Constructing Transnational and Transracial Identity

Adoption and Belonging in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Sigalit Ben-Zion

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137480644
• eBook ISBN: 9781137472823
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are home to more than 90, 000 transnational adoptees of Scandinavian parents raised in a predominantly white environment. This ethnography provides a unique perspective on how these transracial adoptees conceptualize and construct their sense of identity along the intersection of ethnicity, family, and national lines.

CHAPTER 1

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TRANSCOLOR ADOPTEES: SUBJECT, THEORY, AND METHOD

I do believe that this book will be the voice of grown-up adopted people from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and will express how we experience the society we were given and put in, and hopefully it will raise questions and debates of how to make it easier, or better, or be aware of what is like to be almost there but not quite, meaning being almost Swedish, or almost Norwegian, or almost Danish but not quite. There is always a little question.

(Charlotte, adopted from Indonesia by Swedish parents)

THE SCOPE OF THIS INQUIRY AND THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are home to more than 90,000 transnational adoptees of Scandinavian parents raised in a predominantly white environment. This ethnography offers a unique perspective on how transnational adoptees who are also transcolor¹ conceptualize and construct their sense of identity and belonging along the intersections of race, ethnic, class, family, and national lines.

The case study of transcolor adoptees in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is intriguing as the adoptees are Scandinavians in all aspects but one: they are raised and educated by white Scandinavian parents; they are accustomed to the Scandinavian way of life, practices, and traditions; and they are familiar with the social and cultural codes, but because their physical appearance distinguishes them in the Scandinavian landscape, identity and belonging are often called into question.

In this book, the cultural identity of transcolor adoptees will be examined in the wider context of assimilation, integration, loyalty, membership, familial and national belonging, and the experience of having a visibly different racial identity in a predominantly white environment.²

With this in mind, the Scandinavian case study can be used as a lens to examine related social issues by comparing and contrasting other case studies on the socio-psychological and cultural context of transnational and/or transcolor adoptees raised by white parents in a predominantly white environment such as the United States or Canada.

This ethnography radically differs from other scholarly research into adoption with respect to its methodological, theoretical, and analytical approach. A comprehensive explanation and reference will be given in each appropriate section of this chapter. What distinguishes this ethnography from others is that it investigates the issue of adoption in not one but three cultural localities: Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The number of informants is also substantially larger than is generally considered sufficient for research of this type. The focus is on adult adoptees rather than on children and teenagers, who have been extensively studied in the literature of adoption. The fact that the informants originally come from 12 countries in four continents with diverse ethnic backgrounds also provides a more fertile ground for comparison.

Transnational Adoptees from a Historical Perspective

The global number of transnational adoptees (also referred to as “intercountry adoption” or “international adoption”) from 1955 to 2009 is approximately 800,000: there were 500,000 in the United States; 250,000 in Europe; 50,000 in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel; and more than 90,000 in Scandinavia (50,000 in Sweden, 18,000 in Norway, 23,000 in Denmark, and 3,000 in Finland).³

The recent phenomenon of transnational adoption came to prominence in 1955, in the aftermath of the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. When the war was over, thousands of “orphans” and mixed-race children (whose mothers were Korean and fathers were US or UN soldiers) were adopted to the Unites States by middle- and upper-class white parents and were raised in a predominately white environment.⁴

This new form of adoption, which is structurally similar to the domestic transcolor adoption practice in the United States (e.g., Black and Native American children),⁵ is characterized by the following: (i) Visibility—it is considered a “visible” adoption because of the racial and ethnic differences between the adoptive parents and the adoptees. (ii) Permanency—the practice of adoption was considered a permanent removal of children from their biological family and birth country. (iii) Assimilation—there was an explicit effort to convert these children religiously, socially, ethnically, and nationally so that they would become “little Americans, Swedes or Norwegians”.⁶ This new attitude, as observed by anthropologists Laura Briggs and Diana Marre,⁷ is contrasted with the “orphans” of World War II, in which case the rescue committees sought to provide these children with a foster family in Europe or the United States. A conscious effort was also made to preserve their cultural identity, as in the case of Jewish orphans: “after the war, if no living relative of a hidden child could be found, international committees sought out a Jewish family to raise the child”.⁸

Since the mid-1950s the exodus of adopted children from the third world (and later second world) to Western countries has been shaped by conjunctures of social, political, and ideological factors. The reasons for adoption are complex and have changed over the course of the last five decades.

Factors contributing to the growth of transnational adoption in the nations that provide families for children include a low rate of fertility in many receiving countries, a shortage of available domestic infants for adoption, easy access to abortion, a liberal shift in family values, and the child rescue ideology, which advocates the practice of adopting third-world children.

Factors contributing to the growth of transnational adoption from nations that provide children for adoption include crisis of war, famine, disease, lack of social welfare, difficult economic conditions, unemployment, migration to urban areas, high pregnancy rate among unmarried women, and difficulties in obtaining abortions.⁹ For example, the Korean War in the 1950s; the Vietnam War in the 1960s and the 1970s; the “Dirty War” in Latin America from the 1950s through the mid-1990s, such as in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay as well as the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Brazil; the collapse of Communism in the 1990s; various wars in African countries from the 1990s and until the present day; the increase in the rate of children orphaned by HIV or AIDS, especially in South Africa, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe; population policies such as “one child policy” in China and pronatalist policies in Ceausescu’s communist Romania; social stigmatization of “illegitimate” children, such as mixed-race Korean children; and the rejection of female babies in various sending countries.¹⁰

The countries offering the most children for adoption in the past five decades are South Korea, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, Ethiopia, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, and Romania.¹¹

South Korea is considered the world’s major country in terms of “sending” children for adoption from 1953 to the late 1980s.¹² According to demographer Saralee Kane,¹³ “Korea’s activity was a significant factor in most receiving country totals, representing up to 60 percent of some annual totals”.¹⁴ For example, in Denmark, South Korea represented between 50 and 70 percent of the annual total. In terms of numbers, it is estimated that between 1953 and 2008, 161,665 Korean children were sent out for adoption. The majority of these children were adopted in the United States (1953–2008, 109,248), France (1968–2008, 11,165), Sweden (1957–2005, 9,051), Denmark (1965–2008, 9,297), Norway (1955–2008, 6,297), and the Netherlands (1969–2003, 4,099), with fewer children being sent to other Western countries.¹⁵ Demographer Peter Selman cogently notes that despite the fact that South Korea is considered an “advanced” society with a high level of education and technology and a low birth rate, overseas adoption continues to be practiced, explaining that “there is a continuing problem over stigma of unmarried parenthood and in the absence of a comprehensive welfare system it is impossible for a poor single mother to keep her child.”¹⁶ The over-representation of South Korean adoptees is strongly reflected in the Scandinavian nexus, with 40 percent of all transnational adoptees in Denmark, 50 percent in Norway, and 25 percent in Sweden coming from South Korea during 1955–2009. This impressive figure is also reflected in this current research, in which Korean adoptees constitute 50 percent (26 out of 51 informants). (The details are tabulated in Appendixes 1, 2, 3.)

According to Selman, the top ten receiving countries from 1980 until 2004 were the United States, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark.¹⁷ The United States is considered to be the largest recipient of transnational adoptees in terms of actual numbers of its native-born population; however, the per capita adoption rate is substantially higher in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.¹⁸

Transnational Adoption from an Anthropological Perspective

The issue of adoption and transnational adoption, particularly in Western societies, as a social and cultural practice has received little attention from anthropologists from the 1960s until the mid-2000s, despite the fact that it has a transformative impact on major themes in anthropology, such as family and kinship, racial identities and social stigma, cultural assimilation and integration, ethnicity and nationality. The paucity of anthropological research on adoption in Western countries, manifested by the small number of scholarly publications, was in stark contrast, on one hand, with innumerable anthropological field studies on adoption in non-Western societies, especially during the late 1960s and the 1970s,¹⁹ and, on the other hand, with disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, and social work, which have dominated the study of adoption for several decades. However, the mid-2000s mark a turning point at which the social, cultural, and historical contexts of transnational adoption began to be examined by anthropologists, sociologists, and humanities scholars.²⁰ In fact, transnational adoption has become a key and popular topic of investigation (at the cost of other issues in kinship studies) in contemporary anthropological kinship studies.²¹ I would even go as far as to say that the study of transantional adoption is better understood in light of the new developments in kinship studies. This observation is partly deduced from the historical development of this project in terms of research agenda and topicality. In brief, I started this project with the focus of national identity from a postcolonial perspective. Then my informants and the research led me more and more into kinship and kinship studies (see Preface).

Transnational Adoption from the Perspective of “New” Kinship Studies

Michael Herzfeld’s²² punch line is that although the “technical virtuosity of kinship analysis has largely passed from the scene,” the centrality of kinship remains unabated. Kinship as revealed by Herzfeld has undergone a radical transfiguration in the last decades, and has morphed into a global phenomenon that covers fashionable topics that have become “considerably more central to the discipline,” such as nationalism, gender, bio-ethics, race, transnational mobility, memory, use of national narratives, new reproductive technologies, and new family forms. In light of the above, the study of transnational adoption contributes yet another colored stone to the mosaic of contemporary kinship studies.

A renewed interest in kinship studies came to prominence from the mid-1990s to the end of 1990s, and is inherently connected with the revolutionary work of David Schneider.²³ In his A Critique of the Study of Kinship, Schneider²⁴ expresses an unfavorable opinion of the way in which generations of anthropologists since Lewis Henry Morgan (1871) have defined kinship as a system of genealogical ties arising from sexual procreation. Schneider demonstrates that this assumption was based on a Euro-American folk belief and was central to the anthropological study of kinship. Unlike Morgan and his contemporaries, who argued that kinship is universal and is found in all cultures, Schneider suggests that kinship can only be understood within specific cultural systems and is not comparable cross-culturally.

Schneider’s groundbreaking work had thoroughly transformed the study of kinship in anthropology. Although his work led to a fundamental c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface: The Untold Story of the Journey into the Twilight Zone
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Anthropology of Transcolor Adoptees: Subject, Theory, and Method
• 2. Stockholm Fieldwork: From St. Eriksplan to Rinkeby
• 3. “Living in the Twilight Zone”
• 4. “No One Is More Swedish Than Me!”
• 5. “Love Is Above Culture, Above Blood”
• 6. “It’s Like Taking a Cat and Raising It Like a Dog”
• 7. “I Didn’t Feel Norwegian Enough to Wear the National Costume”
• 8. “I Am Comfortable with the Feeling of Being White!”
• 9. “Going to the Whiteness”
• 10. They Can’t Afford to Stop Imagining
• 11. The Construction of Imaginary Homelands
• 12. Conclusions
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index