Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how materiality in multiple forms becomes a crucial component of kinship belonging in the narratives and life experience of transnationally adopted people.

Paper long abstract:

Transnationally adopted people, once adults, make an effort to reconnect to their roots and country of birth through enquiring, researching, and sometimes travelling to their motherland. Those who manage to travel, return back to the adoptive country carrying several objects that become extremely evocative and keep acquiring layered meaning and relevance. Those who cannot travel but happen to know someone who does, request for some specific objects to be brought to them, as a way to quench, and soothe, a deeply felt sense of longing, and belonging. Objects also travel between adoptees and their estranged mothers and viceversa, via a third party – the anthropologist. This paper follows the route of different materialities in the lives of a cohort of Chileans adopted by Italian families some 40 years ago. Tangible objects such as pictures, jewellery, a lock of hair, a stone; and intangible (names) or sensory (smells, sounds) ones, become the embodiment of meaningful connections to people, places, identity, and silently but eloquently materialize a sense of belonging that is often controversial and transgressive to express.