Expectations, conflicts, and uncertainties: The construction of kinship ties among adopted individuals who find their families of origin

Abstract

“The dream of my life is to know where I was born”, ‘it was closing an open door’ these are some expressions stated by people who, after years of intense and persevering search, managed to know their families of origin. These men and women are part of a group of activists who fight for the right to know their origins in Argentina. Most of them were falsely registered in the civil registry, which implies the absence of information and documentation to carry out their searches. This situation turns many of them into true researchers of their own history, tireless and creative “searchers” who have developed diverse technical and emotional knowledge and skills of all kinds to obtain information about their origins. 

From an ethnographic perspective, this text recovers experiences of people who found their families of origin with the aim of analyzing how kinship and identity ties are constructed and how meanings about family, motherhood, brotherhood and abandonment are elaborated in these cases. Although the encounter seems to signify the conclusion or the end of the search, these stories reveal dilemmas and uncertainties resulting from the encounter where conflict is a recurrent element. Thus, the encounter involves a new search for creative strategies to deal with the expectations, desires and demands of all involved. Therefore, information about origins, in addition to being a constitutive information of personal identity (Strathern, 1999), is a type of disruptive information for adopted persons in that it mobilizes, alters and modifies relationships, positions and emotions with both the family of origin and the foster family.