Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Childhood

Mental Health

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 15:25:29 +0000

"Be happy and live". Photo taken in 2021 by photographer and mental health activist Damilare Adeyemi.

King's College London

Initially published 4 Apr 2023

Abstract:

When we talk about mental health, we could seem to be talking about some self-evident reality. However, the very notion of mental health can be seen to both assume and require a specific vision of human interiority. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’—or the ‘psy' disciplines—were particularly formative in defining this perceived interior selfhood through various scientific and therapeutic practices of inspection and introspection, through new constitutions, articulations, and regulations of what it means to be human. Mental health could be seen to be fundamental to our collective and individual ability as humans to think, feel, relate, interact with each other, sustain ourselves, and enjoy life. This entry explores some key theoretical and ethnographic interests, and their alignments and tensions, through which different anthropologies of mental health have taken shape. For example, social studies of mental health have been shaped by various engagements of ‘culture’ as a form of both contextualisation and critique. More recently, scholars have examined the political, ethical, and therapeutic processes by which people come to constitute themselves and others—for instance, through everyday practices of self-care or clinical diagnosis and treatment—as particular subjects of mental health. Anthropologists have described how people’s experiences of mental health and its associated afflictions are constituted relationally, in different ways, and with different social consequences around the world. The entry ends with a brief discussion of some current topics in anthropological studies of mental health, from the proliferation of mental disorders and the prevalence of neurobiological understandings of human distress to the increasing digitalisation of mental health. As these and other efforts imply, mental health is becoming a prominent field of enquiry in contemporary anthropology and one with renewed ethnographic salience for everyone involved.

Introduction: Situating mental health

The concept of mental health has drawn together a range of ideas and practices that have come to define, and intervene on, what it means to be human. In contemporary English-speaking societies, it is a concept which is often used to express a concern for human well-being in psychological terms. However, what counts as ‘mental health’ is a question of varied social significance as we move historically and ethnographically across time and space. Increasingly, mental health figures as a universal feature in conceptualising humans, and, conversely, mental ill-health is understood to affect humans globally, with an estimate of 970 million (or 1 in 8) people around the world considered to be living with a ‘mental disorder’.^{^[1]}

Some anthropologists have argued that mental illness is recognised in every culture, even if the ways in which people experience, treat, and make sense of psychological distress might differ considerably (see e.g. Luhrmann and Marrow 2016). Others have been sceptical of the very language of ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’, particularly where it has been deployed to pathologise or criminalise incongruent desires and bodies, as in the case of homosexuality for instance (Foucault [1961] 1988a), and to uphold systems of colonialism and racialisation (Fanon 1963). At the same time, the concept of mental health construed as a shared human condition of what it means to be psychologically well has been deemed important and needed; indeed, mental health has in recent decades come to be regarded as a ‘human right’ by the World Health Organisation (WHO).^{^[2]} Increasingly across different social worlds, from local healing practices and national health systems to everyday affairs of care and kinship, global health discourses, and beyond, mental health has emerged as something that ‘everyone has’. It is something that, for better or worse, warrants attention and action.

This entry provides a brief exploration of some theoretical and ethnographic interests that have been particularly instructive in anthropological studies of mental health. Before turning to anthropology, however, the entry suggests a way of situating mental health. This can only be done in very general terms here. One important point is that, despite its contemporary ubiquity and salience, mental health is a relatively recent concept that emerged in particular historical (and historiographical) circumstances, shaped by new psychological practices and institutions, through which new constitutions, articulations, and regulations of a ‘healthy mind’ were effected. Modern psychology now generally considers people to have something called mental health located in the putatively subjective interiority of the individual person, a human interiority which has become aligned with particular notions of ‘the mind’ or ‘the brain’ (Martin 2021; Rose and Abi-Rached 2013).

The concept of mental health reveals a complex historiography of social transformations over the past two hundred years, from the era of the asylums to the psychiatric hospitals and mental health services with which we are familiar today (Foucault [1961] 1988a; Unsworth 1993; Shorter 2007). It is a concept shaped particularly by two world wars and the emergence of welfare states with the monitoring of publics and populations (Fraser 1984; Busfield 1998; Marks 2017). Importantly, ideas of mental illness have also emerged in contexts of colonisation and decolonisation (Reyes-Foster 2018; Calabrese 2013; see also Fanon 1963). The historical precursor to the concept of mental health has been traced back to the efforts of the ‘mental hygiene movement’ that took shape in Europe and America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bertolote 2008; Novella and Campos 2017). The idea of ‘mental hygiene’ gained traction in the second half of the nineteenth century and is often credited to the work of William Sweetser (1797–1875), who defined it as the science of preserving a healthy mind (Sweetser 1850). The mental hygiene movement sought to establish public health measures and interventions in the prevention and treatment of mental disorders. In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, the term ‘mental health’ gradually replaced the language of mental hygiene because the latter had become increasingly associated with Nazi eugenics.

When we move to present-day contexts of the cognitive sciences, mental health figures as a wide-ranging field of research, with several scientific and clinical definitions currently in circulation. The WHO offers the following:

Mental health is a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.^{^[3]}

The WHO states further that ‘mental health is more than just the absence of mental disorders’. Conversely, according to this definition, mental ill-health implies that a person lies at a ‘negative’ end of a health continuum. For instance, mental health professionals might speak of ‘caseness’, of being ‘a clinical case’ (see e.g. Susko 1994), which means that a person who reports distress considered as pathologically significant is deemed to be suffering from mental ill-health. We see here that the very conception of mental health hinges on one of the key problems in psychiatry, namely the epistemic resolution of the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’—including that distinction itself (Canguilhem [1966] 1989; Foucault [1963] 1973). The various ‘psy’ sciences (Rose 1985) that emerged over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries established themselves by claiming their ability to deal with a range of mental and behavioural phenomena deemed dysfunctional or abnormal. The concept of mental health was thus historically constructed around notions of pathology and the differentiation between normal and non-normal conduct.

Anthropological trajectories

Contemporary worlds of mental health can be seen to constitute a multitude of sciences, technologies, and professions, as well as involve a wide range of therapeutics and care practices within and beyond clinical settings. In the following sections, we are going to look at some key anthropological trajectories in relation to what has been collectively termed the ‘psy disciplines’, that is, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology. Anthropologists have increasingly come to treat mental health as an ethnographic topic of central rather than tangential interest. This entry suggests that we might think of different anthropologies of mental health, some of which have developed within specific subfields of social and cultural anthropology, such as medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, and cross-cultural or transcultural psychiatry. Since the early twentieth century, anthropologists have developed diverse ways of studying issues that we might, for the moment, summarise as concerning ‘mental health’. However, this term—and other related terms such as ‘well-being’—came generally much later in anthropology.^{^[4]}

Anthropological research on mental health has often focused on traversing or reconciling the disciplinary fields of anthropology and psychiatry. One key aim was to render anthropological knowledge applicable to clinical problems. To some, this meant accounting for ‘culture’ in psychiatry, particularly in terms of ‘cultural difference’ in the perception and experience of illness, and in the classification, diagnosis, and treatment of people (Kleinman 1980; Littlewood and Lipsedge 1997). Within anthropology, it is largely medical anthropologists who have been at the forefront of dealing with these issues in the context of psychiatry—a discipline that has tended to dominate anthropological studies of mental health both ethnographically and analytically (see, e.g., Sapir 1932; Opler 1959; Westermeyer 1976; Kleinman 1988; Luhrmann 2000; Littlewood 2002; Brodwin 2013; Jenkins 2018; Pinto 2020).

Ethnographic fieldwork encourages us to take seriously the experiential realities of those we study. Anthropologists might not always find it appropriate, therefore, to assume a particular definition of mental health but tend instead to be more interested in how the people they study are establishing and enacting their own definitions and self-defining worlds: for example, how people might understand, use, resist, and live ‘mental health’, and the consequences. As such, rather than taking mental health for granted as pre-given or self-evident, we can think of it as something that emerges relationally. This entry suggests that mental health comes to figure in multiple ethnographic senses: as a presumed universal feature of the human mind; a sense of self; a psychological state that can be intervened upon and taken care of; a measure for populations, groups, or individuals; an object of therapeutic enquiry; a matter of concern for those classified as patients; and so on. We could talk here of different 'definitional realities' of mental health that constitute its meaning (see Ardener 1982; Hastrup 1995; McDonald 2020). For instance, clinical evaluations of mental health are inevitably dependent on the conceptual definitions offered of that reality. Analytically, this means that ‘mental health’ does not figure as an a priori phenomenon anterior to its relations and articulations, but as a category in action. Some social scientists might want to talk here about the ontological multiplicity of mental health; for example, how it is enacted and coordinated as a matter of concern—similar to the ‘doing’ of disease in medical practice (Mol 2002).

The ‘social’ and the ‘psy’

The question of mental health has been shaped by various attempts to either separate or reconcile the social and the psychological. Such attempts were particularly influenced by anthropological studies of the so-called ‘primitive mind’, the 'personality of culture', and the nature of human cognition. Anthropology addressed mental health as an object of study, in an important sense, via the scientific ambitions of the early psy disciplines, notably late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century psychoanalysis and experimental psychology. Yet mental health was often only implicitly dealt with, eclipsed by prevailing ambitions at the time to ascertain a universal human psychology—‘the generalised mind’—inspired in part by the German experimental psychologist William Wundt’s (1832–1920) ‘introspective’ methods, as well as by subsequent anthropological investigations into what was then seen as the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ mind (Martin 2021, 26–51; see also Rieber 1980; Mandler 2011). Influenced by Darwinian evolutionism and its underbelly of Victorian scientific racism, a widespread theory of human psychology claimed that so-called ‘primitive’ people lacked higher mental functions while they surpassed ‘civilised’ people in physical performance, because more energy was seen to remain devoted to their physicality as opposed to their mentality (Martin 2021, 37). This theory was put to test, and eventually challenged, by the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (Haddon 1901; Herle and Rouse 1998; Sullivan 2012), which also sought more generally to investigate psychological ‘introspection’, namely the inspection of one’s own internal mental processes. The expedition was influential in shaping both modern anthropology, and in bringing together psychology and anthropology with a common interest in what we might now want to see as an early version of mental health research.

However, the relationship between anthropology and psychology as exemplified by the Cambridge Expedition did not end in a happy marriage. On the contrary, in Britain and elsewhere, the social and cultural were in many ways further delineated in contradistinction to the psychological. During the early twentieth century, new disciplinary identities emerged as practitioners marked out social science (including anthropology) distinct from psychology and natural science. For example, the British anthropologist Edmund Leach treated psychology as a discipline against which social scientists are ranged. He asserted that ‘[the anthropologist] will be well advised to leave psychological matters to psychologists and stick firmly to the public sociological facets of the case’ (1958, 148). This was a disciplinary division of labour according to which the world was also divided into a presumed separation of the public and private, the collective and individual, the external and internal. One of the pioneers of British social anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) effected his own disciplinary boundary-making by way of critically engaging with psychoanalysis. In Sex and repression in savage society (1927), Malinowski famously examined the Freudian ‘Oedipus complex’ in the context of Trobriand kin relations and child development, which led him to dismiss any notion of Oedipal universality claimed by psychoanalysts of the day. While Malinowski remained a critic of psychoanalysis and its ‘exorbitant claims’ throughout his career, he also contended that its ‘open treatment of sex […] is of the greatest value to science’ (Malinowski 1927, vii–viii). Although Malinowski and Leach, and, before them, Émile Durkheim ([1912] 2008), had long moved the ‘social’ away from the ‘psy’, the question of human interiority—for some the seat of cognition, emotion, and subjectivity, complete with an individuated mind or consciousness (indeed, what many today might think of as pertaining to mental health)—never completely disappeared from anthropology.

Influenced by the work of Franz Boas (1858–1942), another famous anthropological pioneer, developments in American cultural anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century offered a rather different engagement of psychological theories. The most prominent development came from the ‘culture and personality’ movement during the 1920s and 30s instigated by the work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (all former students of Boas) and which subsequently fed into the American-bred field of psychological anthropology (Ingham 1996; LeVine 2010; see also Mead 1928; Sapir 1932; Benedict 1934). Applying their own critical reading of Freudian psychoanalysis, they argued that human behaviour is ‘culturally patterned’, just like speech is patterned by a particular language. The cultural patterns of childhood experience were thus considered to be the cause of adult personality characteristics, which in turn gave rise to culture-specific patterns of mental health and forms of psychopathology. The aim was for some to develop a generalised cultural description of mental health through ethnographic research on individual personalities and, by extension, the personality of cultures. For other anthropologists, however, such an ambition simply confirmed what they had previously suspected, that a psychologised version of anthropology was susceptible to reductionism and overgeneralisation (LeVine 2001).

It was only much later with the ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1970s, that ‘psy’ gradually came to occupy another conceptual space among anthropologists as they began to move from the mythic and symbolic universe of structuralism (owed to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and those who read him, see e.g. 1963) to the laboratory of cognitive science. New evolutionary theories equipped anthropologists with novel rethinkings of ‘cognition’ (e.g. Bateson 1972) that shaped the emerging subfield of cognitive anthropology (Blount 2011). Importantly, some anthropologists challenged what to them appeared to be their discipline’s ignorance of a properly scientific study of human mental life. Cognitive anthropology sought to put an end to the Durkheimian separation of the social from the psy that had informed so much of anthropology. However, mental health was still largely a taken-for-granted object in cognitive anthropology, which has tended instead to examine the transmission of cultural representations, Theory of Mind (ToM), innate modularity, and cognate ideas (see Whitehouse 2001; Bloch 2012; Irvine 2018). In all such endeavours, and in those that have come after, the concept of culture looms large.

Culture and mental health

Anthropological studies of mental health in the second half of the twentieth century have been driven by efforts to account for ‘culture’ and ‘cultural differences’ that came out of interdisciplinary borderlands between psychiatry and anthropology, sometimes referred to as ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘transcultural’ studies (cf. Opler 1959; Westermeyer 1976). Culture was also taken up as a language of anthropological critique. For example, the psychiatrist-cum-anthropologist Roland Littlewood has argued that the concept of culture remains ambiguous for psychiatry as it has tended to perceive it as secondary to a biomedical reality. He argued that psychopathology is inherently ‘local’, and that the discipline of psychiatry has its own tacit ‘culture’ (Littlewood 1996). Earlier work had already introduced the idea of ‘the cultural construction of clinical reality’ and encouraged ‘a clinical social science capable of translating concepts from cultural anthropology into clinical language for practical application’ (Kleinman, Eisenberg and Goods 1978, 140). Its authors urged a distinction between ‘disease’ and ‘illness’, as well as the concept of ‘explanatory models’ that sought to include and elicit the ‘patient’s experience’ of disease and treatment: how do people understand and live with mental illness? How is disease perceived in cultural terms? What or who caused it, and how? This work seemed in many ways novel and important, but it still took for granted many of the old dichotomies of medicine. For instance, Kleinman and his colleagues presented a scenario of doctors with scientific ‘knowledge’ and patients with culturally determined ‘beliefs’; with ‘disease’ (medical reality) on the one hand, and ‘illness’ (cultural experience) on the other.

The disease versus illness distinction has informed much research in the intersecting fields of anthropology and psychiatry, as well as beyond: it is now a common component of clinical education programmes where it features as a way of reinserting ‘the cultural context’ where such is deemed lacking or to acknowledge ‘the patient perspective’. Yet this conceptual binary can also imply a problematic separation of the physical versus the mental whereby the former is seen as underlying (biological) causation and the latter as mere (cultural) representation. This has tended to presuppose that neurobiology—as a seemingly culture-free reality—is the ontological foundation of mental health upon which perceptions and experiences of it are culturally or socially constructed. We can trace many contemporary versions of this type of social and cultural constructionism in anthropologies of mental health and related fields.^{^[5]}

The earlier work of Kleinman (1980; 1988) along with the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s (e.g. Szasz 1974) nevertheless had a significant impact in confronting psychiatry with ‘culture’, although their reasons for doing so differed greatly: anthropologists generally sought to improve psychiatry rather than dismantle it. Even so, anthropologists now seemed equipped to take apart the cultural preconceptions built into psychiatric diagnoses and treatments in a manner that exposed psychiatric conceptions of mental disorder as inherently ethnocentric, revealing underpinning cultural biases and assumptions (Littlewood and Lipsedge 1997). Anthropologies of mental health and illness have since been routinely embedded in constructs of ‘cultural difference’ or ‘different cultures’ (e.g. Littlewood and Dein 2000; Luhrmann et al. 2015; Onchev 2019). The language of culture has also been considered a worthwhile mode of contextualisation in a field of research that still tends to be dominated by biological determinism (e.g. Sargent and Larchanché 2009). Some anthropologists have found it compelling to talk of ‘the culture’ of the mental health clinic (Luhrmann 2000, 119–57); of differences in professional and therapeutic cultures, with diagnosis, treatment, and patients recontextualised. More recently, new interdisciplinary engagements between anthropology and psychology have described how different cultures ‘invite’ people to relate to their mind in particular ways, which in turn affects the kinds of mental experiences people have and how they make sense of them (Luhrmann 2020; Weisman et al. 2021). Understanding mental health here means grasping shifting cultural models of mind.

Historically, anthropologists have thus been largely responsible for introducing the concept of culture to the study of mental health (cf. Mead 1953; Opler 1959; Westermeyer 1976), although it did not always bring about the anthropological insights that occasioned it. For example, ‘cultural competency’ now regularly features as an important educational component of many mental health training programmes and services (e.g. Carpenter-Song, Schwallie and Longhofer 2007). But cultural competency efforts, despite their best intentions, can appear to treat culture simply as a variable to be accounted for. Different differences—what might be seen as pertaining to nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality—are often brought together under a single denominator of the ‘cultural’, thereby eliding a range of experiences altogether.^{^[6]}

The concept of culture has in many ways effected its own problems. Introducing ‘culture’ in studies of mental health, as suggested above, meant introducing ‘context’ and then ‘meaning’. Yet, in these instances, culture is easily reified in ways that some anthropologists might find rather problematic (Strathern 1995; Fox and King 2002; McDonald 2012). For example, speaking about different cultures of mental health might imply an unhelpful normativity that requires further anthropological validation, and evoking culture as a mode of contextualisation and critique does not always differ significantly from people’s own self-understanding. Whitney Duncan (2017) explores this latter point in her ethnography of psychoeducation (psicoeducación) in Oaxaca, Mexico. Working with psychologists and patients in and around a psychiatric hospital, she describes how mental health practitioners come to understand culture as a barrier to mental healthcare. They strive to further ‘psy-globalisation’—the transnational flow of ideologies and practices around mental health. Practitioners see themselves as involved in a global and modernising movement to promote mental health but express frustration about how difficult this project is in Oaxaca, where ‘local culture’ prevents their efforts (Duncan 2017, 37). Mental health practice thus emerges as a project of what she terms ‘psychological modernisation’, a movement that is defined against its own perception of local culture (consisting of ‘traditional medicine’, ‘beliefs’, and ‘magical thinking’). It considers local culture to be incommensurable with global notions of mental health and a source of resistance to mental healthcare and its de-stigmatisation. Not only does psychoeducation in Oaxaca provide a means of self-understanding among professionals and patients alike in the context of modernity, Duncan argues, but it also actively seeks to produce the psychological conditions for modernity.

From governmentality to self-cultivation

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has arguably been one of the most influential scholars in social studies of mental health and illness. It was the earlier body of his work on the history of madness and the birth of the clinic (Foucault [1961] 1988a; [1963] 1973) which initially inspired critical examinations of the psy disciplines—speaking of a ‘great confinement’ of the mad into asylums and new scientific ambitions that effected the authority of a ‘medical gaze’ (e.g. Hacking 1998; Rose 1989; Danziger 1998). These accounts have traced how, over the course of the twentieth century, psychological knowledge regimes have effected new forms of self-governance—what Foucault called ‘governmentality’—and political relations. The insight that whole populations and ‘life itself’ have become problematised as objects of management and regulation gave rise to the terms ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ (Foucault et al. 1991; Rose 2006).^{^[7]} In the formation of (neo)liberal democracy, Nikolas Rose (1996) has shown that diverse psychological knowledge practices require that we ‘invent our selves’ or constitute ourselves as if we were selves. The crux of the arguments that run through much of this and related Foucauldian scholarship is the contention that, in the name of expertise and well-being, the psy disciplines—their institutions, professions, technologies, and interventions—conceal and instil specific moral and political ideologies that shape the ways we come to know, relate to, and act upon ourselves and others. Constituted through discourses of individual autonomy, people are rendered responsible for their mental health—for instance, in everyday articulations and requirements ‘to take care of yourself’—in the name of their own freedom.

Anthropologists of mental health have also drawn from Foucault’s work on ‘subjectification’ (assujettissement) in examining the different modes and processes by which human beings are made into subjects. Subjectification refers not only to a mode of having power and control exercised over oneself (‘political subjection’) but also to modes of acting upon oneself and others that constitute one as a particular kind of subject (Foucault 1997). When applying this analytical lens to mental health, it can elucidate, for instance, the effects of people subjected to practices of diagnosis and treatment by which they are classified as distinct clinical cases (e.g. ‘a patient with anxiety disorder’), at the same time as they are required to take up particular subject positions (see Hacking 1985, on ‘making up people’). Consider as example the construction of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD). Based on Vietnam War veterans’ reports of war-related trauma, PTSD was officially accepted in 1980 as a universal disorder, when it was included in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-III). This followed a political struggle by psychiatric workers on behalf of the large number of veterans who were seen to suffer from the psychological effects of traumatic memory (Young 1995). Contrary to the depiction of the disorder in psychiatric classification practices, PTSD may thus not be timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity:

Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilised these efforts and resources’ (1995, 5).

Young shows how clinicians in the US applied the diagnostic criteria to include people that they felt ought to be seen as mentally ill and shows the way patients in turn began to present themselves in such a way as to fit into the diagnostic categories of PTSD.

Moreover, some scholars have argued that psychiatry’s capacity to define the ‘mentally ill’ has been achieved partly through the making and remaking of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association 2013)^{^[8]} and through historical processes of institutional colonialism, market capitalism, and a medicalisation of human suffering (see e.g. Healy 1997; Kirk and Kutchins 1997; Borch-Jacobsen 2012; J. Davies 2021). This literature targets modern psychiatry and pharmaceutical industries in particular, and has echoes of earlier critiques that came out of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 70s (e.g. Fanon 1963; Szasz 1974). This was a movement influenced by Foucault’s genealogy of madness, which appeared to expose psychiatry in many ways as a structural oppressor. Foucault’s scholarship thus had a significant impact on intellectual anti-psychiatry critics, many of whom held academic positions in psychiatry, although he often distanced himself from the direction in which they took his work.

Since the 1980s and 90s, then, social scientists have been ready to contextualise and deconstruct mental health within an analytical frame of ‘politics’. Neoliberalism—with its associated ideals of autonomy and individual responsibility (Ganti 2014)—has often been evoked as one such political frame within which to locate and critique mental health. Social scientists have pointed to the impact of neoliberal attitudes on social and economic stressors such as unemployment in relation to the rapid increase in ‘mental health problems’. Neoliberalism especially shapes depression and the growing ‘happiness’ industry (W. Davies 2015). At the same time, even putatively ‘neoliberal’ mental health initiatives might be seen to move beyond political agendas and logics with unexpected consequences. For example, some anthropologists argue that the self-governing practices of individuals required to ‘work on’ their mental health—and any process of subjectification this might entail—are not always sustaining any straightforward or self-explanatory neoliberalism (Cook 2016; Bell and Green 2016). It has also been common in social science studies of mental healthcare for ‘politics’ (neoliberalism or capitalism, for instance) to be seen and cited as a domain that gets in the way. By the same token, one common way of criticising care has thus been to situate it in the service of politics.

T.M. Luhrmann’s (2000) ethnography of American psychiatrists can be read as an objection to the kind of critical studies of the psy disciplines discussed above. Luhrmann refrained from situating her study of American psychiatry in terms of Foucauldian governmentality, deeming such social science perspectives a naive romanticism that does little justice to the suffering subjects:

Foucault did presume that madness had always existed, but he romanticised it in a way that, despite all his insights, did a terrible disservice to its pain. […] Madness is real, and it is an act of moral cowardice to treat it as a romantic freedom. (2000, 11–2).

Instead, Luhrmann identified two competing paradigms in psychiatry: the psychotherapeutic model (informed by psychoanalysis and psychotherapy) and the biomedical model (informed by neuroscience and pharmacology). Her ethnography provides a remarkable account of the epistemological conflicts between ‘talk therapy’ and ‘drug therapy’, and the medico-moral consequences of losing the former to the latter.

More recently, it is Foucault’s later writings on ethics and care (see e.g. [1978] 1988b; 1997) that have inspired anthropological perspectives on mental health. People who undergo mental healthcare, for example, can be understood as participating in active processes of self-cultivation through an ethical practice of ‘reflective thought’ (Laidlaw 2018). Here, one’s mental health is constituted as an object of reflection in order to change it, or one's relation to it. Practitioners of ‘mindfulness-based cognitive therapy’ develop a particular ‘distanced perspective’ as they are learning to cultivate a detached relation to thoughts and feelings: ‘I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts’ (Cook 2015, 223–9). This seeming capacity for introspection, to take one’s ‘self’ as an object of inspection and reflection, is at once assumed and required in psychological therapies as practised in the UK and elsewhere (Bruun 2023). In the face of the promise of postsocialist democracy, the work of post-Soviet Russia’s psychotherapists can be understood as an ethical practice of freedom, but one that ultimately hinges on ‘an ongoing struggle between different assumptions about freedom […] that plays out through precarious care’ (Matza 2018, 241). The freedoms sought in post-Soviet Russia are less individualised and based instead on collective forms of ‘self-work’. Psychotherapists seek to cultivate mental health for themselves and their clients but are caught between psychology’s ambiguous care for the lives of two distinct groups of people—those who accumulated wealth and those who did not—following the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no easy way out of biopolitics here, but the logics of psychotherapeutic care also enable new ethical orientations, new modes of caring for self and others.

Foucauldian notions of both governmentality and self-cultivation have encouraged anthropologists and mental health practitioners alike: not only have they provided important conceptual frameworks within which anthropologists might contextualise and critique psychological realities, but they have also informed mental health practitioners’ own critical assessments of their professional worlds.

Psyches, minds, bodies, and brains

Within the historiographical context of the sciences, mental health emerged in mutual distinction and self-definition: physiology dealt with ‘the body’; psychology with ‘the mind’ or ‘psyche’. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’ were particularly formative in defining a perceived human interiority through different practices of inspection and introspection (Coon 1993; Danziger 1998; Vidal 2011). The modern disciplines of the clinic thus helped divide the human into the mental and the physical, the psychological and the physiological. We have largely inherited this and other dichotomies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where also ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ emerged in contradistinction (Daston and Galison 2007). New psycho-technologies and scientific methods of introspection helped constitute ‘the human mind’ as an object of both scientific observation and intervention (Rieber 1980; Green 2010; Martin 2021). Reified as empirical objects, ‘the mind’ and ‘the body’ established in turn universalising ideals about ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ health, including their demarcation and distinct disciplinary subdivisions and specialisms.

With the rise of neuroscience in the twenty-first century, some feel that mental health has finally been anchored in the physical reality of the brain (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013). Consequently, a biologically orientated psychiatry now tends to see the distressed mind as a result of a biologically dysfunctional brain. Focusing on the persuasive power of brain images as experienced by people suffering from mental ill-health, Joseph Dumit’s (2003) ethnography shows how neuronal connectivities and chemistries, such as neurotransmitters, come to be seen as the aetiology of distress. Through encounters with neuroscientific causation models where brain images (such as PET scans) play a key role, people come to understand themselves as having chemical imbalances in their brain that cause mental illness such as depression. Neuroscientific facts cast the afflicted person as a dysfunctional brain by which they acquire a sense that they are their brain. The persuasive idea here is that ‘the mind is what the brain does’. But this understanding of mental health, in which the person experiences distress because of their brain, also comes to sit in tension with people’s sense of an agentive self and a capacity for self-determination: ‘is it me or my brain?’ (Dumit 2003).

Neurobiological theories that envisage the brain as a chemical laboratory of mental health have, for a long time now, equipped mental healthcare systems with scientific rationales for the use of psychopharmaceuticals in the treatment and management of people who experience distress (Petryna, Lakoff and Kleinman 2006; Jenkins 2010; Oldani 2014). Biomedical models of mental health can thus appear to locate responsibility and agency elsewhere, namely in the biochemical constitution of brains. Conversely, anthropologists have also described how psychotherapists have tended to locate moral responsibility on the part of the afflicted person (Kirsner 1998; J. Davies 2009). Littlewood (2002) has construed this tension as ‘naturalistic’ versus ‘personalistic’ explanations of mental ill-health. For the biomedically-trained psychiatrist, however, mental illness was no longer anyone’s fault: people were instead suffering from discrete ‘disorders’ that could be detected neurologically and treated with drugs (Luhrmann 2012). By the 1980s, neuro- and cognitive scientists were throwing out the psyche and Freud had become a footnote in psychology textbooks as psychoanalytic theories and methods were largely discredited. Psychological scientists have since strived hard to situate mental health research in the scientific principles and measures of ‘real science’ on an equal footing with biomedicine, contending that their discipline could otherwise be lost to ‘pseudoscience’ (cf. Lilienfeld, Lynn and Lohr 2004).

Notions of the biochemical and genetic brain remain instructive in contemporary understandings of mental ill-health and its treatments (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013). It is partly through the persuasive notion of a universal human physiology that the concept of mental health has acquired its own universality. But it has also brought with it a biological understanding of minds and maladies. For some anthropologists, this entails a problematic reductionism which has caused a ‘psychiatric drug epidemic’ by way of pathologising human distress (J. Davies 2017). Over the past forty years, numbers of mental disorders have grown exponentially in the publications of international diagnostic manuals, resulting in a proliferation of psychopathologies and market-driven pharmaceutical treatments (Petryna, Lakoff and Kleinman 2006). In an age of psychopharmacology, the ‘pharmaceutical self’ (Jenkins 2010) continues to shape experiences of mental health with vast social, ethical, and economic effects.

Anthropology encourages us to treat the division of health into the ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ as a matter of ethnographic interest. It is, in other words, worthy of study to anthropologists that some people conceptualise health in terms of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, and that these divisions in turn mark out different realities deemed ‘psychological’ and ‘physiological’. More recently, the ‘biopsychosocial’ model, invented by the American psychiatrist George L. Engel (1977), has been an attempt to bring together different disciplines (biology, psychology, social science) alongside their associated realities (body, mind, society). Rather than treating these as separate phenomena, this model claims to further a more holistic and scientifically rigorous understanding of humans as biopsychosocial beings. In the context of mental healthcare, such an understanding has in turn encouraged a perspective on treatment in which it is no longer sufficient for interventions to consider only biological or psychological factors. Instead, treatment must include ‘the social’ in the sense of environment, context, and culture (see e.g. Álvarez, Pagani and Meucci 2012; Gask 2018). According to this model, mental health is not only a case of a biological body (a case of ‘brain chemistry’, for instance) existing anterior to its psyche, social relations, or environment, but of a whole body-mind-subject—biologically, psychologically, and socially constituted—in a particular cultural world. However, the anthropologist might wonder at the separations and connections that are sought here. We might ask, for example, if the tripartite differentiation put forward in the ‘biopsychosocial’ is still suggestive of a problem rather than offering a novel reconciliation.

The proliferation of mental health

Following the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, an upsurge in mental ill-health around the world and its associated medical, social, and economic impacts, including an exacerbation of existing health inequalities, have been widely reported on in scientific journals (e.g. Moreno et al. 2020; Wu et al. 2021). The Covid-19 pandemic has reinvigorated mental health as a matter of concern, from local and national levels of concern—pertaining to ‘individuals’ and ‘populations’—onto a cosmopolitan scale as part of ‘global mental health’ efforts. Mental health perceived as a global phenomenon, which might require equally global intervention, seems now a well-established reality that has received further experiential confirmation by reports of a worldwide mental health crisis of depression and anxiety disorders caused by the pandemic (e.g. Santomauro et al. 2021). Anthropological investigations of mental healthcare in times of ‘crisis’ seem therefore both pertinent and needed (see e.g. Wright 2022).

An important trajectory of anthropological research in the field of mental health has focused on the production of neuroscientific facts (Cohn 2008, 2010; Dumit 2004), the effects of pharmaceuticals (Dumit 2012; Jenkins 2010; Petryna, Lakoff and Kleinman 2006), and the construction of ‘disorders’, such as bipolar disorder (Martin 2007), autism, depression (Kitanaka 2012), and schizophrenia (Luhrmann and Marrow 2016). Furthermore, the expansion of ‘evidence-based psychological therapies’, especially cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness, and a proliferation of mental health initiatives and psy professions around the world have been a recent focus of ethnography by which new accountabilities, healing modalities, and configurations of care and politics have been examined (Brenman 2021; Bruun 2023; Cook and Cassaniti 2022; Duncan 2018; Huang 2018; Long 2018; Matza 2018; Pickersgill 2019b; Vogel 2017; Vorhölter 2021; Zhang 2020). These studies deal diversely with issues of precarity and access to mental healthcare, the transformation of therapeutic practices within and beyond their particular cultural or clinical environments, and the social and ethical consequences of particular scientific, economic, and political framings of mental health.

Another recent direction of research explores the digitalisation of mental health. The proliferation of digital monitoring technologies and AI-assisted interfaces—such as computerised therapeutics, online clinical platforms, smartphone apps, and wearable self-tracking devices—has constituted new fields of digitised mental healthcare (see e.g. Birk and Samuel 2020; Brandt and Stark 2018; Fullagar et al. 2017; Minozzo 2022; Pickersgill 2019a; Trnka 2022). Self-monitoring of ‘mental well-being’ is now part of many people’s daily health regimen as everyday activities of eating, sleeping, work, and recreation have become digitalised objects of observation shaped by ambitions to ‘encode wellness’ and promote personalised forms of health surveillance (Cearns forthcoming; Bruun forthcoming). This move towards ‘digital psy’ presents us with ‘disparate subjects, practices, places and temporalities of sensing, predicting, diagnosing, or treating mental health’ (Bemme, Brenman and Semel 2020). New therapeutic socialities and relationalities have unfolded.

Conclusion

The anthropology of mental health has come a long way. This entry has shown how ‘mental health’ can figure both as an analytical category in anthropology and an object of ethnography. Ethnographies of mental health can help us grasp not only the structural features of healthcare systems but also the modalities of healing and care in and beyond the clinic (e.g. Meyers 2013; Patton 2010), the medical and moral complexity of psychological distress (e.g. Luhrmann 2000; Zhang 2020), and the experiential realities that take shape around these issues. Where issues of authority and mental illness come together, anthropologists have demonstrated how people might resist, reinvent, or transform the therapeutic worlds in which they live (e.g. Brodwin 2013; Calabrese 2013; Myers 2015). Ethnography also teaches us that people’s experiences of mental health are situated in their own and others’ classifications and understandings of it (Bruun and Hutten forthcoming). Mental health thus entails particular kinds of theories that people have about themselves and others and the world in which they live. Anthropology can help us better understand why and how people experience mental distress but also what well-being and happiness might mean and look like.

Mental health might be seen to have acquired a hard-won universality. While some find this universality compelling and needed, others are critical of the ubiquity of mental health as an organising concept with the capacity to both normalise and pathologise. Kleinman, among others, contends that the expansion of the category of mental health ‘seems to simultaneously trivialize the most serious medical conditions and to medicalize social problems’ (2012, 118). He suggests that ‘fifty years from now this category will have been abandoned’ (Kleinman 2012, 118). Meanwhile, the realities of people’s experiences of mental health are unlikely to go away any time soon. In many parts of the world, mental health is now something that ‘everyone has’. To have mental health everywhere brings home its ethnographic salience.

Note

The writing of this article was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Programme for research and innovation (project no. 947867).

References

Álvarez, Ana Sabela, Marco Pagani, and Paolo Meucci. 2012. “The clinical application of the biopsychosocial model in mental health: A research critique.” American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation 91, no. 13: S173–80.

American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5®). Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association Publishing.

Ardener, Edwin. 1982. “Social anthropology, language and reality.” In Semantic anthropology, edited by David J. Parkin, 1–14. London: Academic Press.

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an ecology of mind: Selected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bell, Kirsten, and Judith Green. 2016. “On the perils of invoking neoliberalism in public health critique.” Critical Public Health 26, no. 3: 239–43.

Bemme, Dörte, Natassia Brenman, and Beth Semel. 2020. “The subjects of digital psychiatry.” Somatosphere, October 13. http://somatosphere.net/2020/subjects-of-digital-psychiatry.html/. Accessed 13 October 2022.

Benedict, Ruth. 1934. “Anthropology and the abnormal.” The Journal of General Psychology 10, no. 1: 59–82.

Bertolote, José. 2008. “The roots of the concept of mental health.” World Psychiatry 7, no. 2: 113–6.

Birk, Rasmus, and Gabrielle Samuel. 2020. “Can digital data diagnose mental health problems? A sociological exploration of ‘digital phenotyping.” Sociology of Health & Illness 48, no. 8: 1873–87.

Bloch, Maurice. 2012. Anthropology and the cognitive challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blount, B.G. 2011. “A history of cognitive anthropology.” In A companion to cognitive anthropology, edited by David B. Kronenfeld, Giovanni Bennardo, Victor C. de Munck and Michael D. Fischer, 9–29. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 2012. Making minds and madness: From hysteria to depression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brandt, Marisa, and Luke Stark. 2018. “Exploring digital interventions in mental health: A roadmap.” In Interventions: Communication research and practice, edited by Adrienne Shaw and D. Travers Scott, 167–82. Bern: Peter Lang.

Brenman, Natassia. 2021. “Placing precarity: Access and belonging in the shifting landscape of UK mental health care.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 45: 22–41.

Brodwin, Paul. 2013. Everyday ethics: Voices from the front line of community psychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bruun, Mikkel Kenni. 2023. “‘A factory of therapy’: Accountability and the monitoring of psychological therapy in IAPT.” Forthcoming in Anthropology & Medicine.

———. n.d. “Watching our selves.” Forthcoming in Times of surveillance, edited by Vita Peacock, Claire Elisabeth Dungey, Matan Shapiro, and Mikkel Kenni Bruun.

Bruun, Mikkel Kenni and Rebecca Hutten, n.d. Towards an anthropology of psychology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Forthcoming.

Busfield, Joan. 1998. “Restructuring mental health services in twentieth-century Britain.” In Cultures of psychiatry in post-war Britain and the Netherlands, edited by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, 8–28. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Calabrese, Joseph D. 2013. A different medicine: Postcolonial healing in the Native American Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Canguilhem, Georges. [1966] 1989. The normal and the pathological. New York: Zone Books.

Carpenter-Song, Elizabeth A., Megan Nordquest Schwallie, and Jeffrey Longhofer. 2007. “Cultural competence reexamined: Critique and directions for the future.” Psychiatric Services 58, no. 10: 1362–5.

Cearns, Jennifer. n.d. “Encoding wellness.” Forthcoming in Towards an anthropology of psychology, edited by Mikkel Kenni Bruun and Rebecca Hutten. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Cohn, Simon. 2008. “Making objective facts from intimate relations: The case of neuroscience and its entanglements with volunteers.” History of the Human Sciences 21, no. 4: 86–103.

———. 2010. “Picturing the brain inside, revealing the illness outside.” In Technologized images, technologized bodies, edited by Jeanette Edwards, Penelope Harvey, and Peter Wade, 65–84. Oxford: Berghahn.

Cook, Joanna. 2015. “Detachment and engagement in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.” In Detachment: Essays on the limits of relational thinking, edited by Thomas Yarrow, Matei Candea, Catherine Trundle, and Joanna Cook, 219–35. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

———. 2016. “Mindful in Westminster: The politics of meditation and the limits of neoliberal critique.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1: 141–61.

Cook, Joanna, and Julia Cassaniti. 2022. “Mindfulness and culture.” Anthropology Today 38, no. 2: 1–3.

Coon, Deborah J. 1993. “Standardizing the subject: Experimental psychologists, introspection, and the quest for a technoscientific ideal.” Technology and Culture 34, no. 4: 757.

Danziger, Kurt. 1998. Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

Davies, James. 2009. The making of psychotherapists: An anthropological analysis. London: Karnac.

———, ed. 2017. The sedated society: The causes and harms of our psychiatric drug epidemic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

———. 2021. Sedated: How modern capitalism created our mental health crisis. London: Atlantic Books.

Davies, William. 2015. The happiness industry: How the government and big business sold us well-being. London: Verso.

Dumit, Joseph. 2003. “Is it me or my brain? Depression and neuroscientific facts.” Journal of Medical Humanities 24, nos. 1/2: 35–47.

———. 2004. Picturing personhood: Brain scans and biomedical identity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

———. 2012. Drugs for life: How pharmaceutical companies define our health. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Duncan, Whitney L. 2017. “Psicoeducación in the land of magical thoughts: Culture and mental‐health practice in a changing Oaxaca.” American Ethnologist 44, no. 1: 36–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12424.

———. 2018. Transforming therapy: Mental health practice and cultural change in Mexico. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Durkheim, Émile. (1912) 2008. The elementary forms of religious life. Translated by Carol Cosman and edited by Mark S. Cladis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Engel, George L. 1977. “The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine’. Science 196 (4286): 129–36. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.847460.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.

Foucault, Michel. (1963) 1973. The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. London: Tavistock.

———. (1961) 1988a. Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. New York: Vintage Books.

———. (1978) 1988b. The history of sexuality, vol. 3: The care of the self. London: Vintage Books.

———. 1997. Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press.

Foucault, Michel, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. 1991. The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fox, Richard Gabriel, and Barbara J. King, eds. 2002. Anthropology beyond culture. Oxford: Berg.

Fraser, Derek. 1984. The evolution of the British welfare state: A history of social policy since the Industrial Revolution. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Fullagar, Simone, Emma Rich, Jessica Francombe-Webb, and Antonio Maturo. 2017. “Digital ecologies of youth mental health: Apps, therapeutic publics and pedagogy as affective arrangements.” Social Sciences 6, no. 4: 135.

Ganti, Tejaswini. 2014. “Neoliberalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43, no. 1: 89–104.

Gask, Linda. 2018. “In defence of the biopsychosocial model.” The Lancet Psychiatry 5, no. 7: 548–49.

Green, Christopher D. 2010. “Scientific objectivity and E.B. Titchener’s experimental psychology.” Isis 101, no. 4: 697–721.

Hacking, Ian. 1985. “Making up people.” In Reconstructing individualism, edited by T.L. Heller, M. Sosna, and D. E. Wellbery, 222–36. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. 1998. Mad travelers: Reflections on the reality of transient mental illnesses. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

———. 2013. “Lost in the forest: Who needs the DSM?” London Review of Books 35, no. 15: 7–8.

Haddon, A.C., ed. 1901. Reports of the anthropological expedition to Torres Straits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hansen, Helena, and Jonathan M. Metzl, eds. 2019. Structural competency in mental health and medicine. New York: Springer.

Hastrup, Kirsten. 1995. A passage to anthropology: Between experience and theory. London: Routledge.

Healy, David. 1997. The antidepressant era. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Herle, Anita, and Sandra Rouse, eds. 1998. Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huang, Hsuan-Ying. 2018. “Untamed jianghu or emerging profession: Diagnosing the psycho-boom amid China’s mental health legislation.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 42, no. 2: 371–400.

Ingham, John M. 1996. Psychological anthropology reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Irvine, Richard. 2018. “Cognitive anthropology as epistemological critique.” In Schools and styles of anthropological theory, edited by Matei Candea, 134–47. London: Routledge.

Jenkins, Janis H., ed. 2010. Pharmaceutical self: The global shaping of experience in an age of psychopharmacology. Santa Fe, N.M: School for Advanced Research Press.

———. 2018. “Anthropology and psychiatry: A contemporary convergence for global mental health.” In Textbook of cultural psychiatry, edited by Dinesh Bhugra and Kamaldeep Bhui, 18–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kirk, Stuart A., and Herb Kutchins. 1997. Making us crazy: DSM – the psychiatric bible and the creation of mental disorders. New York: Free Press.

Kirsner, Douglas. 1998. Unfree associations: Inside psychoanalytic institutes. London: Process Press.

Kitanaka, Junko. 2012. Depression in Japan: Psychiatric cures for a society in distress. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kleinman, Arthur. 1980. Patients and healers in the context of culture: An exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine and psychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 1988. Rethinking psychiatry. New York: Free Press.

———. 2012. “Medical anthropology and mental health: Five questions for the next fifty years.” In Medical anthropology at the intersections: Histories, activisms, and futures, edited by Marcia C. Inhorn and Emily A. Wentzell, 116–28. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kleinman, Arthur, Leon Eisenberg, and Byron Good. 1978. “Culture, illness, and care: Clinical lessons from anthropologic and cross-cultural research.” Annals of Internal Medicine 88, no. 2: 251–8.

Laidlaw, James. 2018. “The anthropological lives of Michel Foucault.” In Schools and styles of anthropological theory, edited by Matei Candea, 173–84. London: Routledge.

Leach, E.R. 1958. “Magical hair.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 88, no. 2: 147–64.

LeVine, Robert A. 2001. “Culture and personality studies, 1918–1960: Myth and history.” Journal of Personality 69, no. 6: 803–18.

———, ed. 2010. Psychological anthropology: A reader on self in culture. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. “The effectiveness of symbols.” In Structural anthropology, 186–205. New York: Basic Books.

Lilienfeld, Scott O., Steven Jay Lynn and Jeffrey M. Lohr. 2004. Science and pseudoscience in clinical psychology. New York: Guilford Press.

Littlewood, Roland. 1996. “Psychiatry’s culture.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 42, no. 4: 245–68.

———. 2002. Pathologies of the west: An anthropology of mental illness in Europe and America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Littlewood, Roland, and Maurice Lipsedge. 1997. Aliens and alienists: Ethnic minorities and psychiatry. London: Routledge.

Littlewood, Roland, and Simon Dein. 2000. Cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology: An introduction and reader. London: Athlone Press.

Long, Nicholas J. 2018. “Suggestions of power: Searching for efficacy in Indonesia’s hypnosis boom.” Ethos 46, no. 1: 70–94.

Luhrmann, T.M. 2000. Of two minds: The growing disorder in American psychiatry. 1st edition. New York: Knopf.

———. 2012. “Beyond the brain.” The Wilson Quarterly 36, no. 3: 28–34.

———. 2020. “Mind and spirit: A comparative theory about representation of mind and the experience of spirit.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26 (S1): 1–166.

Luhrmann, T.M., R. Padmavati, Hema Tharoor, and Akwasi Osei. 2015. “Hearing voices in different cultures: A social kindling hypothesis.” Topics in Cognitive Science 7, no. 4: 646–63.

Luhrmann, T.M., and Jocelyn Marrow, eds. 2016. Our most troubling madness: Case studies in schizophrenia across cultures. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1927. Sex and repression in savage society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Mandler, George. 2011. A history of modern experimental psychology: From James and Wundt to cognitive science. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Marks, Sarah. 2017. “Psychotherapy in historical perspective.” History of the Human Sciences 30, no. 2: 3–16.

Martin, Emily. 2007. Bipolar expeditions: Mania and depression in American culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2021. Experiments of the mind: From the cognitive psychology lab to the world of Facebook and Twitter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Matza, Tomas Antero. 2018. Shock therapy: Psychology, precarity, and well-being in postsocialist Russia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

McDonald, Maryon. 2012. “Putting culture in its place: Anthropological reflections on the European Commission.” European Societies 14, no. 4: 540–61.

———. 2020. “From Oxford to Cambridge: Chasing the ‘Aka.’” In After society: Anthropological trajectories out of Oxford, edited by João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman, 177–95. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for Western civilisation. New York: William Morrow & Company.

———. 1953. Cultural patterns and technical change: A manual prepared by the World Federation for Mental Health and edited by Margaret Mead. Tensions and Technology Series. Paris: UNESCO.

Meyers, Todd. 2013. The clinic and elsewhere: Addiction, adolescents, and the afterlife of therapy. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Minozzo, Ana Carolina. 2022. “#Wellness or #hellness: The politics of anxiety and the riddle of affect in contemporary psy-care’. In The quantification of bodies in health, edited by Btihaj Ajana, Joaquim Braga, and Simone Guidi, 137–56. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Moreno, Carmen, Til Wykes, Silvana Galderisi, Merete Nordentoft, Nicolas Crossley, Nev Jones, Mary Cannon et al. 2020. “How mental health care should change as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The Lancet Psychiatry 7, no. 9: 813–24.

Myers, Neely Laurenzo. 2015. Recovery’s edge: An ethnography of mental health care and moral agency. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Novella, Enric J, and Ricardo Campos. 2017. “From mental hygiene to mental health: Ideology, discourses and practices in Franco’s Spain (1939–75).” History of Psychiatry 28, no. 4: 443–59.

Oldani, Michael. 2014. “Deep pharma: Psychiatry, anthropology, and pharmaceutical detox.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 38, no. 2: 255–78.

Onchev, Georgi. 2019. Culture and psychopathology: The anthropology of mental illness. Berlin: Peter Lang.

Opler, Marvin K. 1959. Culture and mental health. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Patton, Cindy, ed. 2010. Rebirth of the clinic: Places and agents in contemporary health care. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Petryna, Adriana, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. 2006. Global pharmaceuticals: Ethics, markets, practices. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Pickersgill, Martyn. 2019a. “Digitising psychiatry? Sociotechnical expectations, performative nominalism and biomedical virtue in (digital) psychiatric praxis.” Sociology of Health and Illness 41 (S1): 16–30.

———. 2019b. “Access, accountability, and the proliferation of psychological therapy: On the introduction of the IAPT initiative and the transformation of mental healthcare.” Social Studies of Science 49, no. 4: 627–50.

Pinto, Sarah. 2020. “Madness: Recursive ethnography and the critical uses of psychopathology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49, no. 1: 299–316.

Reyes-Foster, Beatriz M. 2018. Psychiatric encounters: Madness and modernity in Yucatan, Mexico. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Rieber, R. 1980. Wilhelm Wundt and the making of scientific psychology. New York: Plenum Press.

Rose, Nikolas. 1985. The psychological complex: Psychology, politics and society in England, 1869-1939. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

———. 1989. Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. London: Free Association Books.

———. 1996. Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2006. The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rose, Nikolas, and Joelle M. Abi-Rached. 2013. Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Santomauro, Damian F., Ana M Mantilla Herrera, Jamileh Shadid, Peng Zheng, Charlie Ashbaugh, David M Pigott, Cristiana Abbafati et al. 2021. “Global prevalence and burden of depressive and anxiety disorders in 204 countries and territories in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.” The Lancet 398, no. 10312: 1700–12.

Sapir, E. 1932. “Cultural anthropology and psychiatry.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 27, no. 3: 229–42.

Sargent, Carolyn, and Stéphanie Larchanché. 2009. “The construction of ‘cultural difference’ and its therapeutic significance in immigrant mental health services in France.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 33, no. 1: 2–20.

Shorter, Edward. 2007. “The historical development of mental health services in Europe.” In Mental health policy and practice across Europe: The future direction of mental health care. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1995. “The nice thing about culture is that everyone has it.” In Shifting contexts: Transformations in anthropological knowledge. London: Routledge.

Sullivan, Gerald. 2012. “Anthropology and psychology, case of W.H.R. Rivers.” In Encyclopedia of the history of psychological theories, edited by Robert W. Rieber, 76–86. New York: Springer US.

Susko, Michael. 1994. “Caseness and narrative: Contrasting approaches to people who are psychiatrically labelled.” Journal of Mind and Behavior 15, nos. 1–2: 87–112.

Sweetser, William. 1850. Mental hygiene: Or, an examination of the intellect and passions, designed to show how they affect and are affected by the bodily functions, and their influence on health and longevity. New York: George P. Putnam.

Szasz, T. S. 1974. The myth of mental illness: Foundations of a theory of personal conduct. New York: HarperCollins.

Toren, Christina. 2012. “Anthropology and psychology.” In The Sage handbook of social anthropology, edited by R. Fardon, 27–41. New York: Sage.

Trnka, Susanna. 2022. “Competing responsibilities and the ethics of care in young people’s engagements with digital mental health.” In The Palgrave handbook of the anthropology of technology, edited by Maja Hojer Bruun, Ayo Wahlberg, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Cathrine Hasse, Klaus Hoeyer, Dorthe Brogård Kristensen, and Brit Ross Winthereik, 627–46. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

Unsworth, Clive. 1993. “Law and lunacy in psychiatry’s ‘golden age.’” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 13, no. 4: 479–507.

Vidal, F. 2011. The sciences of the soul: The early modern origins of psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vogel, Else. 2017. “Hungers that need feeding: On the normativity of mindful nourishment.” Anthropology & Medicine 24, no. 2: 159–73.

Vorhölter, Julia. 2021. “Family trouble: Changing (dis)orders and psychotherapeutic interventions in Uganda.” Ethos 49, no. 4: 379–400.

Weisman, Kara, Cristine H. Legare, Rachel E. Smith, Vivian A. Dzokoto, Felicity Aulino, Emily Ng, John C. Dulin, Nicole Ross-Zehnder, Joshua D. Brahinsky, and Tanya Marie Luhrmann. 2021. “Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures.” Nature Human Behaviour 5: 1358–68.

Westermeyer, Joseph, ed. 1976. Anthropology and mental health: Setting a new course. The Hague: Mouton.

Whitehouse, Harvey, ed. 2001. The debated mind: Evolutionary psychology versus Ethnography. Oxford: Berg.

Wright, Fiona. 2022. “Making good of crisis: Temporalities of care in UK mental health services.” Medical Anthropology 41, no. 3: 315–28.

Wu, Tianchen, Xiaoqian Jia, Huifeng Shi, Jieqiong Niu, Xiaohan Yin, Jialei Xie, and Xiaoli Wang. 2021. “Prevalence of mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” Journal of Affective Disorders 281: 91–8.

Young, Allan. 1995. The harmony of illusions: Inventing post-traumatic stress disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Zhang, Li. 2020. Anxious China: Inner revolution and politics of psychotherapy. Oakland: University of California Press.

Note on contributor

Mikkel Kenni Bruun is a Research Associate at King’s College London, where he currently works on the ERC SAMCOM project (https://samcom.uk). He also teaches anthropology at Cambridge University and is co-editing a volume on the anthropology of psychology. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Dr Mikkel Kenni Bruun, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. kenni.bruun@kcl.ac.uk

[1] World Health Organization. 2022. “Mental disorders.” June 8. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders. Accessed 1 October 2022.

[2] World Health Organization. 2022. “Mental health.” June 17. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response. Accessed 1 October 2022.

[3] World Health Organization. “Health and well-being.” https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/major-themes/health-and-well-being.

[4] Some early anthropological work that sought to study mental health explicitly is collected in the volume Culture and mental health, edited by Marvin Opler (1959). Many of its contributors were also professional psychiatrists.

[5] For a critique of cognitivist and cultural models in anthropology and psychology, see Toren 2012.

[6] A related issue concerns ‘structural competency’ efforts in the training of healthcare practitioners (Hansen and Metzl 2019). The ‘structural’ refers here to an analytical shift away from the level of the individual to examine institutional structures (clinical, educational, judicial, etc.) that underlie social determinants of health problems and access to care.

[7] It is important to note that Foucault was dealing mostly with the historiography of the ‘western’ subject. There are other histories and formations, of course. Recent anthropological writing on the relationship between the emergence of the psy sciences and colonialism has considered how we might think about presenting this history (Reyes-Foster 2018; see also Fanon 1963, on the ‘psycho-affective’ effects of colonisation). I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this work.

[8] The DSM is currently in its fifth edition (DSM-5), published in 2013. It replaced the DSM-IV which appeared in 1994. For a critical review of the DSM-5, see Hacking (2013).

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Adoption

Felix Stein — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 11:20:08 +0000

Jessaca Leinaweaver

Brown University

Initially published 7 Jun 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18adopt

Abstract:

What is adoption? To answer this question is to jump directly into one of the key controversies of anthropology: anthropologists, associated for over a century with the close study of kinship relationships, are quite hesitant to privilege ‘biological kinship’ over ‘social kinship’, and the category ‘adoption’ may unwittingly do that. On the other hand, reviewing what anthropologists have learned about adoption, fostering, and child welfare reveals some important understandings of how people make families and become parents and children to one another. Those findings resonate with what the great social scientist Émile Durkheim contended more than a century ago: that kinship is social or it is nothing. Adoptions around the world demonstrate that the intentional claiming of a kinsperson or a kin group, and the everyday acts (both by ‘adopter’ and ‘adoptee’) that are associated with bringing that person more fully into that family, are not practices limited to adoption but are in fact the stuff of all kinship. Because examining ‘adoption’ reveals the processes of social kinship, it offers us a direct route into understanding the social practices that are part of how all families come to be.

After examining these larger issues, the entry considers what adoptions around the world look like and what they accomplish. The word ‘fostering’ often describes the practices of raising, training, and caring for a child. By contrast, ‘adoption’ in its early formulations, such as in Roman law from which many contemporary Western adoption policies descend, emphasised the acquiring of a legal heir and the transfer of property via inheritance. The entry concludes with a discussion of recent critiques of international adoption, which have demonstrated that adoptions may also, among the many things they accomplish, reproduce local and global inequalities.

The basic problem: critique of the study of kinship^[1]

The problem with defining ‘adoption’ for an encyclopedia of anthropology is this: on the one hand, what anthropologists know about adoption is evidence for some of our most central tenets; particularly that kinship is produced through social, linguistic, and legal practices rather than asserted through genetic codes. On the other hand, the very category ‘adoption’ unintentionally runs counter to those tenets. First, I’ll explain this central contradiction, then I’ll go on to show what anthropologists know about adoption and why it’s important – and only then will I define it.

One of the foundational principles of socio-cultural anthropology is its critique of ethnocentrism, which is the assumption that one’s own ways of doing things are superior to all other ways, leading to misunderstanding of other cultures and their norms and practices. By studying cultures around the world, anthropologists have learned that diversity is the norm. In other words, every culture has its own assumptions about what is true and what isn’t, so our job is to understand each culture in its own terms rather than imposing our own, whatever they may be.

The stated ethical incompatibility between anthropology and ethnocentrism came to a head in the 1960s and 1970s critiques of our discipline, which included as one major component a critique of kinship studies on the basis of embedded ethnocentrism.^[2] David Schneider, in a critical tone, suggested that the ‘anthropological’ notion of kinship is simply borrowed from a European one (1984: 175). As he wrote, anthropology’s generalised understanding of ‘consanguinity, of blood relationship and descent, rests on precisely…the biogenetic relationship…We have tried to impose this definition of a kind of relation on all peoples...’ (Schneider 1984: 72).

It’s easy to see how this critique can be extended to the term ‘adoption'. Vern Carroll, comparing adoption in the United States with fosterage in Eastern Oceania, asks whether it is wise ‘for anthropologists to use this term [‘adoption’] to label customs that conform only in part to adoption practices in Europe and the United States’ (1970: 4). Adoption, like kinship, has been used to describe a wide range of practices. Yet lurking within this term, it seems, is the subtext of what it means among middle classes in North America and Europe. So if, as David Schneider proposes, ‘[i]n American cultural conception, kinship is defined as biogenetic’ (1980 [1968]: 23), adoption in the U.S. will be a legal and acceptable ‘fiction’ within a larger assumption that ‘[a] son or daughter by definition shares its parents' biogenetic substance’ (1980 [1968]: 50; see also 1984: 54-55). Later, in his Critique of the study of kinship, Schneider suggests pointedly that ‘anthropologists have consistently treated adoption as something quite different from true kinship’ (1984: 171-2).

As such, by even so much as marking out a category called ‘adoption’, this encyclopedia entry runs the risk – amply critiqued by Needham (1971), Schneider, and others – of elevating biogenetic kinship to the unmarked or ‘natural’ category, and studying adoption only as something curious that deviates from the ‘norm’.

What adoption does

And yet, anthropological research on that very category of ‘adoption’ has revealed two crucially important points: adoption is neither curious in terms of rarity, nor is it curious in terms of supposed deviation from a norm that is biological kinship. Rather, adoption is widespread, and is brilliantly revelatory of the processes central to the making of all kinship.

Firstly, adoption is far from unusual – over time and across place, it has been crucial to maintaining power relations, ensuring social reproduction, and forming alliances, and it has been and continues to be numerically significant as well. For example, Elise Berman has reported that for the 250-person village in the Republic of the Marshall Islands where she worked, a quarter of children are adopted and an astonishing ‘90 percent of households include someone adopted in or out’ (2014: 579).

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, studying adoption has helped anthropologists to demonstrate that all kinship is adoptive. In other words, no matter whether blood ties are asserted or recognised in a particular relationship, that relationship requires upkeep, assent, and intentional or matter-of-fact fostering. As Émile Durkheim wrote more than a century ago, kinship is ‘a social bond or it is nothing’ (1896: 318).^[3]

Durkheim’s discussion of adoption makes clear why adoptions are such an important piece of evidence for kinship theory. Writing of adoption in small-scale societies, Durkheim notes ‘[b]y itself, birth is not sufficient ipso facto to make an infant into an integral member of the domestic group – religious ceremonies must be superimposed. The idea of consanguinity is thus secondary… All kinship is social, consisting essentially of socially sanctioned legal and moral relations’ (1896: 318). ^[4]Another similarly pithy way to say this comes from the groundbreaking work of Kath Weston in 1980s San Francisco on gay and lesbian ‘families we choose’: groups of close friends and companions who were sometimes described by anthropologists as partaking of ‘fictive kinship’ (a term that has been part of anthropological usage at least since the nineteenth century^[5]). ‘All kinship’, Weston says, ‘is in some sense fictional’ (1991: 105).

By itself, as Durkheim proposes, birth is not sufficient to establish belonging to kin: ‘kin work’ is required. This latter phrase is Micaela di Leonardo’s; she coined it in a groundbreaking essay, where she used it to mean

the conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross-household kin ties, including visits, letters, telephone calls, presents, and cards to kin; the organization of holiday gatherings; the creation and maintenance of quasi-kin relations; decisions to neglect or to intensify particular ties; the mental work of reflection about all these activities; and the creation and communication of altering images of family and kin vis-à-vis the images of others, both folk and mass media (1987: 442-3).

To di Leonardo’s useful intervention we might simply add that ‘kin work’ need not be limited to ‘cross-household kin ties’ (e.g., writing to in-laws or inviting a cousin to your house). Similar to the process of kin-work, ‘kinning’, as proposed by Signe Howell writing on transnational adoption in Norway, can indicate ‘the process by which a foetus or new-born child is brought into a significant and permanent relationship with a group of people, and the connection is expressed in a conventional kin idiom’ (2006: 8). Within one’s household, ‘kin work’ or ‘kinning’ can involve activities as wide-ranging as teaching a child manners (claiming that child as yours and representative of your household, concerned about how he or she will interact with the social world), or giving a sibling the silent treatment (withholding the normative relations of kinship from someone who, perhaps, has failed to act like a sibling is expected to act).

One form that kin work or kinning can take is verbal. Linguistic and cultural anthropologists have paid close attention to how talk can establish or attenuate kinship. An excellent example is provided in Sallie Han’s writings on ‘belly talk’. In middle-class U.S. households, fathers-to-be receive advice to ‘talk, read, and sing to the baby [that is, the foetus]’ so that they are recognised by others as expectant fathers, and so that they can be involved with their future children. Such ‘belly talk’, Han argues, ‘accomplishes important cultural work for American mothers and fathers alike...[it] socializes women and men as parents’ (2009: 312, 316). Yet speech and representation are equally mobilised to accomplish similar work in adoptive relations – for example, in Japan, Kathryn Goldfarb’s research participants often highlighted physical resemblance between foster parent and child as a way of signalling the ‘“self-evident” proof of a connection to a non-biologically related child’ (2016: 48). This is one example of a feature of many adoptions, though not all: they are often partly produced through and supported by the involvement of mediators, from the official (social workers and attorneys) to the everyday (like those Goldfarb describes, who participate in conversations about family resemblance).

The ‘kin work’ done by these individuals incorporates newcomers – children and children-to-be, parents and parents-to-be, and still other kin as well – into families. That work of incorporation, I propose, is adoption.

What is adoption?

More than a quarter of the way through this entry, I can finally come to define the topic. Adoption is, I suggest, the purposeful taking on of a kinship role, responsibility, or duty vis-à-vis another person. I’ve tried to make that definition as simple and open as I can, in part because there is a lot of variability in what anthropologists might label ‘adoption’. It could be primarily about – as seen in the earliest adoption laws in ancient Rome – formally identifying an heir. It could be, on the other hand, a kind of fostering – taking care of a young person – not focused on inheritance but instead on the acts of raising.^[6]

So, one way of answering ‘what is adoption?’ is with another question: ‘Well, it depends – what needs and expectations do people have of their families in the cultural context you are wondering about?’ In much of North America and Europe, a ‘sentimentalization’ or ‘sacralization’ of childhood (Zelizer 1985) has occurred over the course of the last century, so that what adoption is for residents of those regions today is a parent-centric institution that provides children to adults who eagerly want to love, raise, and care for a child.^[7] Marilyn Strathern, observing the cultural implications of assisted reproductive technologies (which, depending on how they are defined, can include adoption), remarks that a child in such a context embodies ‘the desire of its parents to have a child’ (1992: 32). Problems or challenges within adoption in this setting will arise when the model of parental desire for a child conflicts with other aspects of social reality: for example, if prospective parents want infants whom they can raise and mould (Leinaweaver 2013: 38-46; Stryker 2010), but the available children are toddlers or school-age.

But in other cultural contexts around the world and throughout history, adoption is something else. There are several different ‘purposes’ for which adoption happens, and it is useful to distinguish them. Raising, training, and caring for a child is one purpose – often called fostering. Acquiring a legal and spiritual heir is another – for example, for many Hindus, sons fulfill both religious and property-related roles, and adoption is one of the potential substitutes for ‘legitimate’ sons in ancient Hindu legal codes (Bharadwaj 2016: 53, 158). In the following two sections I will describe each of these categories, before moving to a broader discussion of how adoption – among the many things it accomplishes – can also reproduce local and global inequalities.

Fostering: feeding and supporting a child

The word ‘foster’ comes from Old English, and its original referents were food, nourishment, sustenance, and nursing.^[8] Anthropologists have long been attentive to food – its sharing, production, withholding – and the kinds of social relations that food facilitates. This awareness of the social significance of food has resulted in excellent analyses linking food to kinship. For example, Mary Weismantel’s essay on fostering in an indigenous community in highland Ecuador includes the wonderful line, uttered by a man about a child he had only recently brought into his household, ‘I am going to be his father...Aren’t I feeding him right now?’ (1995: 690). Weismantel’s interlocutor was saying that feeding creates kinship, over time.^[9]

The concept of ‘fostering’ or ‘fosterage’ has also been amply studied in socio-cultural anthropology, with a focus not solely on food but on the daily practices of caregiving, tending, and nurturing. Anthropologists have documented fostering, or ‘child circulation’, as a widespread phenomenon around the world from West Africa to Oceania to the Americas.^[10] The ubiquity of these fluid and flexible movements of children from one home to another, and the cross-cultural data on process and outcomes, show how effective fostering can be at bringing up children in an extensive family context while responding to structural conditions such as poverty or political upheaval.

For example, Esther Goody has studied fostering at length in West Africa, among the Gonja people of Ghana. In her analysis of fostering and adoption (1984), she aligns the uses to which fostering is put with the complexity of the political and social organization of a community. According to Goody, in a unilineal descent group (a system where relatedness is traced either through fathers or through mothers, but not both^[11]), fostering outside of the kin group is rare, being unnecessary for the child’s training, and undesirable because it would imply the descent group’s loss of a child’s labour; however, in other kinds of societies, a range of spatially dispersed relatives may have rights to a child, so depending on resources in a kin group and on existing labour needs a child might be asked to move. But the child’s movement is not only meant to serve the labour needs of dispersed kin; simultaneously, Goody explains, ‘parents arrange for their children’s training and sponsorship in the way which will place the children in the best possible position as adults with respect to those skills and resources which are required to “succeed”’ (1984: 275). As such, this kind of fostering is thought to provide opportunities to children; it is seen elsewhere in West Africa as well (Bledsoe 1990, Gottlieb 2004).

Yet fostering has other implications too, some of them quite provocative. In an essay on ‘milk-kinship’, Peter Parkes recounts epics and legends from Greek, Celtic, and other pasts to demonstrate what he calls ‘allegiance fostering’ – how, for example, medieval Irish nobles would foster their children serially, to multiple foster parents, in order to ensure the children’s education in a range of skills and arts while simultaneously strengthening adult alliances that broadened the nobles’ own political reach (2004: 599-600).^[12] And alliances between relatives are forged in everyday settings as well, as I learned from Milagros, a teenager who participated in my research on child circulation in the city of Ayacucho, in southern Peru. Milagros told me she had moved into her mother’s sister’s house at the age of nine. I observed that her mother’s sister’s family was financially better off than Milagros’s mother – who lived in a squatter settlement across town – and keeping that relationship strong and flowing would have been important for Milagros’s mother. In that context, child circulation served to ‘solidify relationships that adults rely on for day-to-day survival or backup emergency plans’ (Leinaweaver 2007: 175). It also results in a robust and culturally-appropriate form of support for young people, though it is a form that many of them express some ambivalence about. Milagros told me both that she had gotten accustomed, and that it was 'not the same' as being with her family of origin (2007: 171, 172).

Finding an heir: ensuring disposition of resources according to one’s wishes

Legal adoption is a different story, though of course legal adoption need not preclude the feeding, raising, and nurturing of a child. As Jack Goody shows, adoption laws in many Western nations today derive from principles established in ancient Rome, where ‘the institution was one whereby the great families provided themselves with heirs to their property and worship, successors to office or a political following’ (1969: 60). Property and its felicitous disposition was thus a significant motivator for early Western formulations of adoption (Hann 1998).

In Roman law, such adoptions were complete and irreversible. Adoption law in many nations today includes a provision where a child is formally, completely, and legally detached from a ‘first family’ before being incorporated into another (‘full’ or ‘plenary’ adoption). This model differs from fostering, where a child retains connections both to the ‘first family’ and to other subsequent caregivers (Goody, J. 1969: 59). It also differs from legal adoption practices in a number of other nations, including France (whose civil code permits ‘simple’, or additive adoption, where the adoptive relationship is added to, rather than replaces, existing biological relationships) and Japan, where in ‘“regular adoption” (futsu¯ yo¯shiengumi), adoptees are often children of extended family members or are adults’ (Goldfarb 2016: 49).

The implications of inheritance, permanent affiliation, and rights take on intriguing meanings in a case described by John Borneman. In the late 1990s, Borneman knew a same-sex couple in Germany – fifty-five year old Harald and thirty-five year old Dieter. Harald, knowing his death was near, wanted to adopt Dieter; in the court hearings, Dieter’s mother insisted that the men’s relationship was ‘like a marriage’. But in that period, the two men could not legally marry, and adoption was the only formal route available for Harald to effectively confer his belongings to Dieter, which in turn formalised and officialised their relation. Borneman highlights the principle of custody – in which ‘the right to inherit wealth [is made] effective through a right to care and be cared for’ (2001: 34). Harald eventually adopted Dieter, which, in its startling contrast with child adoptions, beautifully highlights the social and felt significance of formalising and materialising ties of care.

Also, in many ways far removed from ancient Rome, a Norwegian case study demonstrates the continuing importance of formally making a child into an accepted family member, even through some of the more everyday labours of ‘kin work’ or ‘kinning’. In adoption, kinning may be marked because of what Howell calls the ‘open and public nature’ (2006: 64) of the newly forming relationship or what Modell described as the self-consciousness of adoption: ‘for a parent and child to be related by arrangement, and not by nature, compels an alertness to the terms of relationship that is unusual in an American context’ (1994: 3-4). So, in Norway, one of the arenas in which kinning of transnationally adopted children occurs is through attiring them in the traditional Norwegian clothing called bunad (2006: 75). The use of clothing as a symbolic and formal way to affiliate a child from another place to a Norwegian family is the emphasis here, in contrast to the focus on caring, feeding, and raising seen in the previous section’s discussion of fostering.

Political economy of adoption and inequality

As anthropologists study adoption and kinning around the world, whether in fostering and daily acts of care or through formal alliances and the demands of property disposition, political economic inequality often turns out to be an important dimension of how adoption is experienced and understood.

In the contemporary West, adoption is a process that sometimes uncomfortably entangles child welfare services on one end (the removal of children from birth families that are found to be unsuitable) and the desire for ‘social progeny’ (Goody, J. 1969: 57) on the other.^[13] Critical adoption scholars have identified how adoption tends to reproduce a social hierarchy between deserving receiver and inadequate giver of a child (Briggs 2012, Gailey 2010, Solinger 2001). The inequalities between those who adopt and those whose children have been removed are perhaps most evident in cases of transnational adoption. Linda Seligmann observes for U.S. families that ‘the ability to pursue adoptions across borders – racially, economically, or nationally – is the consequence of geopolitical inequalities that are themselves the result of particular histories and policies that the United States has helped create’ (2013: 11).^[14] For example, Guatemala became one of the most numerically significant ‘providers’ of children in international adoption to the U.S. as a consequence of poverty, violence, and corruption traceable to U.S. involvement in Guatemala during the Cold War (Grandin 2004, Briggs 2012).

Given this unequal flow of children from less-developed to more-developed countries (Frank 1966), it’s particularly important to identify the processes through which international adoption can be narrated as wholly positive. Considering explanatory language like ‘God said one day, “…I found you a baby but you have to go to China”’, Seligmann gracefully demonstrates how many parents’ emphasis on metaphysical connections can preclude a full-on examination of geopolitical inequalities that make international adoption possible (2013: 72). Paloma Gay y Blasco analyses the writings of middle-class white Americans on their personal Internet pages, in which the prospective parents ‘portrayed their adoption as an extraordinary journey, a “wondrous adventure,” not only a particularly significant episode in their lives, but one that transformed them into or revealed them to be extraordinary people, different from those who surrounded them, forever marked as the creators of a “special” or even “miraculous” family’ (2012: 330-31). Supporting these narrations is the conceptual inheritance that Karen Dubinsky has described as ‘an adoption system premised on rescue’ (2010:19). Laura Briggs further argues that this ‘rescue’ framing effectively ‘directs attention away from structural explanations for poverty, famine, and other disasters, including international, political, military, and economic causes’ (2003: 180). In this way, international adoption not only benefits from global inequality – it can also work to foreclose critical discussions of such inequality.

This critical global political economy perspective can also be applied to both historic and on-going forms of domestic adoption that equally reproduced social hierarchies and inequalities. A famous and tragic example is the widespread practice during the mid-twentieth century in which Native American and First Nations children were removed from their homes in what was said to be their ‘best interests’, ‘rescuing’ them while forcibly extracting them from their families and communities (Jacobs 2014). And, in the 1970s and 1980s, the legal mechanism of adoption was used to disguise the criminal appropriation of the children of the disappeared and murdered in Argentina’s Dirty War (Villalta 2009). For example, in a well-documented case described by Carla Villalta, a woman and her eight-month-old infant were captured by the police in Buenos Aires; when the child’s grandmother brought the birth certificate to the police station to claim the child, her documents were challenged and she was not permitted to retrieve him. The child’s parents remain missing, while the child was, in a routine fashion, defined as ‘abandoned’ and placed in the care of a distinguished attorney and his wife, who later adopted him (Villalta 2009: 156-58).^[15] And still more recently, the overrepresentation of African-American children in the U.S. child welfare system reflects, as legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has argued, a policy choice to emphasise punishment for poverty over possibilities for family unity (2002). In each of these examples, structural racism shapes which children are declared to be legally abandoned and therefore ‘adoptable’. Of course, not all adoptions recorded by anthropologists involve such stark inequalities – recall the West African fostering that is meant to support children’s development (Goody, E. 1984; Bledsoe 1990) or Harald and Dieter’s same-sex partnership officialised through adoption in Germany (Borneman 2001). But one of the themes in recent anthropological scholarship on adoption has been how adoption, like so many other practices, expresses and confirms existing socio-political relations of inequality more than it innovates new, creative, transnational relations of ‘diffuse, enduring solidarity’ (Schneider 1980 [1968]: 52).

Conclusion

John Terrell and Judith Modell wrote in their 1994 review essay, ‘Anthropology and adoption’, that ‘adoption is about who belongs and how – a subject of immense political as well as disciplinary significance. It is also, and increasingly, about power, privilege, and poverty…’ (160). The question of who belongs and how is another angle on the question posed above about adoption, that is, ‘what needs and expectations do people have of their families?’

This is to say that, if belonging is important, the mechanisms through which that belonging occurs are going to be crucial for both anthropologists and for adopted persons and their families. But this entry has suggested that for anthropologists, adoption is not only about belonging but also about what families do – transfer property, care for children, convey identity, and more. Adoption is therefore an extremely revealing and important lens for understanding human existence, both because of what it can tell us about how families work, and because of how its use and misuse reflect the ‘power, privilege, and poverty’ Terrell and Modell point to. As Vern Carroll concluded nearly fifty years ago, ‘the answers to questions [about adoption] are the answers to the question of the nature of kinship’ (1970: 15).

Let us return, then, to those very questions about the nature of kinship, and what adoption can mean in the North American and European contexts that have shaped much of the anthropological study of adoption. David Schneider has argued that in the United States, ‘kinship is defined as biogenetic’ and ‘[a] son or daughter by definition shares its parents' biogenetic substance’ (1980[1968]: 23, 50). In these contexts, then, those who are adopted may experience a dissonance of belonging that their cultural surroundings urge them toward.

In Janet Carsten’s interviews with domestically-adopted adults who searched for their birthparents, she was told that the search was motivated by the desire ‘“to know where I came from”, “to be complete”, or “to find out who I am”’ (2000: 689).^[16] At the same time, those who had completed their searches made statements that would ‘disturb that primacy [of birth ties]…strongly assert[ing] the values of care and effort that go into the creation of kin ties’ (Carsten 2000: 691). Carsten showed that these narratives of adoptive kinship actually reveal more general British concepts of ‘personhood, time, biography, and perhaps even the process of bereavement’ (694) unrelated, or not exclusively related, to adoption.

And for Sweden, Barbara Yngvesson demonstrates the paradox at the heart of formal, legal adoption in the way it is practised in most contemporary contexts: while such plenary adoptions connect child and parent(s) in a manner that is permanent and exclusive, there are other cultural dimensions in which those ‘erased’ origins are made significant, namely for the development of the child’s ‘identity’ (2010). This is notably significant when – as is the case for many contemporary adoptions – the adoption is transracial. In such cases, adopted persons are frequently racialised through a ‘constant bombardment of questions regarding the national, regional, ethnic and racial origin of the adoptees’ (Hübinette & Tigervall 2009: 344). And white adoptive parents are asked to take seriously their ‘kin work’ of – as Christine Ward Gailey describes for U.S. transracial adoptions - ‘preparing black children for racism’ (2010: 34).

The research of these scholars, like that of several other anthropologists examining adoption in the present day (Cardarello 2012, De Graeve 2013, Frekko, Leinaweaver and Marre 2015, Goldfarb 2016, Kim 2010, Leinaweaver 2013, Lewin 2005, Modell 1994, Seligmann 2013), shows just how powerful ‘adoption’ is as a site for learning about kinship: how families are made, how belonging is experienced, how persons come to be.

References

Allison, A. 1991. Japanese mothers and obentos: the lunch-box as ideological state apparatus. Anthropological Quarterly 64, 195-208.

Bergmann, S. 2011. Fertility tourism: circumventive routes that enable access to reproductive technologies and substances. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, 280-89.

Berman, E. 2014. Holding on: adoption, kinship tensions, and pregnancy in the Marshall Islands. American Anthropologist 116, 578-90.

Bharadwaj, A. 2016. Conceptions: infertility and procreative technologies in India. New York: Berghahn Books.

Bledsoe, C.H. 1990. 'No success without struggle': social mobility and hardship for foster children in Sierra Leone. Man 25, 70-88.

Bodenhorn, B. 2000. 'He used to be my relative': exploring the bases of relatedness among Iñupiat of northern Alaska. In Cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship (ed.) J. Carsten, 128-48. Cambridge: University Press.

Bohr, Y. 2010. Transnational infancy: a new context for attachment and the need for better models. Child Development Perspectives 4, 189-96.

Borneman, J. 2001. Caring and being cared for: displacing marriage, kinship, gender, and sexuality. In The ethics of kinship: ethnographic inquiries (ed.) J.D. Faubion, 29-46. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Briggs, L. 2003. Mother, child, race, nation: the visual iconography of rescue and the politics of transnational and transracial adoption. Gender & History 15, 179-200.

———2012. Somebody’s children: the politics of transracial and transnational adoption. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———& D. Marre 2009. Introduction. In International adoption: global inequalities and the circulation of children (eds) D. Marre & L. Briggs. New York: University Press.

Cardarello, A. 2012. O interesse da criança e o interesse das elites: ‘Escândalos de tráfico de crianças’, adoção e paternidade no Brasil. Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales XVI (available on-line: http://www.ub.es/geocrit/sn/sn-395/sn-395-10.htm). Accessed 18 May 2018.

Carroll, V. 1970. Adoption on Nukuoro. In Adoption in Eastern Oceania (ed.) V. Carroll, 121-57. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

———1970. Introduction: what does ‘adoption’ mean? In Adoption in Eastern Oceania (ed.) V. Carroll, 3-17. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Carsten, J. 1991. Children in between: fostering and the process of kinship on Pulau Langkawi, Malaysia. Man 26, 425-43.

———1997. The heat of the hearth: the process of kinship in a Malay fishing community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

———2000. ‘Knowing where you’ve come from’: ruptures and continuities of time and kinship in narratives of adoption reunions. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, 687-703.

De Graeve, K. 2013. ‘They have our culture’: negotiating migration in Belgian–Ethiopian transnational adoption. Ethnos 80, 71-90.

De Matos Viegas, S. 2003. Eating with your favourite mother: time and sociality in a Brazilian Amerindian community. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, 21-37.

di Leonardo, M. 1987. The female world of cards and holidays: women, families, and the work of kinship. Signs 12, 440-53.

Dubinsky, K. 2010. Babies without borders: adoption and migration across the Americas. Toronto: University Press.

Durkheim, E. 1896. Review of Kohler, J. Zur Urgeschichte der Ehe. Totemismus, Gruppenehe, Mutterrecht (Contribution à l'histoire primitive du mariage. Totémisme, mariage collectif, droit maternel). L'Année sociologique 1, 306-19.

Fonseca, C. 1986. Orphanages, foundlings, and foster mothers: the system of child circulation in a Brazilian squatter settlement. Anthropological Quarterly 59, 15-27.

Frank, A. G. 1966. The development of underdevelopment. Monthly Review 18(4), 17-31.

Frekko, S.E., J.B. Leinaweaver & D. Marre 2015. How (not) to talk about adoption in Spain. American Ethnologist 42, 703-19.

Gailey, C.W. 2010. Blue-ribbon babies and labors of love: race, class, and gender in U.S. adoption practice. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Gay y Blasco, P. 2012. ‘A wondrous adventure’: mutuality and individuality in Internet adoption narratives. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, 330-48.

Goldfarb, K.E. 2016. ‘Coming to look alike’: materializing affinity in Japanese foster and adoptive care. Social Analysis 60, 47-64.

Goody, E.N. 1982. Parenthood and social reproduction: fostering and occupational roles in West Africa. Cambridge: University Press.

———1984. Parental strategies: calculation or sentiment?: fostering practices among West Africans. In Interest and emotion: essays on the study of family and kinship (ed.) H. Medick & D.W. Sabean, 266-78. Cambridge: University Press.

Goody, J. 1969. Adoption in cross-cultural perspective. Comparative Studies in Society and History II, 55-78.

Gottlieb, A. 2004. The afterlife is where we come from: the culture of infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University Press.

Grandin, G. 2004. The last colonial massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University Press.

Guemple, D.L. 1979. Inuit adoption. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.

Han, S. 2009. Making room for daddy: men's ‘belly talk’ in the contemporary United States. In Reconceiving the second sex: men, masculinity, and reproduction (ed.) M.C. Inhorn, 305-26. New York: Berghahn Books.

Hann, C.M. 1998. Property relations: renewing the anthropological tradition. Cambridge: University Press.

Herman, E. 2008. Kinship by design: a history of adoption in the modern United States. Chicago: University Press.

Howell, S. 2006. The kinning of foreigners: transnational adoption in a global perspective. Oxford: Berghahn.

Hübinette, T. & C. Tigervall 2009. To be non-white in a colour-blind society: conversations with adoptees and adoptive parents in Sweden on everyday racism. Journal of Intercultural Studies 30, 335-53.

Jacobs, M.D. 2014. A generation removed: the fostering and adoption of indigenous children in the postwar world. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press.

Kim, E.J. 2010. Adopted territory: transnational Korean adoptees and the politics of belonging. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Leinaweaver, J.B. 2007. On moving children: the social implications of Andean child circulation. American Ethnologist 34, 163-80.

———2008. The circulation of children: kinship, adoption, and morality in Andean Peru. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———2013. Adoptive migration: raising Latinos in Spain. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

LeVine, R.A. 2004. Challenging expert knowledge: findings from an African study of infant care and development. In Advances in applied developmental psychology - childhood and adolescence: cross-cultural perspectives and applications (eds) U.P. Gielen & J. Roopnarine, 149-65. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group.

———2007. Ethnographic studies of childhood: a historical overview. American Anthropologist 109, 247-60.

Lewin, E. 2005. Family values: fatherhood and gay men in America. In Adoptive families in a diverse society (ed.) K. Wegar, 129-45. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Maine, H.J.S. 1963 [1861]. Ancient law, its connection with the early history of society, and its relation to modern ideas. Boston: Beacon.

Marre, D. 2014. Displaced children and stolen babies: state of exception, fear and public secrets in contemporary Spain. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., 6 December 2014.

Modell, J.S. 1994. Kinship with strangers: adoption and interpretations of kinship in American culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morgan, L.H. 1870. Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Needham, R. 1971. Remarks on the analysis of kinship and marriage. In Rethinking kinship and marriage (ed.) R. Needham, 1-34. New York: Tavistock Publications.

Oh, A. 2015. To save the children of Korea. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Parkes, P. 2004. Fosterage, kinship, and legend: when milk was thicker than blood? Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, 587-615.

Pink, S. & A.M. Perez 2006. A fitting ‘social model’: culturally locating Telemadre.com. Home Cultures 3, 63-86.

Roberts, D.E. 2002. Shattered bonds: the color of child welfare. New York: Basic Books.

Schneider, D.M. 1980 [1968]. American kinship: a cultural account. Chicago: University Press.

———1984. A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Seligmann, L.J. 2013. Broken links, enduring ties: American adoption across race, class, and nation. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Seymour, S. 2004. Multiple caretaking of infants and young children: an area in critical need of a feminist psychological anthropology. Ethos 32, 538-56.

Solinger, R. 2001. Beggars and choosers: how the politics of choice shapes adoption, abortion, and welfare in the United States. New York: Hill & Wang.

Stack, C.B. 1974. All our kin: strategies for survival in a Black community. New York: Harper & Row.

Strathern, M. 1992. Reproducing the future: essays on anthropology, kinship, and the new reproductive technologies. New York: Routledge.

Strong, P.T. 2001. To forget their tongue, their name, and their whole relation: captivity, extra-tribal adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act. In Relative values: reconfiguring kinship studies (eds) S. Franklin & S. McKinnon, 468-93. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Stryker, R. 2010. The road to Evergreen: adoption, attachment therapy, and the promise of family. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Terrell, J. & J.S. Modell 1994. Anthropology and adoption.American Anthropologist 96, 155-61.

Villalta, C. 2009. De secuestros y adopciones: el circuito institucional de la apropiación criminal de niños en Argentina (1976-1983). Historia Crítica 38, 146-71.

Weismantel, M. 1995. Making kin: kinship theory and Zumbagua adoptions. American Ethnologist 22, 685-709.

Weston, K. 1991. Families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Yngvesson, B. 2010. Belonging in an adopted world: race, identity, and transnational adoption. Chicago: University Press.

Zelizer, V.A. 1985. Pricing the priceless child: the changing social value of children. Princeton: University Press.

Note on contributor

Jessaca Leinaweaver is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The circulation of children: adoption, kinship, and morality in Andean Peru (2008, Duke University Press), which won the Margaret Mead Award. Her most recent book is Adoptive migration: raising Latinos in Spain (2013, Duke University Press).

Prof. Jessaca Leinaweaver, Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Box 1970, Providence, RI, United States. Jessaca_Leinaweaver@brown.edu

[1] This article draws on material I have published in overview articles on related topics: ‘Demography of adoption’ (2001) in International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (ed.) J.D. Wright 1^stvol. (Second edition) Oxford: Elsevier; ‘Foster and kinship care: historical and cultural perspectives’ (2009) in The child: an encyclopedic companion (ed.) R.A. Shweder, Chicago: University Press; and ‘Transnational adoption’ (forthcoming) in The Cambridge handbook for the anthropology of kinship (ed.) S. Bamford, Cambridge: University Press.

[2] Anthropology’s earliest beginnings over one hundred years ago were entwined with the study of kinship. The nineteenth-century American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, intrigued by historical linguistic research that showed earlier connections between now-distant groups of people, hypothesised that similarities in kinship systems among even more distant groups of people might allow researchers to push their understandings of early connections in the ‘human family’ even further back. That is, he thought that kinship systems were even more resistant to change than language (Morgan 1870).

[3] ‘Elle est un lien social ou elle n’est rien’, my translation. This, surely, is what Schneider was riffing on when he wrote that ‘it is the sociocultural attribution of meaning to the biological relationship (real or putative) which is the central conception of kinship. Without the biological relationship there is nothing’ (1984: 54).

[4] ‘Même, à elle seule, la naissance ne suffit pas ipso facto à faire de l’enfant un member integrant de la société domestique; il faut que des ceremonies religieuses s’y surajoutent. L’idée de consanguinité est donc tout à fait au second plan…toute parenté est sociale; car elle consiste essentiellement en relations juridiques et morales, sanctionnées par la société', my translation.

[5] See, for example, Maine 1963 [1861].

[6] In both these examples, it is worth noting that the active subject is the adopter – who is the one identifying an heir or taking care of a young person. And in general, though the word ‘adoption’ is often used metaphorically and outside of kinship to indicate claiming something – like technology adoption, pet adoption, adopt-a-park – I’ll limit it here to considering the human relationships altered when one ‘adopts’, or is 'adopted by', another.

[7] As Zelizer points out, nineteenth-century foster children were sometimes like apprentices; they were sentimentally appreciated but at the same time, employed (as seen in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables). Zelizer notes that in 1870, older boys were most wanted because they were useful; by 1930, cute two-year-old girls were most wanted precisely because they were not economically useful, and rather they were emotional and thus ideal for sentimental parenting (1985: 173, 179, 194).

[8] Though I won’t go into all the possible translations, I can add that the Spanish term I would use for an overlapping semantic field – criar – derives from Latin term creāre, which refers to ‘to make grow'. I would define the Spanish word as ‘to raise’, and Spain’s linguistic authority (the Real Academia Española) provides multiple examples of appropriate uses, ranging from breastfeeding to educating to producing. See http://dle.rae.es/?id=BFyuWxK (accessed 7 June 2018).

[9] For a sampling of other cases of the relationship between food and family, see Allison 1991, Carsten 1997, De Matos Viegas 2003, Pink and Perez 2006.

[10] See, for example, Berman 2014, Bledsoe 1990, Bodenhorn 2000, Carroll 1970, Carsten 1991, Fonseca 1986, E.N. Goody 1982, Guemple 1979, Leinaweaver 2008, Stack 1974, Strong 2001.

[11] For further explication, see this encyclopedia’s entry titled Matriliny.

[12] Moving among a range of foster homes is contrary to the premises of the psychological sciences’ notion of attachment theory, or the idea that a stable relationship with a key caregiver is essential in a child’s early years (Bohr 2010). However, the majority of anthropologists see attachment theory as reflective of the assumptions of Western child-rearing ideologies (e.g. LeVine 2004, LeVine 2007) and argue instead that multiple caregivers and consequent affective relationships generally support children’s development (Seymour 2004).

[13] There is a continuum here, of course: not all adopted children have been removed from their families of origin, although it must also be said that the ‘choice’ to place a child for adoption is very often circumscribed by economic and social circumstances. In the absence of such circumstances, this ‘choice’ might well have been different.

[14] The origins of international adoption are usually traced to the Korean war (Briggs & Marre 2009:6, see also Herman 2008, Kim 2010, Oh 2015). Other nations that became known as sources of children for international adoption experienced not so much war as structural violence: poverty in post-Soviet disruptions in the case of Eastern Europe; the heavy hand of state reproduction policy in the case of China; intensely uneven development in the case of African nations.

[15] Interestingly, the documents were in fact false. The child’s father had been disappeared a few months before the birth, and the mother had not registered the child’s birth right away. As Villalta explains, ‘For those who during those years of terrible political repression knew they were persecuted and lived in secret, any contact with a state authority could be signing one’s death warrant’ (‘Para quienes en esos años de feroz represión política se sabían perseguidos y vivían en la clandestinidad, cualquier contacto con una instancia estatal equivalía a ver concretada una condena de muerte’) (Villalta 2009: 157). The ‘laundering’ of disappearances through child adoption also occurred during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-75) in Spain (Marre 2014).

[16] An intriguing analogy comes from analyses of anonymous sperm or egg donations (Bergmann 2011).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Childhood

Mental Health

Introduction: Situating mental health

Anthropological trajectories

The ‘social’ and the ‘psy’

Culture and mental health

From governmentality to self-cultivation

Psyches, minds, bodies, and brains

The proliferation of mental health

Conclusion

Note

References

Note on contributor

Adoption

The basic problem: critique of the study of kinship[1]

What adoption does

What is adoption?

Fostering: feeding and supporting a child

Finding an heir: ensuring disposition of resources according to one’s wishes

Political economy of adoption and inequality

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

The basic problem: critique of the study of kinship^[1]