TY - JOUR
T1 - How (not) to talk about adoption: On communicative vigilance in Spain
AU - Frekko, Susan E.
AU - Leinaweaver, Jessaca B.
AU - Marre, Diana
PY - 2015/1/1
Y1 - 2015/1/1
N2 - © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. Transnational adoption is very difficult to talk about in Spain. For this reason, speakers use "communicative vigilance" to emphasize the appropriate ways to speak and particularly not to speak about it. Part of the difficulty, we demonstrate, is that adoption talk must mediate two contradictory understandings of talk and kinship: (1) a referentialist one in which adoption's undesirability must be first acknowledged and then masked and (2) a performative one in which talk can create a new world where transnational adoption is equivalent to and as valuable as traditional ways of creating families. Our findings have implications for both language-socialization studies and kinship studies. [adoption, kinship, parenting, language socialization, language ideologies, silence, Spain]
AB - © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. Transnational adoption is very difficult to talk about in Spain. For this reason, speakers use "communicative vigilance" to emphasize the appropriate ways to speak and particularly not to speak about it. Part of the difficulty, we demonstrate, is that adoption talk must mediate two contradictory understandings of talk and kinship: (1) a referentialist one in which adoption's undesirability must be first acknowledged and then masked and (2) a performative one in which talk can create a new world where transnational adoption is equivalent to and as valuable as traditional ways of creating families. Our findings have implications for both language-socialization studies and kinship studies. [adoption, kinship, parenting, language socialization, language ideologies, silence, Spain]
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12165
DO - https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12165
M3 - Article
VL - 42
SP - 703
EP - 719
JO - American Ethnologist
JF - American Ethnologist
SN - 0094-0496
ER -