ABSTRACT
Anthropologists doing research on traditional societies have pondered over practices related to the circulation of children since the early days of the discipline. The quandary of children living with parents unrelated by blood has been a key element in rethinking the naturalized conjugal family and formulating alternative models for the study of kinship organization. Many of these studies, however, might well be classified under what Ginsburg and Rapp have called the ‘natural history’ approach to reproduction: the ‘fine-grained, local-level, holistic analysis [whose] strength – its focus on cultural specificity – was sometimes also its limitation’ (1995: 1). Few researchers have studied informal circuits of child circulation within complex societies where the state and global processes have a clear impact.
