ABSTRACT
When I heard about the call for papers for a panel on cross-cultural approaches to adoption, I immediately thought of my personal experience. I once adopted an African child who afterwards was adopted by a Swiss-French couple. The child changed her national identity from Cameroonian to German to Swiss – a real case of cross-cultural adoption. Having learnt that participant observation obliges a researcher not to get emotionally or personally involved too deeply with the people with whom one is doing research, I was conscious of the fact that I had transgressed one of the golden rules of anthropological fieldwork. That is why I am glad to get a chance to present my case to the scientific community. I want to discuss the following questions. First, is it legitimate to transfer a child from the cultural background into which it is born into a completely strange one and do I not provoke a conflict of identity? Second, do I not disqualify myself as a researcher if I get personally involved with the people I am studying? Is this a form of “going native”? I want to say this much in advance: my story of adoption had an inner dynamic and I was not the only person to write this script. Furthermore, I do not claim to make any statements that could be generalized.
