Transnational Adoption, Technologies of Exclusion, and the Promise of ‘Hom

Authors

• Barbara Yngvesson School of Social Science, Hampshire College

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.127520

Abstract

Petri Hautaniemi’s provocative essay focusing on Finland as a case study of European immigration politics illuminates the ways that the application of more exclusive understandings of household, home and family by the nation state work to limit the immigration of refugees who claim the right to do so on grounds of family reunification. Hautaniemi’s research contributes to a rethinking of approaches to kinship and nationhood by anthropologists over the past decade (Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Wade [ed.] 2007). A central thread in this research examines the potential connections between the ways kinship can be reworked using new reproductive technologies, and the ways national bodies can be reproduced or transformed through technologies that restrict or expand  understandings of who does or does not belong (Campbell 2007). As Campbell and others note, these various technologies tend to have ‘race effects’, even as race is publicly eschewed as grounds for immigration policy, for understandings of national identity, and/or for the construction of family.