ADOPTION BUREAUCRACIES: EXPERT KNOWLEDGE, DOCUMENTS AND RACE IN THE MAKING OF ADOPTIVE FAMILIES IN CENTRAL MEXICO

Bureaucracy;State;Child Adoption;Race;Kinship;Law;Mexico;Anthropology

Reyes Kipp, Anaid CitlalliPoole, Deborah ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Bureaucracy;    State;    Child Adoption;    Race;    Kinship;    Law;    Mexico;    Anthropology;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/37175/REYESKIPP-DISSERTATION-2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation examines the bureaucratic, legal and administrative practices of the neoliberal state through an ethnographic account of the Mexican government’s recent attempts to regulate and create adoptive families. With the Mexican state’s adherence to international adoption conventions and the recent shift towards the right in Mexican politics, federal and state-level governments have adjusted existing codes to facilitate the ;;plenary adoption” of poor children by state approved families beginning in the 1990s. The reforms, which define ;;plenary adoption” as the creation of a new family by extinguishing all the previous kinship ties of the adopted child, mark a move away from earlier ;;simple adoption” provisions, in which adoption was defined as a contract between two individuals that could be revoked. Paying special attention to the material production of knowledge–as well as the legal and moral discourses that it entails– the dissertation explores how adoption becomes a technology of government with particular racialized effects, and investigates the multiple possibilities of relatedness that are made available or foreclosed through plenary adoption policies and practices. Drawing on twenty consecutive months of ethnographic and archival work (2009-2011) in an office of the ;;System for Integral Family Development” or DIF (the state institution in charge of adoptions and social assistance in Mexico), as well as interviews with adoptive parents and birth mothers, the dissertation makes three principal interventions: First, it questions the view of bureaucrats as agents who mediate between already constituted objects to ask how forms of kinship and state power are mutually constituted in the context of child adoption. Second, it provides new insights into the mundane processes through which common sense knowledges colonize legal and bureaucratic practices, showing how domains of normalization are central to governmental work and the implementation of law. Finally, it illustrates how the state acquires legitimacy through documentary practices and regimens of expertise that unfold in a context of entrenched and growing inequalities; and how moral and racial idioms emerge and materialize across governmental and familial domains.