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Contribution short abstract:

In past adoptions from India to Switzerland. agencies, the state and adoptive parents heavily invested in the transfer of children, de-linking them from their origins and un-commoning them. Today, adoptees look for accountability, repair and for their biological parents, practicing commoning.

Contribution long abstract:

In the last third of the 20th century, tens of thousands of children from the global South were adopted by parents in the global North. Agencies helped to create a downright market of children for Western couples and state offices often looked away or facilitated this transfer of children. Adoptive parents heavily invested in these new relationships to make them happen and to make them work.

The paper is based on research on inter-country adoptions from India to Switzerland. Today, adopted persons increasingly question the conditions under which they were relinquished, the circumstances of their (possibly illegal) adoptions and their experiences of growing up in a white society. Many adoptees also try to find their biological parents, making use of their right to know one’s origin. Faced with a largely unhelpful Swiss state, they attempt to find their mothers through private connections, courts, and with the help of DNA tests; thus participating in a new market with the promise of reunion.

The paper analyses their searches as a response to the investment put into their separation from their families (un-commoning). This practice of (re-)commoning is radical because it refuses alienation, racialization and commercialization and brings supposedly intimate questions into the public realm.