Tracing Trajectories of Kinship Knowledge

Constitutive Knowledge: Tracing Trajectories of Information in New Contexts of Relatedness
Author(s): Janet Carsten

Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 2, Kinship and Globalization (Spring, 2007), pp.
403-426
Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
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GLOBAL KINSHIP
Constitutive Knowledge: Tracing
Trajectories of Information in
New Contexts of Relatedness
Janet Carsten
University of Edinburgh
Abstract
One much-commented upon feature of globalization is an increased access to
information. If new kinds of information, and a new speed of access to it, char-
acterize the so-called "global society," then how do new kinds of kinship informa-
tion and kinship knowledge affect Western practices of kinship, or a Western
"sense of self?" Examining the place of certain kinds of knowledge in Western
idioms and practices of relatedness and personhood, this paper explores the effects
of new kinds of information upon family ties. The role of information and knowl-
edge in pre-natal testing, in adoptive kinship, in the searches undertaken by
adoptees for their birth kin, and in transfers of bodily substance in fertility treat-
ment, provide some specific contexts to understand the way that kinship knowl-
edge contributes to people's sense of connectedness to their relatives, and to their
own sense of identity. Rather than assuming a clear trajectory from a world of
ascribed ties to one in which such ties are achieved, I highlight some of the more
complex processes which people put to work when they constitute themselves
through their various kinds of relations. A web of intertwinings, separations, and
rejoinings between what is apparently inherited from the past, and what is creat-
ed anew can be discerned as central to Western kinship practices. [Keywords:
globalization; kinship; personhood; prenatal testing; adoption]
403
This paper is an exploration of the place of certain kinds of knowledge in
Western idioms and practices of relatedness and personhood.1 Drawing
extensively on published work by Marilyn Strathern (1992a, 1992b, 1999,
2005), Rayna Rapp (1999), Jeanette Edwards (2000), Monica Konrad (2003;
2005) and others, as well as interviews that I conducted in the late 1990s with
adult adoptees in Scotland, I look at the way that kinship knowledge con-
tributes to people's sense of connectedness to their relatives, and to their own
sense of identity. One of my themes is the effects of increased access to infor-
mation-and here what I have to say touches upon the larger theme of glob-
alization and how we think about family ties. If new kinds of information, and
a new speed of access to it, are features of the so-called "global society," then
how do new kinds of kinship information and kinship knowledge affect the
way we "do kinship," or our sense of self? A characterisation of the "global
society" as founded on relations that are made rather than given (see, for
example, Giddens 1994:106-7) is, I suggest, an oversimplification. Instead,
some complex intertwinings, separations, and rejoinings between what is
apparently inherited from the past and what seems to be created anew are at
the heart of Western kinship practices. But to presume a clear trajectory from
a world of ascribed ties to one in which they are achieved, obscures some of
the more interesting processes which people put to work when they constitute
themselves through their various kinds of relations.
Trying to sketch out some of these processes of intertwining and separation
between the made and the given involves unpicking the paths between knowing
and being in personhood and relatedness. In order to avoid some of the pitfalls
of abstraction in this paper, I ground my speculations in some rather particular
ethnography of kinship. I look at the role of information and knowledge in pre-
natal testing, in adoptive kinship and in the searches undertaken by adoptees for
their birth kin, and in transfers of bodily substance in fertility treatment.
Over a number of years, the work of Marilyn Strathern has been central in
illuminating the multiple significance of different levels of kinship knowl-
edge, from the governmental to the individual, and the intricate work that
goes into the kinds of separations and recombinations which concern me
here. It therefore seems appropriate that I have structured this paper around
an essay which I have found particularly thought-provoking, "Refusing
Information" (Strathern 1999).2 My starting point is a distinction, drawn out by
Strathern, between constitutive and regulative knowledge, which derives from
John Searle's Speech Acts (1969). Searle makes a distinction between constitu-
tive and regulative rules. Constitutive rules create and define new forms of
404
JANET CARSTEN
behavior, for example, the rules of a game. Without the rules of bridge, there
would simply be no game. Regulative rules regulate behavior of which the
rules themselves are independent, for example the etiquette of eating in pub-
lic (see Searle 1969:33-42; Ahern 1982:303; Strathern 1999:68).
Strathern transposes this distinction to the realm of information and
knowledge. She highlights the difference between the information collected
by government commissions of enquiry in order to institute regulative legis-
lation, or in academic discussions of parental and children's rights, and the
kind of information people collect when they find out about their ancestry. In
the one case the information may or may not have consequences in terms of
whether it will be acted upon; it exists independently of the realm of behav-
ior from which it is extracted. It does not, in other words, define the activity
from which it derives. When people find out new information about their kin,
however, that knowledge becomes incorporated into their sense of identity:
"Because of its cultural coupling with identity, kinship knowledge is a partic-
ular kind of knowledge; the information (and verification) on which it draws
is constitutive in its consequences" (Strathern 1999:68). Thus when people
acquire new information about their ancestry, they "acquire identity by that
very discovery...the information forms ("constitutes") what they know about
themselves." (Strathern 1999:68).
I find what Strathern has to say about the "cultural coupling" of kinship
knowledge and identity extremely suggestive, and I return to her remarks at
several points in this paper. Part of my intention is to explore some of the dif-
ferent contexts and consequences of acquiring new kinship information. Here
it is worth noting that the very idea of "kinship information," or "kinship
knowledge" is a shorthand that glosses over the "unbounded" effects of infor-
mation and knowledge. It implies that the domains in which different kinds
of knowledge occur, and to which they may be applied, are discrete and iden-
tifiable. But knowledge of course is not necessarily like that-and nor is kin-
ship. It can seep into unexpected places in unexpected ways, and this is what
Strathern is concerned with. Later, I put to work the antithesis Strathern draws
out between the implications of acquiring information and refusing it. My
focus is on what people do with the information they acquire, and the differ-
ent ways in which they may deploy it.
My starting point is that kinship involves practices, knowledge, memories,
and experience, and that these are intricately intertwined in myriad ways. One
might want to ask whether it is possible, for example, to acquire new informa-
tion about one's ancestry, but to limit its constitutive consequences? What
405
kinds of spaces do people create for new knowledge about relatedness, and
how do they incorporate it into their old selves? What kinds of brakes do they
apply? Are there degrees of knowledge or different trajectories of processing it?
Here Strathern, once again, makes some thought-provoking comments:
ordinary knowledge about genetic connection gives a choice; there might
be no choice about recognising the kinship constituted in the genetic con-
nection itself...but people may or may not make active relationships out
of these connections. They may decide to ignore potential links. (Strathern
2005:26, original italics; see also Edwards and Strathern 2000).
Clearly, this is a very large topic, involving not just an examination of the links
between procreation and personhood in Western kinship, but which also
touches on issues of temporality-the connections people make between past
parentage and identity in the present and future. I begin, however, with a
brief discussion of a more well-worn topic-the connection between sexual
procreation and kinship knowledge.
From Sexual Procreation to Kinship Knowledge
Strathern's remarks, which I have quoted above, about the implications of dis-
covering new facts about one's ancestry rest, of course, on the centrality of
sexual procreation to Western kinship:
Parentage implies relatedness; facts about birth imply parentage. Euro-
Americans cannot ignore these connections. The information forms
("constitutes") what they know about themselves. (Strathern 1999:68;
see also Strathern 2005:69).
This passage recalls a much-quoted statement of David Schneider's in American
Kinship (which Strathern cites elsewhere, 1995:346), about the relation
between scientific knowledge and kinship:
In American cultural conception, kinship is defined as biogenetic. This
definition says that kinship is whatever the biogenetic relationship is. If
science discovers new facts about biogenetic relationship, then that is
what kinship is and was all along, although it may not have been known
at the time. (1980:23).
406
JANET CARSTEN
The idea that kinship in American culture is a direct reflection of current
scientific knowledge about biogenetic connections, which passed with rela-
tively little comment in American Kinship, has of course been a key issue in
analyses of the social effects of new reproductive technologies. Given the pace
of technological developments, the status of biogenetic connections, or "facts
about birth," is critical to how kinship is defined, and to the ways in which kin-
ship connections are mapped out in new, and apparently more literal ways
(see also Strathern 1992a, 1992b, 1995, 2005; Franklin 1997; Carsten 2000a,
2004). One arena in which one might expect to see such a "literalization" at
work would be when adoptees attempt to trace birth kin from whom they
have been disconnected since early childhood.
The desire on the part of the adult adoptees who I interviewed in Scotland
in 1998-9 to find out about and meet their birth kin was apparently axiomat-
ic. And it might seem obvious to connect this to what some see as an ongoing
geneticization of kinship in Euro-American culture (e.g. Finkler 2000). In fact,
as I indicate here, such desires have multiple and complex causes and corre-
lates, which no doubt partly relate to the particular value placed on biogenet-
ic origins in the West, but also to discourses about the self, encompassing
notions of agency and psychoanalytic understandings, and to more general
heightened interest in genealogy in Western culture (see also Carsten 2000b,
2004). I should emphasize that those I talked to were a narrowly selected group
who had all searched for and met their birth kin in the recent past. When I
asked these adoptees why they had wanted to engage in such searches, most
simply said "to find out who I am," "to be complete," or "to know where I came
from" (see Carsten 2000b, Telfer 2004). It seemed to me that they took these
desires to be self-explanatory. And this was indicated by both the brevity and
the formulaic nature of their responses. It was self-evident that one would
want to know about one's birth parents, just as it was self-evident that one
would want to be complete.3 And "completeness" is here constituted not in
one's present or future relations (as, for example, one could imagine someone
who had failed to fulfill a desire to marry or to have children also expressing a
sense of incompleteness), but in knowledge about the past.
This then bears out Strathern's insight that such knowledge is constitutive of
a person's identity. It was precisely the obvious contrast between Western adop-
tion, which signals the full relinquishing of parental rights on the part of birth
parents, and Malay fostering, which is both very frequent, and does not involve
the assumption of exclusive parental rights, which first motivated me to under-
take research on adoption reunions in Scotland (Carsten 1991, 1997). Whereas
407
in the West "missing" birth parents often appear to occupy a very prominent
place in the imaginary world of child and adult adoptees (see, for example,
Schwartz 1970), it is hard to imagine a Malay adult who has been fostered in
childhood seeking out her birth parents in the way described to me by those I
interviewed. This is most obviously unlikely because the connections to birth
parents would have been maintained alongside those to foster parents.
"Finding" one's birth parents would thus take on quite different meanings, and
knowledge of kin connections or origins would not have the revelatory force
which it appears to have in Western contexts. One might say that in the Malay
case such knowledge does not have the same power to constitute or dislodge a
person's sense of her own identity. And this perhaps suggests something about
what makes this kind of information constitutive in the West. Such knowledge
is not just to do with past kinship because part of its force derives from the dis-
closure of what has previously been hidden, or only partially revealed.
The shift in focus from knowledge to secrecy is significant. The theme of
secrets at the heart of kinship-the unknown and unexpected relative, adopt-
ed, abandoned, or illegitimate, who shows up after an absence of many
years-is familiar in European and North American novels, fairy stories, and
plays. In these contexts, the returned forgotten relative may have the power
to reshape (positively or negatively) the lives of those from whom she has
been separated in childhood. In different permutations, discussions of the
importance of disclosing information about their parentage to adoptees runs
through much of the literature on adoption in the West (see, for example,
Bowie 2004; Carp 1998; Modell 1994, 2002; Raynor 1980; Sachdev 1989;
Telfer 2004; Triseliotis 1973, 1984).4 This then is hardly a new theme. The idea
that adult adoptees engaging in searches for birth kin is a recent phenome-
non is also cast into doubt by E. Wayne Carp's research on the history of adop-
tion in America. Carp shows how at the beginning of the twentieth century,
child welfare reformers were concerned that either distorting the birth
records of adopted children, or making them confidential, might prevent chil-
dren from later discovering important facts about their identity. She cites a
prominent child welfare activist writing in 1916: "Everyone who is accus-
tomed to deal with illegitimate children, is familiar with the eager desire
which such children have, when they grow up, to know the facts as to their
parentage, and many cases are on record where these facts have become
important for the welfare of the child." (Hastings H. Hart cited in Carp 1998:
49). Similarly, in 1946 a consultant at the US Children's Bureau, concerned
about distorting information on birth certificates, wrote in startlingly contem-
408
JANET CARSTEN
porary terms, "every person has a right to know who he is and who his peo-
ple were" (Maud Morlock cited in Carp 1998:52).
In fact, the idea that adoptees have a "need to know" or a "right to know"
about their origins is once again a familiar theme in the popular and profes-
sional literature on adoption (see Carp 2002; Lifton 1979; Modell 1994, 2002;
Sachdev 1989; Triseliotis 1973, 1984). Expressed in the language of needs and
rights, information about origins has a constitutive force that derives both
from the linkage between kinship and identity, and from its previously hidden
status. It is not surprising that the adoptees I interviewed took their motiva-
tion for undergoing searches or seeking reunions with birth kin to be self-
explanatory grounds for becoming complete persons.
The Positive Value of Information
One striking feature of the narratives I collected from those who had under-
taken searches for birth kin, which I have drawn attention to elsewhere, was
the sense that this had been a worthwhile process (Carsten 2000b). Although
many of the interviewees I talked to spoke eloquently of the obstacles, anxi-
ety, and disappointments that they had encountered (and these often cen-
tered on the difficulties of establishing relations with birth kin), no one
expressed regret at actually having undertaken a search (see also Modell
2002:59). There are of course many possible explanations for this positive atti-
tude. One might see it simply as post facto rationalization of what in many
cases had turned out to be a quite traumatic process. However, I was struck
by the views of one woman I interviewed in her fifties who had described to
me at length a succession of episodes both painful and comical, which it
seemed to me should have left her wondering why she had ever embarked on
a search. It was significant that, unlike most of those I talked to, who related
how they had simply always known that they were adopted, Ann could recall
all too vividly the moment when, as a child of ten, she was told that she was
adopted, and the profound psychological reaction which ensued. It was clear
from Ann's account that acquiring the information that she was adopted in
this quite sudden way had had a destabilizing effect, dislodging her previous
sense of self.5 And one could thus view the prolonged enquiries on which Ann
embarked as an adult as an attempt to establish a more secure identity based,
as she saw it, not on lies but on her true origins.
As was the case with many of those I interviewed, Ann's enquiries did not
proceed smoothly. It soon became clear that her birth mother was not keen
409
to establish a relationship with her, and that she was also reluctant to reveal
identifying information about Ann's birth father. Although in Ann's case it was
evident that she was unlikely ever to establish positive relations with her birth
kin, there was no doubt that for her, the process of establishing "who she was"
had been positive. As she put it, "You've got to know where you came from.
You've got to find the end." Listening to her story, it was apparent that the
value of the information she had acquired about her origins was inextricably
linked to the layers of secrecy that she had encountered through her life, and
to her own need to have these recognized. While Ann's account, and those of
others I interviewed, emphasized the importance of truth and openness, as
well as histories of care in kinship, the fact that this lack of openness related
specifically to biogenetic origins may have given such information a height-
ened value. In their accounts, however, interviewees tended not to phrase
their experiences in terms of nature versus nurture, or "biological" versus
"social" ties, unless prompted by me (see Carsten 2000b).
The uncovering of secrets is, however, unlikely to be a straightforwardly pos-
itive process in such contexts. As Ann narrated to me how she had first encoun-
tered her birth mother, and then attempted to confront her birth father, it was
obvious that the attitude of her birth parents was at best ambivalent. It was
not at all clear that, from their point of view, the bringing to light of secrets was
in any way a positive outcome. And this of course is by no means an unusual
scenario. There are many reasons why birth parents may not wish to have such
secrets uncovered-although some clearly welcome the opportunity to meet
the children from whom they have been separated.
On a larger scale, E. Wayne Carp's documentation of legislative changes in
the US demonstrates that the original intention behind instituting secret
adoption records was not to prevent children from later having access to infor-
mation about their birth, but to curtail public access to stigmatizing informa-
tion about women who had given birth outside marriage (Carp 1998, 2002).
Here of course there is a tension between the value we place on information,
and free access to it, and the protection of those who may be made vulnera-
ble by disclosure. It is such kinds of tension that Strathern points to when she
underlines how, in the context of reproductive technologies, "Euro-Americans
are moving from a situation where concealment was always an option, to a
position where, in favour of open knowledge, concealment is regarded as
deleterious" (1999: 80). As she makes clear, when the information that is
uncovered has constitutive effects for the individuals concerned, then it is
likely that openness (however politically and socially valued it may be) will
410
JANET CARSTEN
constrain choices for those individuals as much as enlarging them. In an ear-
lier essay, Strathern points out that making biological knowledge more explic-
it has the paradoxical effect of increasing the social contingency of relation-
ships that are understood to be based on procreative ties. More explicit
knowledge thus contributes to knowledge about individual personhood but
not necessarily to knowledge about persons as kin (1995:360).
The political value we place on an "open society" or on the "free-flow of
information" does not, in Strathern's (1999) view, take account of the consti-
tutive effects of acquiring new knowledge about one's origins. And it is in the
light of the links between information about origins, and identity and kinship
that she counters the current trend to increased openness by suggesting the
positive value that refusing information might have. Before turning to
Strathern's observations about the value of refusing information, however, I
want to pause for a moment to consider some of the constraints that acquir-
ing information may impose.
Acquiring Information; Constraining Choices
I turn first not to adoption but to Rayna Rapp's (1999) extraordinarily rich
ethnography of pre-natal testing in the US. Pre-natal testing yields a different
kind of information, of course, from the searches I have discussed above.
Indeed, a deep uncertainty about just what kind of knowledge is being
acquired is voiced by some women undergoing amniocentesis. This eloquent
utterance by a Chinese-American woman in the context of a genetic coun-
selling session provides an example:
My mother, my grandmother they all had babies in China, and nobody did
this. They wouldn't do it now, if they were here. Now is modern times,
everyone wants to know everything, to know as soon as possible, in
advance, about everything. What kind of information is this? I don't know,
but I will soon have it, faster than I can understand it. (Rapp 1999:99).
Under a mantle of apparent confusion, we could hardly imagine a clearer
articulation of the potentially destabilizing force of this new information.
If we can construe the results of pre-natal testing as a kind of "kinship
information" (bearing in mind the caveats I raised earlier about this formula-
tion), it is oriented to the future rather than the past, and to a potential kin-
ship rather than the certainty of already established links. Nevertheless, there
411
is a sense in which I think we might see the results of such testing as consti-
tutive information in Strathern's terms. One genetic counselor captures this
quality in describing her husband's hesitance about foetal sexing in terms of
a tension between information and real experience:
I want to know, but Frank doesn't want to know...he doesn't want some
doc, you know, telling him before he has the real experience, finding it
out together, in life, not as information (Rapp 1999:123).
Writing of kinship knowledge in Lancashire, England, Jeanette Edwards sug-
gests that, like kinship, knowledge, deriving from experience and from infor-
mation, is hybrid. It is at once "bounded and discrete," and "unbounded and
nebulous" (2000:243-4), and thus its constituent elements are not readily sep-
arable. In most contexts (except perhaps academic ones), it is difficult to
divorce knowledge from what people do with it. As is meticulously document-
ed in Rapp's work, the acquisition of pre-natal test results changes the nature
of the links between an expectant mother and the unborn foetus she carries.
And this is also true of the chromosomal tests carried out after birth when
Down's syndrome is suspected. As one mother of a teenager with Down's syn-
drome commented:
What kind of information do you really need to handle a 6-week-old? I
didn't look at my daughter every day and say, "she has Down's." Today,
they get more services and support. But they've got less ability to forget
it, to just get on with knowing the child. (Rapp 1999:273).
The choices imposed by acquiring knowledge in this way highlight all too
clearly how such information may be experienced not as an enlargement of
opportunities, but as a narrowing of possibilities for the pregnant women who
undergo testing. Once again, Rapp's acute ear provides evidence of the doubts
which women voice about the kind of information they are acquiring. One
white lawyer in her thirties puts it thus:
If something turns out to be wrong, maybe I'll be happy I've had it. But
in some ways I wish it wasn't available. I wish I didn't have to know....
I've had a couple of abortions before, so it isn't that. But there's some-
thing about this that's like playing God. (Rapp 1999:117).
412
JANET CARSTEN
This is not, however, just a matter of unease about the status of knowledge.
Women also voice a strong sense that here more choice rapidly becomes expe-
rienced as less choice. As the same lawyer expresses it,
Now, I guess I'm having a modern baby. And they all told me I'd feel more
in control. But I guess I feel less in control. It's still my baby, but only if
it's good enough to be our baby, if you see what I mean (Rapp 1999:127).
Rapp notes how, in fact, the loss of control engendered by pre-natal testing
rapidly transforms what may have appeared to be choices into a series of deci-
sions to be made: "when I used the language of 'choice' to her, Doris Paul
immediately responded, 'Choices, choices. Decisions, decisions would be
more like it.'" (Rapp 1999:227).
There are particular reasons, of course, why pre-natal testing with its nec-
essarily inflexible time constraints, should highlight so vividly the way that
more information, which is intended to open up choices, may be experienced
as a restriction, or a heavy burden of decision-making. And it is significant
that we find a similar sense of a narrowing of possible alternatives in studies
of women undergoing fertility treatment. Thus Sarah Franklin, documenting
how women undergoing IVF treatment at fertility clinics in Birmingham,
England, described it taking over their lives, the different stages of treatment
being like "an obstacle course or a set of hurdles to be overcome" (Franklin
1997: 107). One woman vividly articulated the experience thus:
Because you go into it one hundred percent, you see, it's not something
you go into half sort of.... You throw everything in and everything else
gets pushed by, I mean...you live, eat, drink-everything is IVF. Nothing
else exists. I wasn't interested in anything else. I felt guilty, because all I
was thinking about was this like, but you can't, like it takes over every-
thing really, because it's your chance. (Frances Keating cited in Franklin
1997:114, italics in original).
This experience of new opportunities or new information which rapidly
impose their own trajectory of actions, each apparently automatically leading
to the next, and all of them eventually coming to dominate the present lives
of those concerned, was one I heard also in narrations of adoption reunions.
In some interviews, the sense of suspense between one event, or newly dis-
covered item of information, and the next was palpable. And this suspense
413
entails that one action may be followed up by the next almost automatically,
as if there is no alternative (see also Modell 2002:56). Several interviewees
recalled how, although they had been counselled by social workers not to con-
front birth parents directly without warning, once their searches had brought
to light an address or a phone number, and especially when this turned out
to be somewhere quite close by, they had felt impelled to make contact
almost immediately.
It is not necessarily those who themselves undertake a search for birth kin
who are most aware of the extent to which this quest has taken over their
lives. When I asked one woman whether she thought her family life had been
affected by her search, she said that she thought it hadn't. But when her hus-
band appeared a few minutes later, she relayed the question to him, indicat-
ing what her own response had been. She was clearly astonished when he
frankly revealed how he had experienced that period as one in which she had
been emotionally absent both from him and from their children. The extent
of his concern both for her well-being and that of their children, still raw after
several years, spoke eloquently of the kind of disjunction which new kinship
information may set in train.
These stories about searches for missing kin, or "completing a marriage"
(Franklin 1997:138) by undergoing fertility treatment, or the consequences of
pre-natal testing, all convey a sense of trajectories which, once embarked upon,
have their own momentum-their consequences are inescapable. But it is worth
probing this idea a little more deeply. In what ways are the kind of events set in
train here inescapable? In what ways may they be negotiable? The obvious place
to start is with those who refuse to get on the train in the first place.
Refusing Information
Strathern's (1999) argument is that, in Euro-American contexts, acquiring
certain kinds of knowledge about one's ancestry implies acquiring identity.
This kind of knowledge has an immediate effect-once obtained, it cannot
be rejected or put aside-"knowledge creates relationships: the relationship
comes into being when the knowledge does." (1999:78). This is the case, she
suggests, whether one admits the relation or not (see also Strathern
1995:354). In contrast to information collected with regulative aims in
mind, in the realm of kinship, new information precludes choice. The imme-
diacy of the effects of new information is quite apparent in the accounts of
reunions which I collected. But one might add that they are already prefig-
414
JANET CARSTEN
ured by the decision to search for birth kin, and the process of undergoing
such searches. The decision not to seek out birth kin could of course be seen
as equally constitutive of identity. If knowing one's parentage is "constitu-
tive information" (1999:69), then knowledge that one is adopted (whether or
not one pursues birth ties) has the power to create, and also potentially to
dislodge, a sense of self. One might say that Ann's process of searching for
her birth parents, which I referred to above, began when as a child of ten
she was told she was adopted.
But of course in this context there are many ways and possible meanings
of "refusing information." One problem here is the methodological difficulty
involved in trying to study people who are defined by something they don't
do. Perhaps it may be useful to begin with some numbers. John Triseliotis,
whose authoritative study of adopted people's search for their origins in
Scotland in the 1970s was published in 1973, suggests that it is only a small
minority of adoptees who actually seek access to their birth records
(Triseliotis 1984). Section 26 of the Children Act of 1975 gave adopted people
in England and Wales who had reached the age of eighteen the right to a
copy of their original birth certificate. Under Scottish law, access to birth
records had been available since 1930, and it was anticipated that following
the 1975 Children Act, there would be a flood of enquiries in England and
Wales. In fact, this was very far from the case. Triseliotis estimates that the
average annual rate of such enquiries in the years 1980-1982 was 0.3 per
cent of adopted adults in England and Wales, and 0.7 per cent in Scotland.
Extrapolating from these annual rates, he suggests, would give a figure of
between 15 per cent and 21 percent of adoptees in England and Wales mak-
ing enquiries over the average life cycle. Taking into account that about one
third of adoptions were by relatives-and these adoptees do not normally
seek access to their birth records-Triseliotis suggests an annual rate of
enquiries of 0.6 per cent in England and Wales, 0.9 per cent in Scotland
(Triseliotis 1984:47-8). There is, however, evidence to suggest that the num-
ber of people seeking access to their birth records has risen considerably
since Triseliotis conducted his research.6
I have not myself conducted interviews with adoptees who choose not to
examine their original birth records, and I would hesitate to make any
assumptions about their motivations. It might seem reasonable to suppose
that many adoptees' sense of self is well-established enough for them not to
feel a "need" to acquire such information.7 To the contrary, it may also be the
case that some have reasons to worry that the consequences might be desta-
415
bilizing either for themselves or for those to whom they are close. Strathern's
point that "kinship knowledge is about identity in the context of relationships,
so that choice between facts is also choice between relationships" (1999:75) is
apt here. Anecdotally, I have been told of several cases where adoptees were
concerned about upsetting their adoptive parents-and this suggests that the
constitutive effects of acquiring this information is felt to have the potential
to impinge on others beyond adoptees themselves and their birth parents.
Concern for relations with adoptive parents is likely to weigh heavily when
those relations form a major part of the active experience of kinship in the
present as well as the past. For some adult adoptees at least, the identity of
birth parents would seem not to be a highly significant factor in their own
understandings of kinship. Clearly this is a subject for further research.
Nevertheless, the numerical significance of those who do not seek access to
their birth records might make us pause, for it suggests that there remains a
substantial gap between the positive valuation which is ascribed to openness
in the public arena, or in political contexts, and the space allowed for infor-
mation to remain hidden or undisclosed in the private sphere.8
The existence of such a gap between values which might be deemed appro-
priate in the public sphere and those which pertain in the privatized world of
the emotions and family life is expressive of the disjunctions between these
two worlds in the West. When the sometimes sordid private secrets of public
figures are exposed to public scrutiny, the contradictory nature of this clash in
values is tangible. But in many contexts such disjunctions are dealt with more
subtly. I noted above the ambivalence which Rayna Rapp reports amongst
some of her informants about amniocentesis or foetal sexing. This is knowl-
edge that some people at least do not wish to have. But it is significant that
one reason that those she talked to gave for wanting to know the sex of the
foetus, was the fact that others already had this information. One 39 year old
white school teacher expressed it thus: "As long as it's known, I feel the par-
ents should know, you know. I mean, we shouldn't be the last to know, it is
that kind of a feeling" (Rapp 1999:122). Once the knowledge is out there, in
the public arena of the clinic, then those whom it most concerns should have
access to it. Here there is a sense that being "deprived" of knowledge also con-
notes lack of agency. And this is reminiscent of the narratives of adoptees
which I collected, in which it appeared to me that acquiring information
about origins, and meeting birth kin, was a means for adoptees to reassert
agency over past events of their lives over which they had had no control
(Carsten 2000b, Telfer 2004).
416
JANET CARSTEN
In the following sections of this article, I pursue some of the means by
which people negotiate the fine line between knowing and not knowing, and
between taking control of events and being rendered passive by them. As is
clearly illuminated in Rapp's study, social class, gender, and education,
amongst other factors, are highly pertinent to how information is received,
and what is perceived to follow from it. The same information may be appre-
hended in quite different ways-as this short excerpt from a consultation
between a Haitian mother with a six week old baby boy diagnosed with a
chromosomal abnormality, and two geneticists reveals:
The counselor took notes as the geneticists measured and discussed the
baby. "Note the oblique palpebral fissure and micrognathia," one called
out. "Yes, " answered Veronique in perfect time to the conversation, "he
has the nose of my Uncle Herv6 and the ears of Aunt Mathilde." As the
geneticists pathologised, the mother genealogized, the genetic coun-
selor remained silent, furiously taking notes, and the anthropologist
tried to keep score. (Rapp 1999:187).9
It should not be presumed, however, that such disjunctions are simply of
knowledge and ignorance. As Rapp points out, in this case (as in many others)
the mother was quite aware of the difficulty the geneticists had been having
in both diagnosing the chromosomal anomaly, and in predicting its likely
effects. V6ronique expressed this outside the consultation:
But when they told me this, who knows? I was so scared, but the more
they talked, the less they said. They do not know what this is. And I do
not know either. So now, it's my baby. We'll just have to wait and see
what happens. And so will they. (Rapp 1999:188).
The description we are given of Veronique's encounter with geneticists shows
with remarkable clarity how the same information may be received quite dif-
ferently by different people. While the medical professionals are seeking new
scientific knowledge that may aid them in future diagnoses, Veronique has
embarked on a trajectory of a relational kind. Realizing that what the geneti-
cists can tell her is at best provisional, she inserts her baby into a nexus of kin
relations, at the center of which is her own relation to it as mother: "it's my
baby." In effect, she is rejecting one kind of information and replacing it with
a constitutive statement of kinship.
417
Other Trajectories
I began the last section by discussing outright refusals of information, and
ended it with a case which one might see as a rejection of scientific informa-
tion, but could also be viewed as a more intricate negotiation between differ-
ent kinds of knowledge. In the remaining part of this article, I want to pursue
further strategies which appear to involve quite complex processes of inter-
twining and separating different kinds of knowledge. Strathern presents us
with what is apparently a stark contrast between refusing information and
concealing it. She suggests that acquiring new kinship information has effects
which are both immediate and rule out choices: "if one has no option but to
deal with the information it is also true that one has no option over the rela-
tionships" (1999:77). Furthermore, whereas the possibility of concealing infor-
mation was previously built into how we did kinship, the values which we
place on an open society, and on acquiring more self-knowledge, now make
concealment appear as negative, or "pinched and narrow" (1999:85).
Strathern's point, at the close of her essay, is that in fact refusals of infor-
mation also offer new possibilities for kinship-they only appear as pinched
and narrow in the light of a particular kind of political discourse. But we
might take her argument in a slightly different direction, which involves
examining in a more minute way how people deal with new information
about their past and future kinship. What kinds of choices do people make
when they are confronted with such information, and what kinds of spaces do
they create to accommodate it?
One striking feature of the narratives about searches which I collected from
adoptees was the way in which interviewees often described how the process
of searching had gone on intermittently over a period of years. Several of
those I spoke to had first sought out information from their birth records
when they became entitled to do so at the age of seventeen or soon after. But
instead of following up the information they had been given immediately,
they left it to one side, and did not pursue it for a number of years. The next
trigger to taking matters a stage further often occurred at a quite different
stage of their lives-for example, after marriage or the birth of children, or
after the death of an adoptive parent. One could therefore view such search-
es as having their own particular chronologies, dependent on the life history
of the person undertaking it.
A similar kind of pattern emerges from other studies. In fact, Triseliotis
(1984:42) estimates, based on various studies, that only about half of those
seeking access to their birth records are actually seeking to meet their birth
418
JANET CARSTEN
parents. Of course, with studies which are not retrospective, but are based on
interviews or questionnaires at the time of access to original birth records, it
is difficult to know whether those seeking access to information will not in the
future attempt to follow up the information they acquire.10 But if one bears
in mind that only a minority seek access to such information in the first place,
then the evidence would seem to suggest a variety of strategies in relation to
such information-from not seeking it out at all, to applying brakes at vari-
ous points once it is acquired. Adoptees may limit themselves to acquiring
birth records, they may stop and restart their searches, they may act immedi-
ately, or they may postpone the next stage for months or even years. And the
fact that new moves are often linked to the present family circumstances of
adoptees, particularly the birth of children, suggests a rather complex inter-
twining of past, present, and future chronologies of kinship. Once again, one
can detect attempts to limit the effects which meetings with birth relatives
may have. Several interviewees related to me how although they themselves
had met their birth parents, they had not told their own children about them.
As far as these children were concerned, they had just two sets of grandpar-
ents. Here then, we can perhaps discern evidence of trajectories of kinship
knowledge which neither fit neatly into a category of "refusing information"
nor of acquiring it, but rather of creating spaces to accommodate or limit the
"constitutive force" of new information.
In a quite different domain of kinship knowledge and practices, Monica
Konrad's research on third party anonymous donor conception in fertility clin-
ics in London suggests that donors may have a quite different stance towards
the potentially constitutive properties of kinship knowledge (Konrad 1998,
2005). Here genetic material is consciously disconnected from its origins: "I
don't think the eggs are mine, they're not something physical that they're my
eggs. I don't even think of them as my eggs." (cited in Konrad 1998:651).
Another woman articulates a desire "to help busloads of women" (1998:656).
In attending to the imaginative possibilities of anonymity, Konrad illuminates
how diffuseness and generality evoke enchantment, hope, and excitement
rather than the burdens of kinship obligation (1998:659-661).
It is significant, I think, that the innovative imaginary space created in the
context of egg donation is oriented towards the future not the past. Here,
instead of an emphasis on tracking the trajectories of particular eggs with par-
ticular origins, we are confronted with an emphasis on non-particularity and
anonymity. Rather than appearing "pinched and narrow" in Strathern's terms,
the emotional tenor is one of generosity and openness. This suggests that the
419
"constitutive force" of kinship knowledge may be negotiated in ways that do
not necessarily constrain choices in the ways that we might expect. Partly, I sug-
gest, because kinship knowledge can be oriented to the future as much as to
the past, the ways in which new information inserts itself into self-knowledge
and identity may be used to suggest new possibilities rather than closure.
Konrad also tackles directly the question of how participants in reproduc-
tive technologies and genetic testing "evade, defer, and struggle to make
sense of what they themselves classify as difficult conception knowledge"
(2003:341). Here we enter a realm of secrecy rather than openness. She cites
one case in which a woman has decided not to tell her 74 year old mother that
the latter's granddaughter has been conceived by means of an ova derived
from an anonymous source. For this woman, the non-disclosure of genealog-
ical knowledge about her daughter to her mother is seen as part of the full
assumption of adult responsibility for family secrets (which she describes by
reference to the writings of Bruno Bettelheim). But she is also simultaneous-
ly looking to the future, and anticipating with some anxiety what the keeping
of such a secret might mean when her daughter becomes an adult. In other
cases described by Konrad, donors are simply "cancelled out" where physical
resemblance between child and parents seems to make a child's connection
to its parents appear "natural" (2003:346).
For Konrad, what is of interest here is the way that "the medicalization of
kinship is reappropriated in folk terms as genealogical ethics" (2003:342). In
the cases she analyses, involving her earlier study of in-vitro fertilization, and
a later study of predictive genetic testing for Huntington's Disease, she
demonstrates the complex temporality of conception knowledge. Genetic
knowledge may be disclosed gradually over time: "conception secrets," as she
puts it, "often have no clear beginnings or endings" (2003:350). Such secrets
"set in motion a long "chain" or "pathway" of interconnected kinship conse-
quences" (2003:352). Here there is certainly a sense of lack of closure but, for
both givers and recipients of genetic knowledge, "the genealogical life of the
secret" (2003:352) is darker and heavier in tone than the sense of enchant-
ment in her earlier depiction of egg donors.1
Shadow Kinships
I would not want to imply that an orientation to the past in acquiring kinship
knowledge is necessarily only constraining or delimiting. If we think for a
moment about the ways in which memories and absences are woven into par-
420
JANET CARSTEN
ticular family histories, it is apparent that the past may offer creative possibil-
ities that are not always so different from those represented by the future. Bob
Simpson's study of divorce and separation in Britain reminds us of the many
ways in which,
Who we are is not simply determined by the positive relations we have
with those that surround us but that ongoing negative relationships as well
as the absence, the memory and the former significance of others also play
their part in who we are and who we might become. (Simpson 1998:10).
The point is that such memories are far from static-they are continually
reworked, and their significance shifts in response to present relationships
and wider political circumstances. This is most obvious perhaps when families
are uprooted by war and migration. It emerges too in accounts of transnation-
al adoption. Barbara Yngvesson and Maureen Mahoney (2000) have highlight-
ed in poignant terms how narratives of transnational adoptees illuminate the
contingency of identity-caught between the apparent arbitrariness and con-
tingency of choice, and the illusory authenticity or closure sought in biologi-
cal connections. They suggest that the experience of the Swedish adoptees
whose narratives they analyse is one of "displacement" (2000:82) in which
they "straddle a fine line between belonging and not belonging" (2000:90; cf.
Yyngvesson 2002:240).
Memories are of course as telling in their silences as in what they record.
And there are many absent figures in the historical narratives of the Western
family. Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden
(1999) explore the significance of such silences about unmarried women in
memories of family life in early twentieth century Britain. They note that such
women often played highly significant roles as the providers of material aid
and domestic help-services which might otherwise be obtained from paid
servants-and they thus "cross and blur the boundaries of blood, contract
and intimacy" (1999:224). The ambiguities and silences around such figures in
family stories recall other absences, such as those of illegitimate births or of
adoption which I have discussed here. The connection is underlined by the
wonderfully evocative term "family shadows" (Davidoff et al. 1999:221),
which these authors use and which I have adapted here. The point is that
silences about the past cast a long shadow over the present and the future.12
I suggested earlier that the constitutive power of new kinship knowledge
might be reinforced when such knowledge has been concealed. And that this
421
is because identity for Euro-Americans rests not just with self-knowledge, and
hence kinship knowledge, but also with a sense of control over one's own life.
Acting as kin is a crucial part of being kin, just as persons who are defined by
their passivity are likely to have a diminished sense of self. As the ambiguities
surrounding adoption in the West clearly demonstrate, kinship knowledge, by
itself, does not create kinship. Whilst knowledge of a person-including
knowing about their kinship relations-is crucial to being close to them (see
Edwards 2000: 245), knowledge must also be activated in relationships.
Conclusion
In a rather eclectic manner, I have tried to sketch some different kinds of kin-
ship knowledge and some different trajectories for its use. There are of course
many different ways of knowing, just as there are degrees of knowing.
Perhaps the most unexpected of these occupy the interstices between know-
ing and not knowing to which family life seems particularly given. The myri-
ad creative and destructive possibilities offered by knowledge in the emotion-
ally complex and intricate realm of the family suggest the variable ways in
which kinship knowledge is constitutive of the self. And this implies that if
new information, and increased access to it, are characteristic features of the
global society, there is no predetermined pattern to what this will do for kin-
ship. Because those most concerned are often highly aware of the destabiliz-
ing force of new kinship information, they may find ways to limit or accom-
modate its effects. New possibilities are not necessarily confined to refusing
information or to seeking it out, but reside in the multiple ways in which the
new may be combined with the old.
This suggests that the supposed shift in emphasis from what is given in
relations, to what is made, with which I began this article, is at least partly off
the mark. The kind of memory work which is encapsulated in Euro-American
kinship, and its connections to selfhood, implies some very complex process-
es of combining and separating what is given and what is made in the realm
of intimate family relationships. I have argued that one avenue for creative
possibilities is the fact that kinship is oriented as much to future relations as
to past ones. But I have also tried to show that the ways in which memories
rework and extricate the past in the light of the present, means that they too
cast a shadow over kinship in the future. Kinship shadows are projected
simultaneously forward and backward in time. There is no simple way in
which we can say that a search for hidden family relations or origins necessar-
422
JANET CARSTEN
ily implies closure. And this of course is because although kinship knowledge
is constitutive of the self, kinds of knowledge and what people do with them
are infinitely variable-just as selves are never finitely constituted entities.
ENDNOTES
1A preliminary version of this article was delivered at a seminar on "Globalization and
Rethinking the Family" at Johns Hopkins University. I am grateful to Veena Das for the invi-
tation, and to audiences there and at the anthropology seminar at Goldsmiths College,
University of London, and to participants at a workshop on "Forms of Knowledge, Notions
of Relatedness" held at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, as well as
the anonymous reviewers of this article for their stimulating comments. Research on adop-
tion reunions was carried out in Scotland in 1997-8, and funded by a Social Science
Research Fellowship from the Nuffield Foundation. I am grateful to the Nuffield
Foundation, participants in the research, and to the staff of the agency that helped in con-
tacting those I interviewed. I have kept this organization and interviewees anonymous in
order to protect the latter's privacy. I particularly thank Jennifer Speirs for her help in initi-
ating the research, and for her suggestions and comments. Conversations with Sophie Day
and Maria Phylactou over several years have helped me think through the implications of
the material discussed here.
2Strathern continues her exploration of the parallels between knowledge and kinship in
what she calls a "knowledge-based society" in her most recent collection (Strathern 2005).
For parallel arguments in closely related contexts built around a development of Strathern's
ideas see Sarah Franklin's (2003) discussion of the nature-culture articulation in terms of
Strathern's model of "merographic connection," Barbara Yngvesson's (2002) discussion of
transnational adoption in terms of Strathern's notion of "enchainment" between giver and
receiver, and Konrad's (2005) extended discussion of ova and embryo donation in the UK in
the context of Melanesian gift exchange.
3Telfer (2004) also notes a coupling of knowledge and completeness in his discussion of
searches in Australia. Interestingly, he draws a parallel in this case with the compulsory edu-
cational activities that adoptive parents undergo before and after adopting (Telfer 2004:251).
4Bowie begins her overview of cross-cultural approaches to adoption with the observation
that, "Adoption is one of Western society's best kept secrets." (2004:3). While openness is
increasingly part of US adoption practices, and adoptive parents in the UK are encouraged
to disclose information about birth parents, the adults I interviewed had received quite lim-
ited information about their origins while they were growing up.
5Here, as elsewhere, the invocation of a sense of "self," and the use of similar psychological
idioms, reflects my subjects' own accounts in conversation or that of the literature I discuss.
Another paper needs to be written about the popularity of such idioms in this ethnograph-
ic context (see Yngvesson and Mahoney 2000).
6The Adoptions Unit of the office of the Registrar General in Scotland states that, in 2002,
454 people applied for access to their original birth certificate at the General Register Office
for Scotland. This figure, which is substantially higher than the 73 adult adoptees Triseliotis
records as seeking this information in the twelve months in 1969 -1970 when he conduct-
ed his research (Triseliotis 1973:11), does not include those who, knowing their original
birth name, apply directly for access to the Court Process of their adoption. Nor does it
include those who knowing their original name, directly place their name on a register for
423
those seeking to make contact with birth kin. Composite figures are not available. (Jennifer
Speirs, personal communication.)
7This suggestion is supported by evidence from research in the US which suggests that those
who do not search have a more positive sense of self and relation with their adoptive par-
ents (Carp 2002:450, citing Aumend and Barrett 1984).
81n Norway, Howell (2003: 481) suggests that only a small minority of transnational adoptees
try to locate their biological relatives. For the US too, it appears that only a minority of
adoptees search for birth parents. Estimates of the proportion who engage in searches vary
between 1% and 35% (Carp 2002:450; Modell 2002:56).
9See Franklin (2003: 72-4) who cites the same episode from Rapp's study to demonstrate the
incommensurability of two different kinds of knowledge, and the way that kinship may
supersede genetic knowledge (contra Finkler 2000).
10Modell (2002:59-60) notes that in the US too, not all adoptees who access their birth
records go on to make contact with birth relatives, and that there are no statistics on those
who try unsuccessfully to access their records or make contact with birth relatives.
"See also Konrad (2005:161-69) for an extremely subtle discussion of "the processual
unfolding of the life of secrets" (2005:162) in anonymous donor conception, and specifical-
ly in juxtaposition to adoption secrets.
12See also Barbara Yngvesson's (2002) highly suggestive discussion of the experience of
transnational adoptees in Sweden and the US as one of an effort "to occupy the 'in-
between,'" where adoptees "inhabit...[a] 'ghostly' place" (2002:248-9). Here a sense of
being "doubled" or dually located means that "the past will always haunt their presence"
(2002:251). One interviewee "describes this 'absent presence' as a life that has always run
parallel to his everyday life but has never overlapped it" (2000:252).
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Constitutive Knowledge: Tracing Trajectories of Information in New Contexts of Relatedness

Author(s): Janet Carsten

Constitutive Knowledge: Tracing

New Contexts of Relatedness

One much-commented upon feature of globalization is an increased access to

tion and kinship knowledge affect Western practices of kinship, or a Western

"sense of self?" Examining the place of certain kinds of knowledge in Western

edge in pre-natal testing, in adoptive kinship, in the searches undertaken by

edge contributes to people's sense of connectedness to their relatives, and to their

through their various kinds of relations. A web of intertwinings, separations, and

ed anew can be discerned as central to Western kinship practices. [Keywords:

globalization; kinship; personhood; prenatal testing; adoption]

Constitutive Knowledge: Tracing Trajectories of Information in New Contexts of Relatedness

This paper is an exploration of the place of certain kinds of knowledge in

Western idioms and practices of relatedness and personhood.1 Drawing

extensively on published work by Marilyn Strathern (1992a, 1992b, 1999,

tributes to people's sense of connectedness to their relatives, and to their own

sense of identity. One of my themes is the effects of increased access to infor-

way we "do kinship," or our sense of self? A characterisation of the "global

example, Giddens 1994:106-7) is, I suggest, an oversimplification. Instead,

some complex intertwinings, separations, and rejoinings between what is

themselves through their various kinds of relations.

Trying to sketch out some of these processes of intertwining and separation

of abstraction in this paper, I ground my speculations in some rather particular

ethnography of kinship. I look at the role of information and knowledge in pre-

their birth kin, and in transfers of bodily substance in fertility treatment.

illuminating the multiple significance of different levels of kinship knowl-

goes into the kinds of separations and recombinations which concern me

an essay which I have found particularly thought-provoking, "Refusing

Information" (Strathern 1999).2 My starting point is a distinction, drawn out by

Strathern, between constitutive and regulative knowledge, which derives from

would simply be no game. Regulative rules regulate behavior of which the

lic (see Searle 1969:33-42; Ahern 1982:303; Strathern 1999:68).

Strathern transposes this distinction to the realm of information and

knowledge. She highlights the difference between the information collected

by government commissions of enquiry in order to institute regulative legis-

lation, or in academic discussions of parental and children's rights, and the

whether it will be acted upon; it exists independently of the realm of behav-

however, that knowledge becomes incorporated into their sense of identity:

"Because of its cultural coupling with identity, kinship knowledge is a partic-

ular kind of knowledge; the information (and verification) on which it draws

is constitutive in its consequences" (Strathern 1999:68). Thus when people

very discovery...the information forms ("constitutes") what they know about

themselves." (Strathern 1999:68).

knowledge and identity extremely suggestive, and I return to her remarks at

ferent contexts and consequences of acquiring new kinship information. Here

it is worth noting that the very idea of "kinship information," or "kinship

knowledge" is a shorthand that glosses over the "unbounded" effects of infor-

out between the implications of acquiring information and refusing it. My

ent ways in which they may deploy it.

My starting point is that kinship involves practices, knowledge, memories,

Constitutive Knowledge: Tracing Trajectories of Information in New Contexts of Relatedness

apply? Are there degrees of knowledge or different trajectories of processing it?

Here Strathern, once again, makes some thought-provoking comments:

ordinary knowledge about genetic connection gives a choice; there might

be no choice about recognising the kinship constituted in the genetic con-

of these connections. They may decide to ignore potential links. (Strathern

2005:26, original italics; see also Edwards and Strathern 2000).

between procreation and personhood in Western kinship, but which also

touches on issues of temporality-the connections people make between past

brief discussion of a more well-worn topic-the connection between sexual

procreation and kinship knowledge.

From Sexual Procreation to Kinship Knowledge