Holding On: Adoption, Kinship Tensions, and Pregnancy in the Marshall Islands

In the Marshall Islands, the idea that children belong to the kinship group as a whole exists in tension with an understanding of children as closely tied to their birth family. This tension is simultaneously created and overcome by linguistic and strategic practices in which adoptive and birth parents alike attempt to gain and keep children. Their efforts to “hold on” challenge recent trends in the anthropological study of kinship, specifically deconstructions of the importance of things—such as pregnancy—that appear biological. I argue that both criticisms and defenses of kinship as biology have overlooked how the physical process of reproduction creates interactional constraints on negotiations for children. These negotiations also create multiple potential parents as legitimate, thus producing the ambivalence and tensions that underlie Marshallese experiences of adoption. Rather than simply destructive, however, these tensions and ambivalences are also constructive—it is through their struggle to hold on that parents bind children to themselves.