ABSTRACT
Much of the pioneering anthropological work on adoption sought to generate a comparison between different adoption regimes by framing them as transactions in rights between adults (Carroll 1970, Brady 1976, J. Goody 1969, E. Goody 1982). This was of course the anthropological strategy of the day; cross-cultural comparison was possible because kinship ‘systems’ could be broken down to common denominators such as rights, obligations, inheritance, corporate consolidation, and inter-group politics. It was perhaps felt that because of the tremendous disparities between Western-style1 and ‘customary’ adoption, as well as the diversity of these forms of adoption themselves, the notion of adoption was only useful as a theoretical tool for the recognition of institutions in both the industrialised West and non-Western societies that dealt with transactions in ‘rights to’ children. ‘Rights and duties’ were the handles by which anthropological theorists transformed the parent-child relationship into a transactable object. The point was that rights and duties are conceptually and juridically separable from persons, and are not themselves persons, so that the discussion could be kept distinct from questions of slavery.2 But rights-as-objects also enabled an interpretive step by means of which theorists could then proceed to ‘property’ or ‘commodities’. Take, for example, a paradigmatic statement from Goodenough:
People’s labor, companionship, and allegiance are in effect commodities, and access to them, as to other valued commodities, is universally subject to social regulation. Although we do not ordinarily think of it in this way, the rights people have in regard to these things are a form of property. Adoption and fosterage are transactions in parenthood as a form of property.
