Substance, sign, and trace

Performative analogies and technologies of enfleshment in the transnational adoption archives in Guatemala

Bibliographic Data

ID4801327
AuthorsPosocco (0000-0002-2075-1480, Birkbeck, University of London, corresponding author), Silvia Posocco
Year2015
Volume16
Issue5
Pages567-584
Publication date2015-07-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14649365.2015.1009855
OpenAlexW1971681683
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited32

In Kinship, Law and the Unexpected, Marilyn Strathern (2005, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Always a Surprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) shows how, through analogies, Euro-American knowledge practices turn offspring into property, information into knowledge, and relations into relations. This article takes this Strathernian insight as a point of departure for a consideration of the analytical possibilities - and the instances of incommensurability - of a juxtaposition of transnational adoption and migration. Drawing on ethnographic research in Guatemala, the article argues that kinning in this context relates not only to the construction of new forms of relatedness, but also, crucially, to the suspension and severing of relations, and to politically charged claims for the reactivation of connections and enfleshment. Against figurations of kinning as commodified and inequitable relations of ownership and exchange, struggles for 'searches' and 'reunions' in contemporary Guatemala bring into view a range of subjectivities and relations 'under erasure,' within the horizon of the Guatemalan conflict (1960-1996). Analogizing transnational adoption and migration is a cultural and analytical practice that performatively reveals and occludes. The article proposes a historically and idiomatically grounded reorientation of the analogic flow sideways, in the directions of the archive, as substance, sign, and trace

Assemblage (archaeology · Commodification · Diaspora · Performative utterance · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Child Welfare and Adoption · Sex work and related issues

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