Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This is a beautifully written, gripping ethnography." * PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review *
"
Contingent Kinship speaks to the critical potential of anthropology to unsettle narratives of a post-racial society and the universality of (US American) progress. With lucid and embodied analytic focus, it teaches us to be skeptical about any idealistic speculation on future life, which is so often symbolized in the figure of the child, especially when speculation sidesteps, or ignores entirely, the history of racialized exploitation and structural violences that persist into the present." * Current Anthropology *
"This book will be of use to those interested in and can be taught as part of graduate courses on kinship and race in the United States, gender and reproduction, and objects, gifts and commodities." * Anthropology Book Forum *
"Mariner’s overall characterization of US transracial adoption as an individual-level approach for mitigating multi-layered structural inequities, using intimate speculation, is thoroughly captivating and compelling." * Transforming Anthropology *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction: To Speculate Intimately
1 • Suspect and Spectral (M)others
2 • Protective Inspections
3 • Temporal Uncertainties
4 • Kinship’s Costs
5 • Closure
Conclusion: Intimacy’s Intricacies
Notes
References
Index
