J B Leinaweaver
Biographic Data
| ID | 6977 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J B Leinaweaver |
| GIVEN NAMES | J B |
| FAMILY NAME | Leinaweaver |
| SIGNATURE | LEINAWEAVER J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | John Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9178-7624 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 318 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Encoding family struggles through Peruvian child welfare practice: Microbiographic insights from an alternative care database
Résister à l'absence dans l'adoption, avant et après
Working together, learning apart: A multicommunity study in rural Peru
Museum families: Canadian kinship and material culture
Understanding and documenting the ways that objects become entangled in, produce, sustain, and rupture family relations are crucial contributions of museum studies to anthropological kinship theory. This article analyzes a Canadian exhibit entitled "Family: Bonds and Belonging," developed in response to Canada's 150th anniversary, in 2017, by a British Columbia provincial museum, then brought to Canada's national immigration museum in Nova Scotia…
El regreso de la migración silenciosa: Adopción Internacional, Raza Y Diferencia
Los demógrafos consideran a la adopción internacional principalmente como un tipo inusual de migración. Esta perspectiva ofrece a los antropólogos nuevas formas de pensar sobre el parentesco. Basándose en el cuerpo de trabajo demográfico y en los estudios antropológicos sobre parentesco y migración, este artículo desarrolla un enfoque nuevo e híbrido para abordar la adopción internacional como un proceso social complejo el cual es, al mismo tiemp…
Solidarity exclusions: Problematizing kinship and humanitarianism from the perspective of transnational adoption
What is, or should be, the role of solidarity within the (transnationally adoptive) family? In Spain, solidaridad is a prized value in family life, political organization, and humanitarian action, yet adoption professionals actively discouraged its use as a motivation for transnational adoption. This article offers a genealogy of the concept of solidaridad, a consideration of its enduring currency in kinship discourse in Spain, and a critical ana…
Adoption knowledge: A citizen-scientific use ofFamilySearchto understand Peruvian adoption
This article analyzes the citizen-scientific work conducted by a Peruvian adoptee, co-author Milagros Caroline Forrester, who is collecting, archiving, coding, and analyzing the birth records of Peruvian adoptees she encounters through her ongoing review of FamilySearch, a depository of genealogical data run by the Mormon Church. Forrester's project resembles the personal birthparent searches conducted by many adopted people, but at another scale…
Counter-Demography: Situated Caring for the Aged in Andean Peru
I argue that non-demographers engage in "counter-demography" - repurposing demographic tools as they interpret and manage local, individual expressions of complex population-level issues. I explore this through a focus on population aging in Peru. Like many developing countries, Peru is in a delicate demographic position where sometimes violent efforts to reduce fertility, and broader processes of modernization and education, have resulted in pop…
Papering the Origins: Place-Making, Privacy, and Kinship in Spanish International Adoption
This article examines place and privacy as two key resources for producing kinship through an analysis of exceptional legal practices in Spain that overdetermine international adoptees’ Spanishness. Per Spanish law, minors internationally adopted by a Spanish parent are “Spanish by origin” (españoles de origen). Over and above this, however, Spain’s Civil Registry Law was modified in 2005 to allow internationally adoptive parents to officially ch…
Adoption
What is adoption? To answer this question is to jump directly into one of the key controversies of anthropology: anthropologists, associated for over a century with the close study of kinship relationships, are quite hesitant to privilege ‘biological kinship’ over ‘social kinship’, and the category ‘adoption’ may unwittingly do that. On the other hand, reviewing what anthropologists have learned about adoption, fostering, and child welfare reveal…
Be Fruitful and Multiply: Kinship, Sociality and Non-Reproduction
Aditya Bharadwaj. 2016. Conceptions: Infertility and Procreative Technologies in India. Series: Fertility, reproduction, and sexuality. New York: Berghahn Books. 312 pp. Hardcover $110.00. 2 illus
Homework' and transnational adoption screening in Spain: The Co-Production of Home and Family
We use the transnational adoption screening process as a lens for examining the co-production of the home and the family in Spain. We propose the term 'homework' to describe the efforts of adoption applicants toperforman appropriate home and thus receive approval to adopt. The transnational adoption screening process is a key site of state-individual interaction for communicating a set of classed, gendered norms. Through that process, participant…
Transatlantic unity on display: The "white legend" and the "pact of silence" in Madrid's Museum of the Americas
This article examines the history and recent pro-immigrant installations of the postcolonial Museum of the Americas in Madrid. It critically relates the Hispanist "White Legend" regarding the benevolence of Spanish colonialism to both the "pact of silence" following Spain's Civil War and the current Spanish orientation towards immigrants from Latin America. Despite significant recent reconceptualization, the museum continues to put forward a narr…
Andalucía, the Americas, and the Anthropological Object
Adoption, Demography of
Anthropological Perspectives on Care: Work, Kinship, and the Life-Course
The geography of transnational adoption: Kin and Place in Globalization
International adoption involves crossing borders; it invokes space and geography as adoptive parents imagine distant countries, as children are moved from one nation to another, and as adoptees and their families return to their countries of origin. The spatiality of belonging and identity – but also of trauma and violence – are central concerns for the people involved and to the operations of their cultural, political, and legal practice. Yet su…
Geographies of generation: Age Restrictions in International Adoption
International adoption relocates minors, and only minors, from one country to another. The centrality of age to adoptive migration may prevent us from seeing the significance of generation: the prospective parent's age is also examined and evaluated for its relationship to the child's age and what this relationship will mean for the creation of a family. Because international adoption results in children crossing borders to enter new kinship form…
Aging, Relatedness, and Social Abandonment in Highland Peru
Report summarizing preliminary ethnographic research on aging in Highland Peru
How (not) to talk about adoption: On communicative vigilance in Spain
This chapter was written with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness R+D Project “Adoptions and fosterages in Spain: tracing challenges, opportunities and problems in social and family lives of children and adolescents†(CSO2012-39593-C02-01), IP Diana Marre
The Quiet Migration Redux: International Adoption, Race, and Difference
Demographers frame international adoption primarily as an unusual kind of migration. This insight offers anthropologists new ways to think about kinship. Drawing on demographic scholarship and anthropological kinship and migration studies, this article develops a new and hybrid approach to international adoption as a complex social process that is both migratory and productive of kinship. Viewing international adoption as a form of migration reve…
Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain
Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption
Over the past decade, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have explored the increasingly visible phenomenon of transnational adoption, often focusing on the perspective of adoptive families. In Somebody’s Children, Laura Briggs reminds us that such adoptions are not only about how children and parents are joined across borders. They are also just as significantly about how so many children came to be defined as adoptable in the first pl…
Practice Mothers
During the first half of the twentieth century, “practice houses,” or home management houses, thrived in home economics departments of land-grant universities around North America. Practice houses were domestic settings where young women could get hands-on training and experience in all the latest methods and technologies to efficiently manage domestic space and activity. They were also part of a larger trend of professionalization of home econom…
Toward an Anthropology of Ingratitude: Notes from Andean Kinship
In this article I examine gratitude and ingratitude as valuable analytical tools for determining how social inequalities inform kinship practices. Accusing one's kin of ingratitude reveals the edges and fault lines of kinship, as well as closely related expectations aboutwhatshould be given,howit should be given, and how it should bereceived. As such, this essay follows in an esteemed anthropological tradition of unifying analyses of the gift and…
The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru
Jessaca B. Leinaweaver's "The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru" explores the complex social practice of child circulation in the Andes. Challenging Western notions of kinship and family, Leinaweaver demonstrates how children are frequently moved between households, not as a sign of neglect or abandonment, but as a strategic response to economic hardship, social aspirations, and changing family dynamics. This…
On moving children: The social implications of Andean child circulation
In this article, I draw from ethnographic research in Ayacucho, Peru, to describe how rural-to-urban migrants move children between houses as part of a common survival and betterment strategy in the context of social and economic inequality. Such "child circulations" produce and strengthen kinship and are an important part of local family-making efforts. My investigation of child circulation grounds a critical assessment of Peru's globalized adop…
Outsourcing Care: How Peruvian Migrants Meet Transnational Family Obligations
Migration from Peru has increased dramatically over the past decade, but the social and relational repercussions of these transnational movements have not yet been fully explored. Examination of the way migrants manage their responsibilities to dependent kin in Peru reveals that child fostering makes it possible for adults to migrate in search of better work opportunities by ensuring care for their children and company for their older relatives. …
Raising the roof in the transnational Andes: Building Houses, Forging Kinship
Transnational migration transforms houses, the rituals surrounding them, and the people who live in those houses and use them to understand aspects of their social and ethnic identities. I focus on the Andean house-roofing ritual known as the zafacasa to demonstrate the centrality of the house as a mediator for personal relationships, and the importance of such rituals for reconstituting social bonds both in spite of and because of distance. The …
How (not) to talk about adoption: On communicative vigilance in Spain
This chapter was written with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness R+D Project “Adoptions and fosterages in Spain: tracing challenges, opportunities and problems in social and family lives of children and adolescents†(CSO2012-39593-C02-01), IP Diana Marre
Introduction: Cultural and Political Economies of Adoption in Latin America
Improving Oneself: Young People Getting Ahead in the Peruvian Andes
Among rural-to-urban migrants in Peru, the concept of "improving oneself" (superar ) refers to the process of overcoming poverty through dedicated efforts at self-improvement. This individual effort is situated as a moral act, occurring within a relational web of persons who should also benefit. It is described as a family project and a moral imperative for young people, and they internalize their role in this group effort. The concept is the eco…
Choosing to Move: Child agency on Peru's margins
This article links research into constructions of childhood and child agency to anthropological studies of young people's informal adoption and state involvement in family arrangements. It analyses the life history of a young Peruvian woman who deliberately chose to move into an orphanage. The multiple points at which individual and family plans and efforts are shaped by broader political economic matters are addressed in a discussion of how urba…
Homework' and transnational adoption screening in Spain: The Co-Production of Home and Family
We use the transnational adoption screening process as a lens for examining the co-production of the home and the family in Spain. We propose the term 'homework' to describe the efforts of adoption applicants toperforman appropriate home and thus receive approval to adopt. The transnational adoption screening process is a key site of state-individual interaction for communicating a set of classed, gendered norms. Through that process, participant…
Toward an Anthropology of Ingratitude: Notes from Andean Kinship
In this article I examine gratitude and ingratitude as valuable analytical tools for determining how social inequalities inform kinship practices. Accusing one's kin of ingratitude reveals the edges and fault lines of kinship, as well as closely related expectations aboutwhatshould be given,howit should be given, and how it should bereceived. As such, this essay follows in an esteemed anthropological tradition of unifying analyses of the gift and…
Kinship Paths to and from the New E urope: A Unified Analysis of P eruvian Adoption and Migration
Este ensayo compara migrantes y adoptados peruanos quienes viven en Europa, enfocándose en los movimientos desde un país remitente y los movimientos hacía tal país. Primero, analiza las reagrupaciones familiares usando un marco analítico de los estudios de parentesco y adopciones. Yuxtapone las experiencias de migrantes y adoptados para mostrar que la migración también es estructurada por preocupaciones de parentesco. Luego, analiza los retornos …
Kinship into the Peruvian Adoption Office: Reproducing Families, Producing the State
El artículo analiza los instrumentos y las estrategias articuladas por trabajadoras de la oficina de adopciones del gobierno peruano para trasladar niños de familias pobres o indígenas, o de instituciones estatales, a familias peruanas o extranjeras de clase media. El análisis de los mecanismos a través de los cuales las trabajadoras comprenden e interpretan la legislación sobre adopción demuestra como ellas a la vez reproducen nociones hegemónic…
Losing Lévi-Strauss: The 2009 Year in Cultural Anthropology
In 2009, Claude Lévi-Strauss died at the age of 100. In this article, I draw on frameworks that were central to his work to structure my discussion of the key themes in cultural anthropology publications over the past year. The four subjects I consider in this review are kinship, taxonomy, bricolage, and traveling
The geography of transnational adoption: Kin and Place in Globalization
International adoption involves crossing borders; it invokes space and geography as adoptive parents imagine distant countries, as children are moved from one nation to another, and as adoptees and their families return to their countries of origin. The spatiality of belonging and identity – but also of trauma and violence – are central concerns for the people involved and to the operations of their cultural, political, and legal practice. Yet su…
Geographies of generation: Age Restrictions in International Adoption
International adoption relocates minors, and only minors, from one country to another. The centrality of age to adoptive migration may prevent us from seeing the significance of generation: the prospective parent's age is also examined and evaluated for its relationship to the child's age and what this relationship will mean for the creation of a family. Because international adoption results in children crossing borders to enter new kinship form…
The State and Children's Fate: Reproduction in traumatic times
This article introduces a special issue on the meaning of children in violent, uncertain times. It is framed in terms of the political-economy aspects of adoption, focusing on the local occurrences that make international adoption possible, from legal determinations of abandonment to wartime and postwar parenting. The article argues that government and civil institutions contain and shape children in the context of the dual oppressions of violenc…
Transatlantic unity on display: The "white legend" and the "pact of silence" in Madrid's Museum of the Americas
This article examines the history and recent pro-immigrant installations of the postcolonial Museum of the Americas in Madrid. It critically relates the Hispanist "White Legend" regarding the benevolence of Spanish colonialism to both the "pact of silence" following Spain's Civil War and the current Spanish orientation towards immigrants from Latin America. Despite significant recent reconceptualization, the museum continues to put forward a narr…
Alejarse como proceso social: Niños y ancianos «abandonados» en Ayacucho
En investigaciones previas sobre el acogimiento familiar y la adopción en Ayacucho, se ha podido descubrir cómo los ayacuchanos adquieren y producen relaciones sociales. Mientras negocian creativamente los discursos y espacios construidos simultáneamente por instituciones, comunidades, y estructuras sociales, van adquiriendo nuevas formas de relacionarse. Este artículo discute el proceso opuesto: el deshacerse de relaciones de parentesco, y el pr…
Caring for Aging Parents in Peru: Social Obligations and Economic Change
Papering the Origins: Place-Making, Privacy, and Kinship in Spanish International Adoption
This article examines place and privacy as two key resources for producing kinship through an analysis of exceptional legal practices in Spain that overdetermine international adoptees’ Spanishness. Per Spanish law, minors internationally adopted by a Spanish parent are “Spanish by origin” (españoles de origen). Over and above this, however, Spain’s Civil Registry Law was modified in 2005 to allow internationally adoptive parents to officially ch…
Aging, Relatedness, and Social Abandonment in Highland Peru
Report summarizing preliminary ethnographic research on aging in Highland Peru
Practice Mothers
During the first half of the twentieth century, “practice houses,” or home management houses, thrived in home economics departments of land-grant universities around North America. Practice houses were domestic settings where young women could get hands-on training and experience in all the latest methods and technologies to efficiently manage domestic space and activity. They were also part of a larger trend of professionalization of home econom…
Little Strangers: International Adoption and American Kinship. A Review Essay
In Victorian England, the phrase “little stranger” was used to refer to the unborn child one had not yet met. Though it has fallen out of use today, the expression is not inapt for describing the children who enter new families, new ethnic or cultural identities, new social classes, and new nations via international adoption. Over time, and through a series of social practices designed both to “kin” the child and parents, siblings, and other rela…
Solidarity exclusions: Problematizing kinship and humanitarianism from the perspective of transnational adoption
What is, or should be, the role of solidarity within the (transnationally adoptive) family? In Spain, solidaridad is a prized value in family life, political organization, and humanitarian action, yet adoption professionals actively discouraged its use as a motivation for transnational adoption. This article offers a genealogy of the concept of solidaridad, a consideration of its enduring currency in kinship discourse in Spain, and a critical ana…
Adoption knowledge: A citizen-scientific use ofFamilySearchto understand Peruvian adoption
This article analyzes the citizen-scientific work conducted by a Peruvian adoptee, co-author Milagros Caroline Forrester, who is collecting, archiving, coding, and analyzing the birth records of Peruvian adoptees she encounters through her ongoing review of FamilySearch, a depository of genealogical data run by the Mormon Church. Forrester's project resembles the personal birthparent searches conducted by many adopted people, but at another scale…
Kinship and Adopting Strategies in Peru
The State and Children's Fate: Reproduction in traumatic times
This article introduces a special issue on the meaning of children in violent, uncertain times. It is framed in terms of the political-economy aspects of adoption, focusing on the local occurrences that make international adoption possible, from legal determinations of abandonment to wartime and postwar parenting. The article argues that government and civil institutions contain and shape children in the context of the dual oppressions of violenc…
Choosing to Move: Child agency on Peru's margins
This article links research into constructions of childhood and child agency to anthropological studies of young people's informal adoption and state involvement in family arrangements. It analyses the life history of a young Peruvian woman who deliberately chose to move into an orphanage. The multiple points at which individual and family plans and efforts are shaped by broader political economic matters are addressed in a discussion of how urba…
The Peru Reader: History,Culture, Politics
On moving children: The social implications of Andean child circulation
In this article, I draw from ethnographic research in Ayacucho, Peru, to describe how rural-to-urban migrants move children between houses as part of a common survival and betterment strategy in the context of social and economic inequality. Such "child circulations" produce and strengthen kinship and are an important part of local family-making efforts. My investigation of child circulation grounds a critical assessment of Peru's globalized adop…
A Note on Translation
Improving Oneself: Young People Getting Ahead in the Peruvian Andes
Among rural-to-urban migrants in Peru, the concept of "improving oneself" (superar ) refers to the process of overcoming poverty through dedicated efforts at self-improvement. This individual effort is situated as a moral act, occurring within a relational web of persons who should also benefit. It is described as a family project and a moral imperative for young people, and they internalize their role in this group effort. The concept is the eco…
The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru
Jessaca B. Leinaweaver's "The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru" explores the complex social practice of child circulation in the Andes. Challenging Western notions of kinship and family, Leinaweaver demonstrates how children are frequently moved between households, not as a sign of neglect or abandonment, but as a strategic response to economic hardship, social aspirations, and changing family dynamics. This…
Caring for Aging Parents in Peru: Social Obligations and Economic Change
Kinship into the Peruvian Adoption Office: Reproducing Families, Producing the State
El artículo analiza los instrumentos y las estrategias articuladas por trabajadoras de la oficina de adopciones del gobierno peruano para trasladar niños de familias pobres o indígenas, o de instituciones estatales, a familias peruanas o extranjeras de clase media. El análisis de los mecanismos a través de los cuales las trabajadoras comprenden e interpretan la legislación sobre adopción demuestra como ellas a la vez reproducen nociones hegemónic…
Introduction: Cultural and Political Economies of Adoption in Latin America
Performing Kinship: Narrative, Gender, and the Intimacies of Power in the Andes by Krista E. Van Vleet
Raising the roof in the transnational Andes: Building Houses, Forging Kinship
Transnational migration transforms houses, the rituals surrounding them, and the people who live in those houses and use them to understand aspects of their social and ethnic identities. I focus on the Andean house-roofing ritual known as the zafacasa to demonstrate the centrality of the house as a mediator for personal relationships, and the importance of such rituals for reconstituting social bonds both in spite of and because of distance. The …
Outsourcing Care: How Peruvian Migrants Meet Transnational Family Obligations
Migration from Peru has increased dramatically over the past decade, but the social and relational repercussions of these transnational movements have not yet been fully explored. Examination of the way migrants manage their responsibilities to dependent kin in Peru reveals that child fostering makes it possible for adults to migrate in search of better work opportunities by ensuring care for their children and company for their older relatives. …
Alejarse como proceso social: Niños y ancianos «abandonados» en Ayacucho
En investigaciones previas sobre el acogimiento familiar y la adopción en Ayacucho, se ha podido descubrir cómo los ayacuchanos adquieren y producen relaciones sociales. Mientras negocian creativamente los discursos y espacios construidos simultáneamente por instituciones, comunidades, y estructuras sociales, van adquiriendo nuevas formas de relacionarse. Este artículo discute el proceso opuesto: el deshacerse de relaciones de parentesco, y el pr…
Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850-1930 by Nara B. Milanich
Losing Lévi-Strauss: The 2009 Year in Cultural Anthropology
In 2009, Claude Lévi-Strauss died at the age of 100. In this article, I draw on frameworks that were central to his work to structure my discussion of the key themes in cultural anthropology publications over the past year. The four subjects I consider in this review are kinship, taxonomy, bricolage, and traveling
Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics edited by Peter Wade
Kinship Paths to and from the New E urope: A Unified Analysis of P eruvian Adoption and Migration
Este ensayo compara migrantes y adoptados peruanos quienes viven en Europa, enfocándose en los movimientos desde un país remitente y los movimientos hacía tal país. Primero, analiza las reagrupaciones familiares usando un marco analítico de los estudios de parentesco y adopciones. Yuxtapone las experiencias de migrantes y adoptados para mostrar que la migración también es estructurada por preocupaciones de parentesco. Luego, analiza los retornos …
Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption by Barbara Yngvesson
Little Strangers: International Adoption and American Kinship. A Review Essay
In Victorian England, the phrase “little stranger” was used to refer to the unborn child one had not yet met. Though it has fallen out of use today, the expression is not inapt for describing the children who enter new families, new ethnic or cultural identities, new social classes, and new nations via international adoption. Over time, and through a series of social practices designed both to “kin” the child and parents, siblings, and other rela…
Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain
Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption
Over the past decade, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have explored the increasingly visible phenomenon of transnational adoption, often focusing on the perspective of adoptive families. In Somebody’s Children, Laura Briggs reminds us that such adoptions are not only about how children and parents are joined across borders. They are also just as significantly about how so many children came to be defined as adoptable in the first pl…
Practice Mothers
During the first half of the twentieth century, “practice houses,” or home management houses, thrived in home economics departments of land-grant universities around North America. Practice houses were domestic settings where young women could get hands-on training and experience in all the latest methods and technologies to efficiently manage domestic space and activity. They were also part of a larger trend of professionalization of home econom…
Toward an Anthropology of Ingratitude: Notes from Andean Kinship
In this article I examine gratitude and ingratitude as valuable analytical tools for determining how social inequalities inform kinship practices. Accusing one's kin of ingratitude reveals the edges and fault lines of kinship, as well as closely related expectations aboutwhatshould be given,howit should be given, and how it should bereceived. As such, this essay follows in an esteemed anthropological tradition of unifying analyses of the gift and…
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (24 works) · Kinship (21 works) · Anthropology (19 works) · Child Welfare and Adoption (19 works) · Law (15 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · History (11 works) · Geography (9 works)