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Interrogating non-innocent kinship 

 

KATHRYN A MARINER. 2019. Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the 

United States. University of California Press, 256 pp. ISBN: 9780520299566 

 

Keywords: Kinship, Adoption, Futures, Race, Children 

 

Kathryn Mariner’s Contingent Kinship opens up the backstage work in adoption which she 

encounters through her collaboration with an adoption agency located between Chicago’s affluent 

suburb and the city’s low-income neighbourhoods. Mariner’s focus is pre-birth adoption, where a 

contract is drawn between expectant mothers (predominantly African American and ethnic 

minority women) and prospective parents. As is known in the case of surrogacy, intended parents 

lay claim on the womb of the surrogate; in the case of adoption, prospective parents lay claim on 

their ability to give the unborn child a better future. Mariner acknowledges the loop this can create 

– an imagined future for an imagined child. 

 

Mariner approaches adoption as an artefact and unpacks the way this artefact is constructed and 

given value. Her theoretical framework draws from Viviana Zelizer’s construction of kinship not 

only as a field of cultural production, but also structured by and in turn structuring several 

economic and political factors. Kinship through adoption does not reside only in the innocent space 

of intimacy, but rather mirrors speculation one finds in the market. This vocabulary of the market 

is maintained throughout the monograph with debates and discussions pegged around investments 

and futures. It is this ‘intimate speculation,’ which may or may not result in ‘futures’ of parenting 

that Mariner calls ‘contingent kinship.’ Contingency is conceptualized as a characteristic barrier 

between investments in kinship and desired futures. Mariner demonstrates how contingency, 



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conceived as a disruptive experience for adoptive parents and the adoption agency masks, and is 

privileged over the systematic and structural contingencies that mark the everyday lives of 

expectant mothers, who are primarily women of colour, migrant workers and the disenfranchised 

in America. This book is about a specific moment in the history of adoption in America, after the 

recession, and how state and market tactics of disciplining and governing citizen bodies through 

social welfare, employment, housing, and inflation come to determine politics of reproduction, of 

which adoption is an important element.  

 

The first chapter looks at the way in which the figure and body of the expectant mother are both 

constructed and subject to surveillance. The body of the expectant mother, Mariner says is turned 

inside out by science and social workers’ enquires into her pregnancy to authenticate her status as 

an expectant mother. The expectant mother is always viewed with suspicion with regards to her 

intention to place her child for adoption. Over the chapters Mariner evokes the figure of the 

‘welfare queen’ to discuss the cultural justifications that social worders encounter while reflecting 

upon a ‘fall through’ (technical term in case the expectant mother decides to eventually parent the 

child) as both an emotional as well as financial loss.  

 

The second chapter creates a diorama of the Home Study Inspection (HSI), a crucial operation 

within the official adoption process. Here Mariner exposes the power relations that manifest during 

a HSI between social workers and adoptive parents. Aspects of privacy as a valued commodity 

within middle-class American society are breached by the presence of the state (in the form of the 

social worker) in the houses of adoptive parents. The HSI then is a highly performative moment 

when adoptive parents have to stage (with a certain degree of disdain) their selves, their everyday 

lives and the physical spaces within which these unravel. The third chapter unpacks the critical 

role of social workers by highlighting their work as ‘brokers, therapists, fortune-tellers, and risk 

managers’ (97). The adoption process is rife with contingency and uncertainty for both the social 

workers and adoptive parents – ranging from the disappearance of the expectant mother, to the 

appearance of the birth father, to the health of the child. This period is marked by the affective 

labour of social workers who devise various informal and organized strategies to both manage and 

mitigate the risks and contingencies that surround adoption. The fourth chapter draws upon 

discussions around ‘the value of children’ (Zelizer 1985) to address the moral discomfort that is 



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anticipated when adoption of children is viewed through a commercial lens, namely as a monetary 

transaction between concerned parties. Here Mariner focuses on the many ways both social 

workers and adoptive parents articulate or rather de-articulate the role of money involved in 

fulfilling one’s desire for a child by adoption. Last, Mariner provides a micro perspective to 

understand a more global phenomenon, through the closure of the agency with she collaborated 

throughout her ethnography. Her specific enquiry in this chapter is about the manner in which ‘the 

quiet death of a small adoption agency’ (161) can reveal how kinship as intimate speculation is 

contingent upon politics of endowments, donations, and public financial support in the United 

States after Recession.   

 

Borrowing Marcus’ classic markers of a multi-sited ethnography, the author follows people, things 

and metaphors (Marcus 1995). She follows and works with social workers who, like all brokers, 

occupy a liminal space that allows them access to the houses of middle- and upper-class White 

Americans, and low-income neighbourhoods where expectant mothers usually reside. The book 

maps the localized world of the adoption agency and neighbourhoods in Chicago. The spaces that 

we traverse indicate the way capital, affective networks and geography intermingle. The author 

follows things. There are a number of ways in which we may understand ‘things’ in this 

ethnography. Money as a thing, legitimized through ‘allowable legal expenses to expectant 

mothers,’ yet recalling anxieties and discomforts about the entanglement of intimacy and 

economics. The adoption agency as a thing, which has its own agentive function of weaving futures 

(through successful adoptive kinships) as well as severing them (separating birth mothers from 

their children). The author follows the metaphor of the child. Mariner theorizes the way race and 

capital in America determines who counts as a child, based on who has the possibility for a future. 

This conceptualization excludes children who are parented in low-income single women-led 

African American and ethnic minority households. On the other hand, a child desired through 

adoption by white heterosexual couples is no longer an African American or ethnic child, but is 

constructed as a gift, ‘a positive investment in everyone’s future, in a national future.’ (17)  

 

The descriptions in this book are thick while being generative of data. The author explores multiple 

subject positions, while not meandering from her political commitment to systematically 

marginalized expectant mothers, to small not-for-profit agencies, and to scholarship that exposes 



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the way cultural determinants of who deserves to be a parent ensures the production of surplus 

capital. We meet people. We visit neighbourhoods. We visit homes. We encounter hope. We 

encounter hopelessness. We encounter limbo. The book is also a brilliant example of collaborative 

ethnography, where the author and the social workers within the agency share and inform each 

other’s’ works. One usually finds the author in the backseat of a social worker usually driving an 

expectant mother for a clinical appointment or running errands to buy daily groceries for expectant 

mothers or trying to strategize in anticipation of a fall-through. Authorship is therefore an emergent 

effect that reveals its own construction through dialogue, shared performance and intimate 

exchanges. This book will be of use to those interested in and can be taught as part of graduate 

courses on kinship and race in the United States, gender and reproduction, and objects, gifts and 

commodities.  

 

References 

Marcus, George E. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited 

Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1995): 95-117.  

Zelizer, Viviana. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, 

NJ: Princeton University Press (1985).  

 

Chandan Bose is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Indian Institute of Technology 

Hyderabad. He divides his research and writing between material culture in South Asia, and 

emerging practices in adoption in contemporary India.    

 

 

 

© 2020 Chandan Bose  

 

 

 

 


