Browsing by Autor "Atamhi Cawayu"

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Can First Parents Speak? A Spivakean Reading of First Parents’ Agency and Resistance in Transnational Adoption
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2024) Atamhi Cawayu; Hari Prasad Sacré
This article analyses the search strategies of first families in Bolivia contesting the separation of their children through transnational adoption. These first parents’ claims to visibility and acknowledgement have remained largely ignored by adoption policy and scholarship, historically privileging the perspectives of actors in adoptive countries, such as adoptive parents and adoption professionals. Filling in this gap, we discuss the search strategies employed by first families in Bolivia who desire a reunion with their child. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s feminist postcolonial theory, we analyse ethnographic fieldwork with fourteen first families in Bolivia. We read how the agency of first parents, severely limited by the loss of legal rights through the adoption system, is caught in a double bind of dependency and possibility. While hegemonic adoption discourse portrays first parents as passive and consenting to the adoption system, the results of our study complicate this picture. Moreover, we argue that the search activity of the first parents can be read as a claim and request to revise and negotiate their consent to transnational adoption. Ultimately, we read first parents’ search efforts as resistance to the closed nature of the adoption system, which restricts them in their search for their children.
Complicating the Search Imperative in Transnational Adoption: An Anthropological Analysis of Non-Searching Transnational Adoptees in Belgium and Spain
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2025) Atamhi Cawayu; Chandra Kala Clemente‐Martínez
In critical adoption scholarship, significant attention has been devoted to the searching and returning transnational adoptee, while those who opt not to search altogether remain largely overlooked. This article addresses this gap by examining the experiences of transnational adoptees who, despite being raised in the 1990s and 2000s amid increasing openness about origins and adoption, choose not to search. Drawing on two anthropological studies with Bolivian adoptees in Belgium and Nepali adoptees in Spain, the article explores how agency and choice are shaped in relation to the decision not to search. It further examines how socio-political, cultural, and historical legacies—such as the enduring secrecy surrounding adoption and the privileging of closed familial models—have shaped adoptees’ convictions toward their origins, including the decision not to search. Foregrounding the perspectives of non-searching adoptees reveals that their position is not merely oppositional to that of the searching adoptee but rather emerges from the very same structural conditions within the adoption system—namely, a system built on silence, erasure, and restrictive notions of belonging.