Constructing Transnational and Transracial Identity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. The Anthropology of Transcolor Adoptees: Subject, Theory, and Method

   • Sigalit Ben-Zion

   Pages 1-22

3. Stockholm Fieldwork: From St. Eriksplan to Rinkeby

   • Sigalit Ben-Zion

   Pages 23-39

4. “Living in the Twilight Zone”

   • Sigalit Ben-Zion

   Pages 41-59

5. “No One Is More Swedish Than Me!”

   • Sigalit Ben-Zion

   Pages 61-78

6. “Love Is Above Culture, Above Blood”

   • Sigalit Ben-Zion

   Pages 79-95

7. “It’s Like Taking a Cat and Raising It Like a Dog”

   • Sigalit Ben-Zion

   Pages 97-115

8. “I Didn’t Feel Norwegian Enough to Wear the National Costume”

   • Sigalit Ben-Zion

   Pages 117-138

9. “I Am Comfortable with the Feeling of Being White!”

   • Sigalit Ben-Zion

   Pages 139-159

10. “Going to the Whiteness”

    • Sigalit Ben-Zion

    Pages 161-179

11. They Can’t Afford to Stop Imagining

    • Sigalit Ben-Zion

    Pages 181-191

12. The Construction of Imaginary Homelands

    • Sigalit Ben-Zion

    Pages 193-215

13. Conclusions

    • Sigalit Ben-Zion

    Pages 217-223

14. Back Matter

    Pages 225-265

    PDF

Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are home to more than 90,000 transnational adoptees of Scandinavian parents raised in a predominantly white environment. This ethnography provides a unique perspective on how these transracial adoptees conceptualize and construct their sense of identity along the intersection of ethnicity, family, and national lines.

• Transnational adoption
• transracial adoption
• identity
• kinship studies
• ethnic studies
• racial studies
• transnationalism
• globalization
• national identity
• international migration
• ethnic relations
• environment
• ethnography
• Nation
• Transnational

"This uniquely crafted study far transcends its ethnographic objective of depicting the life worlds of Scandinavian transracial adoptees. The understated tension between the tranquil waters of integration, assimilation, and loyalty on the one hand and the turbulent undercurrents of a sense of belonging to visions of another culture on the other engenders an unexpected troubled identity. In a measured and unassuming manner, Ben-Zion unfolds that color-based predicament as she dismantles run-of-the mill categories such as kinship, embodiment, ethnicity, and nationality. The scholarly, civil, political, and cultural lessons that can be drawn from this finely tuned, sensitive sound box of these different voices of reluctant otherness are tellingly constructive as well as disturbing." - Haim Hazan, Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, Israel

"Sigalit Ben-Zion takes the reader on a reflexive and thoughtful journey through the worlds, visions, and insights of transracial adoptees in Scandinavia. Outlining the complexities and ambiguities of belonging from the perspective of their voices, it is a timely book that takes the task of giving people a voice in social sciences more serious than many others. When I started reading, I could not stop until the end of the book - that does not happen often!" - Erdmute Alber, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth, Germany

Sigalit Ben-Zion is an independent scholar based in Israel. She is the author of A Roadmap to the Heavens: An Anthropological Study of Hegemony among Priests, Sages, and Laymen (2008).

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