Per alienus, per intimus : agency and the dialectics of identity in adoption / by Jonathan Telfer.

Abstract

Explores the social dynamics of and interconnections between identity, relatedness and kinship. Argues that identity is fundamentally implicated in understandings of, conflict over and practices around relatedness and kinship. To study identity with regard to the exigencies of relatedness and kinship, uses adoption as an ethnographic and conceptual vehicle and argues that the cultural constructions and interplays between the biogenetic and the social in circumstances associated with adoption are both contextual and potent in relation to multifarious claims to and persuits of identity. Identity and questions of agency are understood as sites for creative struggles by individual agents, within a matrix of competing, often contradictory social forces, tendencies and processes.