ABSTRACT
A common modern understanding of adoption is based on the idea of a person or a couple looking after someone else’s child on a long-term basis (fostering), and the acquisition of fictive but juridically binding “kin” relationship between such “parents” and the adopted child. This chapter deals with strategies and cultural notions of adoption, fostering and cosmo-sociological integration that go beyond such an understanding. Through an examination of empirical cases of adoption among the Yukpa and comparative evidence from other Carib-speaking Amerindians I identify some restrictions and weaknesses in current theoretical concepts. I argue that adoption does not necessarily imply a process of consanguinization of the adoptee, and consequently inclusion as a child is not the only possible outcome of adoption and fostering.
