In this article, I draw from ethnographic research in Ayacucho, Peru, to describe how rural‐to‐urban migrants move children between houses as part of a common survival and betterment strategy in the context of social and economic inequality. Such “child circulations” produce and strengthen kinship and are an important part of local family‐making efforts. My investigation of child circulation grounds a critical assessment of Peru's globalized adoption system, which implicitly denaturalizes the parenting of poor, indigenous Peruvians.

Anthropological research around the world has documented informal, kinship-based foster care cross culturally. That research suggests that children are more likely to benefit from informal kinship-based fostering in cultural contexts where fostering expands the pool of relatives rather than substituting one parent for another, fostering is expected to provide children with positive opportunities for learning and development, and/or children are granted some autonomy or decision-making power. However, informal kinship-based fostering seems to place children at risk in cultural contexts where the process of children’s attachment to caregivers resembles the Western child development model, communities are highly stratified along socioeconomic lines, and/or exploitation of children is permitted. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for both research and policy.

Transnational migration transforms houses, the rituals surrounding them, and the people who live in those houses and use them to understand aspects of their social and ethnic identities. I focus on the Andean house-roofing ritual known as the zafacasa to demonstrate the centrality of the house as a mediator for personal relationships, and the importance of such rituals for reconstituting social bonds both in spite of and because of distance. The article goes on to argue that research on consumption should be complemented by a kinship framework in order fully to represent the local meanings of expenditures.

A B S T R A C TTransnational 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.

We use the transnational adoption screening process as a lens for examining the co‐production of the home and the family in Spain. We propose the term ‘homework’ to describe the efforts of adoption applicants to perform an appropriate home and thus receive approval to adopt. The transnational adoption screening process is a key site of state‐individual interaction for communicating a set of classed, gendered norms. Through that process, participants ratify the authority of professionals to distinguish between adequate and inadequate ways to live. As such, our analysis demonstrates how moral authority is ascribed to material objects, as we document the strong link between ‘appropriate’ housing and growing families as an explanatory factor for the demographic effects of economic crises.

Migration from Peru has increased dramatically over the past decade, but the social and relational repercussions of these transnational movements have not yet been fully explored. Examination of the way migrants manage their responsibilities to dependent kin in Peru reveals that child fostering makes it possible for adults to migrate in search of better work opportunities by ensuring care for their children and company for their older relatives. For Peruvians engaging in labor migration, child fostering tempers some of the challenges of continuing to participate in established social networks from a distance.

In this article I examine gratitude and ingratitude as valuable analytical tools for determining how social inequalities inform kinship practices. Accusing one's kin of ingratitude reveals the edges and fault lines of kinship, as well as closely related expectations about what should be given, how it should be given, and how it should be received. As such, this essay follows in an esteemed anthropological tradition of unifying analyses of the gift and of kinship. It argues that expressions of and talk about gratitude and ingratitude closely index dimensions of social relations such as gender, generation, and social class, and simultaneously reveal tensions within kinship relations where duty and obligation are contested. Ethnographic examples are drawn from fieldwork in Ayacucho, a small city in the Peruvian Andes, where informal fostering and the fraught relations between grown children and their aging parents provide two related arenas for expressions of ideas about gratitude and ingratitude. Analyzing these two examples, I argue for gratitude and ingratitude as analytical heuristics, useful to identify and focus upon dimensions of relations understood to fall within the domain of kinship, and potentially useful in other settings as well.

This article compares migrants and adoptees of Peruvian origin residing in Europe by focusing on their respective movements out of and return to the sending country of Peru. First, it analyzes family-based reunifications by drawing on a framework from studies of adoption and kinship. Juxtaposing the experiences of adoptees with those of migrants reveals how migration, too, may be steeped in concerns about kin ties. Next, it analyzes returns of adult adoptees using a template modeled on migrant returns, focusing on the centrality of the notion of contribution. The article shows how migrants and adoptees contest the constraints of European nation-state definitions of kinship intended to limit migration. It is based on recent research with Peruvian migrants and adoptees in Spain, as well as longer-term research in Peru on migration and adoption.