The Kinning Of Foreigners

Since the late nineteen sixties, transnational adoption has emerged as a global phenomenon. Due to a sharp decline in infants being made available for adoption locally, involuntarily childless couples in Western Europe and North America who wish to create a family, have to look to look to countries in the poor South and Eastern Europe. The purpose of this book is to locate transnational adoption within a broad context of contemporary Western life, especially values concerning family, children and meaningful relatedness, and to explore the many ambiguities and paradoxes that the practice entails. Based on empirical research from Norway, the author identifies three main themes for analysis: Firstly, by focusing on the perceived relationship between biology and sociality, she examines how notions of child, childhood and significant relatedness vary across time and space. She argues that through a process of kinning, persons are made into kin. In the case of adoption, kinning overcomes a dominant cultural emphasis placed upon biological connectedness. Secondly, it is a study of the rise of expert knowledge in the understanding of 'the best interest of the child', and how the part played by the 'psycho.technocrats' effects national and international policy and practice of transnational adoption. Thirdly, it shows how transnational adoption both depends upon and helps to foster the globalisation of Western rationality and morality. The book is an original contribution to the anthropological study of kinship and globalisation.

Adoption and surrogate pregnancy are the two most realistic options currently available for millions of couples unable to have biological children. In the past decade, international adoption has become popular among those who wish to avoid the wait associated with adopting domestically. Yet because of unique political, economic, and cultural circumstances within individual countries, international adoption is fraught with legal controversies and difficulties. Surrogate pregnancy is a relatively new and inherently complicated alternative. With few regulations to guide the process and protect those involved, however, countries struggle to address its ethical and moral questions, in addition to the legal, political, cultural, and environmental ramifications. Providing a historic overview and defining the key issues, Adoption and Surrogate Pregnancy examines the laws related to adoption and surrogate pregnancy in five countries: the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom, and Guatemala. The discussion covers the ways in which adoption and surrogate pregnancy overlap and influence each other, the nuances that further complicate matters, and the controversies surrounding both issues—such as fears of exploitation, class discrimination, socially "unwanted" children, same-sex parenthood, and the difficulties of governing the family unit. Allowing students to compare the subjects from the perspectives of different countries and cultures, this balanced and objective volume sheds light on the way these issues affect the global community.

The compelling story of Hungarian children living with Belgian families during the interwar period Children who migrated without their families were noteworthy participants of interwar European migration history. Milk Sauce and Paprika tells the story of Hungarian children who were sent to Belgium in the framework of a humanitarian project between 1923 and 1927. Based on a wide variety of sources such as official documents, contemporary newspapers, photographs, family correspondences, biographies and interviews, this book examines the history of the Belgian-Hungarian child relief project and describes its social and cultural impacts on the families involved in both countries. This compelling story of one of the first mass European child migration movements offers new insights in the dynamics of national and religious communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on intimate family life and contemporary habits and values regarding parenting and co-parenting in the interwar period. Cutting across national and cultural borders, this monograph connects individual and collective memory with the experiences of childhood and migration.

This book presents a novel framework for studying historical legalisation using quantitative methods, with 10 fully-preserved laws from medieval Sweden, written between c. 1225 and 1350, serving as a case study. By applying a systematic classification scheme to each legal provision, it is possible to investigate the major differences and similarities in structure and content between the 10 laws. This, in turn, allows for the re-assessment of many long-standing problems in Swedish and European medieval legal history that have been challenging to address with traditional methods based on text analyses. Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, major changes in the proportion of legal provisions devoted to different fields of law, and to prescribed consequences, are found. The book shows how the proportions of civil law and public law expanded at the expense of criminal law. Furthermore, a clear transition from casuistic to more abstract law provisions can also be witnessed.

This volume explores how China is adapting to international norms and practices while still giving primacy to its national interests. It examines China's strategic behaviour on the world stage, particularly in its relationships with major powers and Asian neighbours.

Benjamin A. Valentino finds that ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass killing usually originates from a relatively small group of powerful leaders and is often carried out without the active support of broader society. Mass killing, in his view, is a brutal political or military strategy designed to accomplish leaders' most important objectives, counter threats to their power, and solve their most difficult problems. In order to capture the full scope of mass killing during the twentieth century, Valentino does not limit his analysis to violence directed against ethnic groups, or to the attempt to destroy victim groups as such, as do most previous studies of genocide. Rather, he defines mass killing broadly as the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants, using the criteria of 50,000 or more deaths within five years as a quantitative standard. Final Solutions focuses on three types of mass killing: communist mass killings like the ones carried out in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia; ethnic genocides as in Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda; and "counter-guerrilla" campaigns including the brutal civil war in Guatemala and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Valentino closes the book by arguing that attempts to prevent mass killing should focus on disarming and removing from power the leaders and small groups responsible for instigating and organizing the killing.

Before 1994 South Africa practiced a vicious system of oppression. the divisions were clear and vivid. the enemy of the people was well defined and clear. Now let us look back at the history of our people from 1994. We are today in the democratic reign of the fourth democratic president of RSA. But still the great majority of our people has hardship and continues to suffer in agony. There is no apartheid and so who should we blame? People are unhappy and angry. This in our time is danger. People blame and hate each other as they compete for scarce government resources. People blame foreigners as the cause of their current state of suffering. People are misled to blame and attack our Councillors and other government officials. They are confused by the results and causes and by the causes and results. the time is now for you and me to make an attempt in defining the enemy of the people. Matsime Simon Mohapi, from: "Poverty in the Land of Riches - South Africa".