their adoptive parents to courts, hospitals, orphanages and child welfare workers, and participated as an interpreter in a reunion between one adopted child and her Swedish birth mother. In the article, she contextualizes the need for an understanding of the importance of return for adoptees via roots trips. She juxtaposes two popular stories about adoptees the first, a story about abandonment, in which adoptees are set free from the past (constituted as abandoned or motherless), so that he or she can be assimilated into the adoptive family. [The second] a [roots story] or preservation story, . . . , [in which] the child is imagined as part of his or her birth mother or birth nation, imagined as being constantly pulled back to that ground. (8) From these trips, Barbara eloquently notes: . . . reveal the precariousness of I am, the simultaneous fascination and terror evoked by what might have been, and a longing for the safety of home. They materialize an unfathomable moment of choice, when one life that might have been was curtailed and another life that exists now came into being. Why just me? It feels very strange. One wonders, What would have become of me if I had remained there? Who was I during the time I was there? (Sarah Nordin, interview, August 1999). Such moments interrupt the muth that the legal transformation to an other was free that the child simply came home to a site of love where he or

she always belonged revealing instead the cost of belonging (and of love), its inseparability from the birth mother, the orhanage, the courthouse, the agency, and the histories linking nations that give children to those that receive them. But they also interrupt the myth of the return as a form of completion or fulfillment in which one can find oneself in another (be consumed by an other) at a plae or point of fusion, of immanence regained (Nancy 1991, 59). Rather, interruption occurs at the edge, or rather it constitutes the edge where beings touch each other, expose themselves to each other and separate from one another (ibid.). It is at this edge that both connects and separates, as Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that beings, come into being. (ibid, 61) In some ways, this initial understanding of return reinforces Kirks notion of adoptee identity as one rife with instability and immateriality. Adoptees discuss feelings of fantasies of doubleness, alternate realities, and loss of self. However, Yngvessons initial examination of return, unlike Kirks interpretation of adoptee identity [and the work that has followed it], which initially illuminates but then dooms adoptees to a fate of occupying an interstitial identity, uses the metaphor of return to demonstrate adoptees negotiation and inhabiting of multiple locations. She acknowledges that while various legal and state regimes attempt to signify adoption as a clean break, adoptees themselves understand their own circulation as a meeting of time and space, in which they occupy different positions simultaneously. Rather than belonging nowhere, adoptees may articulate themselves as belonging to several places at once. This is a set of multiple locations [as opposed to dislocations] of self that Yngvessons focus on return illuminates and centers. Barbaras expansive view of adoptee identity as a set of multiple locations is further articulated and fleshed out in an article she co-authored in 2006 with Susan Coutin titled, Backed by Papers: Undoing Persons, History, and Return, in which they discuss the resonance between adoptees who opt to make return trips to home ground and criminalized Salvadoran deportees who are coerced to return to their birth countries. In

particular, she begins to sharpen her critique of popular representations of adoptees journeys, focusing less on the linear journey of an adoptive self in favor of the articulation of an adoptees becoming. What does it mean to return to a point from which one originated? In what ways does the very attempt to locate such a point unsettle the implicit assumption that there is an origin waiting for us back there to recoup our identities against (Hall 1997:58)? . . . transnational adoptees who make roots trips to their countries of origin to search for memories, records, birth relatives, and cultural origins and . . . deportees who are more or less exiled to countries of birth despite having spent much of their lives elsewhere return (or are returned) to sites of prior dislocation because they are presumed to belong there. A return may, therefore, seem to set things right by sorting out people, places, and filiations. By retracing the steps and moments of personal formation, a return seems to promise an encounter with an original, less encumbered, more authentic selfor with an alien but nonetheless real self. Despite the promise held out by return, such retracings are problematic. The possibility of return is predicated on a single origin, an original self, and a transparent account of becoming, when, in fact, relocation may be a moment when one self is officially constituted and another is cut away. (177-178) They go on to state: By revisiting such moments, returns evoke the coexistence of multiple, radically different, but analogous worlds in which selves materialize (Pottage 2001, after Strathern 1988). (ibid)

The concept of return as a space in which the adoptees emerge and exist is perhaps most clearly evident in her most recent work, an article titled, The Child Who Was Left Behind: Dynamic Temporality, and Interpretations of History in Transnational Adoption. This article is a part of a special volume of the journal Childhood that Barbara and I have co-edited on circulation as a metaphor for unsettling the ontological category of childhood itself. Her article draws on psychological theory relating to the emergence of self and subjectivity to examine transnational adoptee experiences of their own circulation as children. She juxtaposes state policies and adoptive parent discourses that standardize adoption as a unidirectional process that

requires a clean break from the past, and more complex renditions by the adopted themselves of subjectivity as a temporally dynamic and open-ended process of coming into being. Barbara draws on narratives of return by adoptees born in Ethiopia, India, and Korea who were adopted by parents in Sweden and the United States, and notes that their experiences in the orphanages, hospitals, and families from which they were adopted complicate understandings of what it means to circulate, while opening up standardizing descriptions of family, childhood, and belonging. In the article, she draws on the concept of dynamic temporality (Conrad 2012), or, the notion that childhood narratives of return challenge assumptions of subjectivity as a fixed sense of self that is only rooted in time and place. She also unpacks the notion of isomorphism without identity (Gibbs 2010: 194), or, the idea that ones understanding of themselves in relation between things, involves the experience of both difference and similarity, to explore and explain adoptee experiences of their own circulation as children. She focuses on adoptees developing awareness of becoming (adoptable) through a series of operations that constituted them as objects of exchange, but that may only be understood as such retrospectively, on their return to the sites of their physical or legal abandonment. Adoptees themselves thus use concepts of return to cohere seemingly disparate experiences of self.

Conclusions There are, of course, many more instances in which Barbara Yngvesson takes up the notion of return in her work. But Id like to conclude with a couple of thoughts about how these three examples shape new understandings of adoptee identity, particularly in

relation to the post-Kirk period that adoption scholars and practitioners work in. To begin, Barbaras work provides a model for detailed ethnography and careful and respectful analysis of adoptee narratives that clearly turns the notion of adoptees as fated to belong nowhere into a process of becoming. As we see here, her constantly evolving thoughts of return deepen it as a metaphor for adoptees/ physical and metaphorical journeys from birth to adoptive family, yet never attempt to fix adoptees social locations as of nowhere. Rather, she uses stories about return to help us understand that while adoptees may identify themselves as as between [families, countries, socioeconomic and racial statuses, etc.], they resist having to choose belonging to one physical and social location. For example, Barbara recently recounted to me that adults in her research would constantly ask children to identify and locate themselves for example, asking them So, are you Swedish or are you Chilean? Adoptees invariably resisted these attempts to fix themselves this way in any one physical or social location. (personal communication, 4/11/13) Barbaras adopted interlocutors thus understood themselves of as somewhere and also, as of many some wheres. Barbaras work thus highlights that adoptees often negotiate, accept, and even sometimes even embrace the tensions of being from two places at the same time and occupying multiple locations. Second, Id like to address this interesting use of the notion of return as a way in for understanding adoption as a particular form of becoming. Barbaras adoptee narratives are never edited to produce a pat bullet-point presentations or easy, structured or clean accounts of selfhood. As weve seen here, her work is punctuated with beautiful and sometimes seemingly contradictory honorings of adoptee selfhood that include, all at once, metaphors of invisibility, immaterializations, ghost-like presences, multiple origins,

untraceable origins, alternate possible realities and outcomes, cohesion, attachments, connections, and hope. For Barbara, returns at once suggest a journey, a movement, and simultaneous beginnings and endings. I would like to conclude by saying that Barbaras ethnographic and theoretical reframings of adoptee identity are not only impacting the emerging subfield of the anthropology of adoption, but the anthropology of children and youth more broadly. Those of us who study adoptees have known for a long time that explorations of adopted selfhood are incredibly useful to engaging and thinking about the many understandings and figurations of childhood across time and space. For example, in the interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies, we spend a lot of time arguing about agency. We talk a lot about whether children have it, how they express it, and whether they can use it to gain more of it. For most scholars in this subfield, agency refers to the ability to assess ones environment and then enact change in the world based on those assessments (Montgomery 2009). This discussion causes a lot of debate about, for instance, whether children should have rights. Barbaras phenomenological approach to understanding adoptee selfhood is a model not just for examining the complex forms of becoming for children circulated via adoption, but for children and youth more broadly. The philosophical disconnect in which children are constructed as to be perceived rather than capable of perception that is found in Kirks work is not relegated to only his work. It is an epistemological failing that underwrites much work on children. Although Barbara has never set out to make this one of her explicit intellectual goals, I think of her work as imperative as a model for writing and re-writing (re-righting) not only the critical ethnography of adoption, but of the anthropology of childhood.

Sociologist Berry Mayall has called for scholarly work that treats children as participant agents in social relations, and childhood as a social group fundamentally implicated in social processes (2002: 4). By learning more about childrens understanding and performance of their own circulation, it is possible that we can learn from children about gaps and misfits between their experiences and their positioning in the social order, taken for granted by adults (Mayall, 2002: 2). What a gift we have in Barbara Yngvessons work then, which provides an empathic and emerging model for identifying that children have always occupied this space of social order; we only need to accept the their invitation to live and grow in it with them.

Works Cited Conrad, Rachel. 2012. My Future Doesnt Know ME: Time and Subjectivity in Poetry by Young People Childhood 19(2): 204-219. Gibbs, Anna. 2010. After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication. In Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (eds). The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press. Pp. 186-205. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities. In Culture, Globalization, and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Anthony D. King, ed. Pp. 4164.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Herman, Ellen. The Adoption History Project. Shared Fate: A Theory of Adoption and Mental Health, 1964. Retrieved on April 1, 2013 from: http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/sharedfate.htm

10

Kim, Eleana. 2000. Korean Adoptee Auto-ethnography: Refashioning Self, Family, and Finding Community. Visual Anthropology 16(1): 43-70. Kirk, David H. 1964. Shared Fate: A Theory of Adoption and Mental Health. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Mayall, Berry. 2002. Towards a Sociology for Childhood: Thinking from Childrens Lives. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Moe, Barbara. 2007. Adoption: A Reference Handbook (Second Edition). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, Inc. Montgomery, Heather. 2009. An Introduction to Childhood: An Anthropological Perspective of Children's Lives. West Sussex: UK: Blackwell Publishers. West Sussex. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pottage, Alain. 2001. Persons and Things: An Ethnographic Analogy. Economy and Society 30(1):112138. Stryker, Rachael. 2011. The War at Home: Affective Economies and Transnationally
Adoptive Families in the United States. International Migration 49(6): 25-49.

----- . In press. Movement without Movement: RAD Kids as Circulatory Problems in United States Adoption Pipelines. Childhood 20(3). doi: 10.1177/0907568213483148 Yngvesson, Barbara. 2003. Going Home: Loss of Bearing, Adoption, and the Mythology of Roots. Social Text 21(1): 7-27. ----- . 2006. Backed by Papers: Undoing Persons, History, and Return. American Ethnologist. 33(2): 177-190. 11

----- . In press. The Child Who Was Left Behind: Dynamic Temporality and Interpretations of History in Transnational Adoption. Childhood 20(3).

12