1. In his critique of anthropological studies of kinship, David Schneider (1984) points out how fully taken for granted this assumption is. "Genealogy is at the core of kinship" is treated as an absolute, not a cultural, principle, framing the approaches anthropologists take in the field. According to Schneider, the centrality of "birth" is viewed as natural rather than as a social construct by anthropologists who should know better—trained as they are to examine diverse folk models. Kinship everywhere, he claims, has been mapped onto the particular interpretation favored in Western cultures.

2. Said to have been instituted in order to disguise the "stain" of illegitimacy, the amended birth certificate in effect makes adoption a "juridical parthenogenesis," as one commentator put it (C. W. Anderson 1977, 152).

3. This is a peculiarity of American adoption; in other societies, exchanging a child establishes a relationship between the adults who make the exchange (see Goody 1969; Carroll 1970; Brady 1976, among others). There are in-family adoptions in the United States, and the number of these is rising as the rate of divorce and stepparenthood rises. My book deals only with stranger adoption; in these, the as-if principle of American adoption has its purest form: blood is replaced by contract.

4. The phrase child exchange is more often used to describe adoption in other societies than in American society. Inasmuch as "exchange" suggests market not gift (the latter is the appropriate word for many non-Western understandings of adoption), reluctance to use the phrase reflects an effort to minimize the commercial aspects of transferring a child.

5. Both H. David Kirk (1981, 1984) and David Schneider (1984), from somewhat different vantage points, note the extreme discomfort adoption causes in American culture.

6. In The Woman in the Body (1987), Emily Martin points out that "particularistic, concrete stories" often contain an "analysis of society."

7. Working in two areas was the result of my own career, not a deliberate research strategy. I also did some interviewing in a small town in New England.

8. In The Woman in the Body (1987), Martin suggests that it is a form of activism to volunteer to be interviewed, and that may be true for at least some of my informants. On the other hand, many of them said that talking about adoption was just "fun" and assumed I was enjoying it as much as they were.

9. "Some experiences are inchoate, in that we simply do not understand what we are experiencing, either because the experiences are not storyable, or because we lack the performative and narrative resources, or because the vocabulary is lacking" (Bruner 1986, 6-7).

10. In 1964, in the first edition of a book called Shared Fate, H. David Kirk argued for the "acknowledgment" rather than the "rejection" of difference in an adoptive family. His conclusion was based on data collected from a number of adoptive families, intertwined with references to his own experience as an adoptive father. He makes a persuasive case for the necessity on the part of adoptive parents to acknowledge how different they are from biological parents. He further suggests that adoptive parents in fact share the fate of being different with their adopted children—all the more reason for "difference" to be part of family life. Though most practitioners accept Kirk's theory, and probably many adoptive parents do, it may not be easy advice to follow—as the accounts of adoptive parents and adoptees in the following chapters indicate.

11. In 1980, Congress passed an Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (P.L. 96-272) without much fanfare or publicity; so lackadaisical has been the response that many of its provisions sit unimplemented and unnoticed. Yet several of the provisions, like granting subsidies to adoptive parents, suggest a profound revision of notions of parenthood.

12. Influenced by Joseph Gusfield's 1981 analysis of "drinking-driving" as a public problem, Joel Best (1990) shows the importance of rhetoric for creating various public problems in the history of child-welfare practice in the United States.

13. Recent studies on adoption tend to use the figure of 5 million adoptees, probably borrowed from a summary of the "facts" collected by the NCFA.

14. These surveys, conducted in 1973, 1976, 1982, and 1987, have been analyzed by Christine Bachrach for their information on adoption—including data on relinquishing and adopting mothers; see bibliography.

15. Data for the Factbook were elicited by the group from its member agencies.

16. Individual states, private and public agencies, and adoption groups keep records, but these have not been compiled on a national basis in the past 20 years. The 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (P.L. 96-272) argued forcefully for systematic data collection on a national level, but this has not yet been implemented. The 1987 CWLA Task Force also argued for better data collection. "The goals of the newly-appointed National Adoption Task Force include revising adoption standards and developing, publishing, and disseminating critical adoption information" (Watson and Strom 1987, 2).

17. A failure to distinguish between number of adoptions in a year and number of adoptees in a (child) population per year is apparently not uncommon (Jonassohn 1965; Maza 1984). A further difficulty lies in the definition of an adoption "transaction" altogether. Are they only arrangements that have been through court? Or all instances in which a child has been permanently placed in another home?

18. Exceptions include Bachrach's analyses of the NSFG surveys, and a 1977 article by Gordon Bonham.

19. The books and articles on adoption by the sociologist H. David Kirk stand out here. Kirk has discussed and analyzed adoptive kinship not only as a personal event and a social institution but also as a reflection of dominant ideologies of family and parenthood. Adoption also appears in work by historians of the family and of childhood, as well as in those of anthropologists who have examined adoption in terms of kinship, exchange, and social mobility or, in a few instances, from a comparative perspective. My bibliography gives a fair sampling of this literature.

20. Two earlier books also had a hand in raising adoptee consciousness. In 1968, Jean Paton published Orphan Voyage, arguing against the secrecy and anonymity characteristic of American adoption. In 1973, Florence Fisher published The Search for Anna Fisher, an account of her search for her birthparents. As far as I could tell, neither of these made the impact that Lifton's books did, though Paton's Orphan Voyage serves as an important model for search groups, and Fisher's Adoptees' Liberty Movement Association (ALMA) is a successful national search group.

21. Talking about her difficulty in finding anything but the obvious in what the women she interviewed were saying, Martin quotes Marx: "People feel as much at home as a fish in water among manifestations which are separated from their internal connections and absurd when isolated by themselves" (1987, 11). Early in my fieldwork, I was struck by the sophistication with which the people I met analyzed a familiar kinship system. As they talked about relationships, they framed their feelings and their behaviors in terms of the dichotomies of blood and law, nature and culture, that are central to classic anthropological studies of kinship.