Adoption Cultures, Bio-Digital Technologies and Kinship Actualizations: Searching for Unknown Relatives and Rearranging Genealogies amidst Multiple Tensions in Brazil

Abstract (English)

In this paper, I present preliminary results of a research project that seeks to know how nowadays adults who were once informally adopted “à brasileira”, and have no information concerning their biological relatives, have been looking for these in Brazil by combining multiple searching possibilities. The latter include engaging investigators who localize disappeared people, managing resources such as bio-digital technologies (mostly, genetic testing and navigation throughout different DNA databases), conducting inquiries within and beyond their adopting families (e.g., through social medias), consulting archive documentation (many of which are now available online, and partially commodified), employing genealogists, and looking for legal assistance. In this scenario, what dilemmas do such seekers encounter along their way, and what are further consequences of their search? By accompanying seekers during their work of genealogical reconstitution and biographical updating, I intend to understand ongoing actualizations of kinship under the impact, among others, of new legislation and bio-digital technologies. In my paper specifically, I highlight some of the main aspects of related search by drawing on two case studies, as well as on the “Programa Origens”, a governmental program recently initiated in the State of Pernambuco (in northeast Brazil) that provide juridical and psychological assistance to kin seekers.
As my research preliminarily shows, great part of the adoptees’ search for unknown kin and genealogical rearrangements unfold through at least three central tensions. First, through those related to the fact that earlier ”Brazilian adoption” (adoção à brasileira), which had been a prevailing custom among all social classes in the past, and was carried out often unofficially through medico-religious networks, became officially illegal in the 2000s. That turned the adopting parents, among others, in principle, into persons virtually subjected to legal prosecution, despite the fact that the great majority among them in practice cannot be judged since their “crimes”, after Brazilian law, meanwhile “expired”. Second, through different ambivalences that emerge between kin seekers and members of their non-biological families after the discovery of the adoption, including possible affective renegotiations and/or belonging reassurances, and the possibility of having to deal with diverse unforeseen embarrassments (legal, public, interpersonal etc.). Third, through tensions linked to potential implications of genetic testing and of down- and uploading DNA’s results to as many different DNA-databases as possible in order to increase the probability of finding biological relatives. After all, a significant amount of Brazilian kin seekers’ DNAs and legal documents (such as birth, death and marriage certificates) are meanwhile stored by transnational companies, and foreign entities that provide access to further digitized documents.
By paying attention to how kin seekers navigate among these interlaced tensions, I develop the argument that adoption cultures in Brazil are intrinsically related to fundamental notions of belonging, personhood and world.