ABSTRACT
Drawing on ethnographic material from Ecuador this chapter discusses the process by which abandoned, orphaned or handed-over children are readied for international adoption. I will be concerned with the adoption process in the children’s country of origin,2 in which children come into circulation and a new social relation is constituted between adoptee and adoptive parent or parents. A crucial concern for prospective adoptive parents is to build a strong emotional tie with the adopted child, and to incorporate this newcomer into their kinship circle (Modell 1994; Schneider 1984). Hence the adoptive parents tend to conceive of the child’s value as one of sentiment, of personal and inherent qualities and of moral character, incomparable with any monetarized value or market price. The adopted child is, as Zelizer (1985) puts it, priceless in the eyes of the adoptive parents. A closer look at the way the adoption process is carried out in the Ecuadorian context, however, makes the issue of value less unambiguous. During its circulation from birth or original parents to future adoptive parents, the adopted child, or rather its case, passes through a series of legal procedures within the Ecuadorian state bureaucracy. The child is stored and cared for by orphanages or substitute families, and it is exchanged and connected to a price in the market. The adoptee is at different stages in its circulation valued differently, and as a result brought closer to and farther from its objectified form.
