Customer Reviews

Kinship with Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture

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This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the adoption system. Judith Modell is an adopter and a cultural anthropologist. Her book is a careful analysis of the institution of adoption.

Modell points out the historic roots of "fictive" kinship in adoption. She also brings up some of the paradoxes of this "peculiar" institution. Adoption requires that the birth family be destroyed before the adoptive family can be created.

Modell gives a brief description of the first investigation of "baby farming" in Chicago in 1917. She point up news articles from the 1980s on "baby marketing" as big business.

Overall, Modell questions the benefit of the adoption system for those directly involved and for this society at large.

Modell gives huge insight to the symbolic and structural background of adoption practices in the U.S. She does not seek to affirm or reject the notion of adoption in general. Rather she presents the legal and social/cultural milieus that have shaped our present outlook on adoption. For anyone considering adoption, adoptees or anyone wanting a fuller understanding of how the process occurs from all perspectives, this book is for you. You won't be disappointed by Modell's straightforward, throughouly researched and illuminating discussion of adoption in the U.S.

I think the book was written with a very negative view of adoption. This book totally gives into and supports the stigmatization of adoption and does not cover much of the positive aspects.