Analysis Of Kinship In David Schneider's 'Knowing Where You Ve Come From'

Many anthropologists and ethnographers have described kinship and its various forms. According to David Schneider, kinship is the blood relationship, the fact of shared biogenetic substances whereas for Janet Carsten, kinship is all about “relatedness”. Discussing the various forms of kinship, adoption is one of the them and consider to be the most important fictive kinship form. However, while studying adoption, we see that there are many challenges that comes with adoption.

David Schneider, in his book American Kinship: A cultural account (1968), talks about “culture” of American kinship.

He gives the three-fold classification of kin relationships at: by nature only (illegitimately); by law only (marriage and in-law relationships); and

In the article, “Knowing Where You've Come from': Ruptures and Continuities of Time and Kinship in Narratives if Adoption Reunions” (2000) From Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute which is based on research in Scotland.

She discusses reunions between adults who have been adopted in infancy, and their birth kin. Although the distinction between 'biological' and 'social' kinship, which is central to the anthropological analysis of kinship, is clearly relevant to experiences of reunions, as it is to adoption more generally, this analytic focus is disrupted by issues of temporality, biographical completion, and memory, which both motivate and are raised by

Through her interviews, she realized that the experience of searching for, and then meeting with, birth kin was frequently accompanied by considerable pain and upheaval. Relations with adoptive kin were described in very variable ways by different informants. In some cases, adoptive parents were described in highly positive terms as being extremely loving and supportive, so much so that they were sometimes felt to have been almost too protective or indulgent. In others, these relations were clearly tense and problematic or were experienced as just rather distant and quite unaffectionate. Whatever the nature of these ties, the longing to connect to one's birth relatives seemed almost axiomatic. The outcome of these searches was, at least for those involved, unknowable. All of those whom she interviewed vividly described their anxiety and nervousness as they neared the end of their search and attempted to set up an initial meeting, usually with a birth