Adoption and Migration from Pulap, Caroline Islands

Flinn, Juliana (April 1985). "Adoption and Migration from Pulap, Caroline Islands". Ethnology. 24 (2): 95. doi:10.2307/3773552. ISSN 0014-1828.

Abstract: A number of studies dealing with adoption in the Pacific have considered children as resources and adoption as part of a general pattern of resource sharing among kin (Brady 1976; Carroll 1970a, 1970b; Marshall 1976; Ritter 1981). Adoption in Oceania usually involves kinspeople rather than strangers or unrelated individuals, and can be viewed as a transaction between the natural and adoptive parents, with a partial transfer or sharing of rights in the child (W. Goodenough 1970). Adoption does not necessarily entail the creation of new ties but can strengthen existing relationships or activate latent ones. Adoption thus reinforces kinship solidarity. Children are valued resources, and sharing children is similar to other transactions among kin. For example, discussing adoption on Namoluk, south of Truk Lagoon in Micronesia, Marshall (1976: 47) points out that children are shared" in the same way that land, food, residence, labor, physical possessions, political support, and money are shared." Marshall (1977) has described in detail for Truk the linkage between kinship and sharing resources. Genealogy may provide a basis for kinship, but behavior and performance are the essential determinants; kinship is demonstrated, validated, and sustained through nurtur-ant acts, specifically the sharing of resources. In other words, ties can be strengthened, sustained, activated, or created through sharing resources, or they can be ignored, weakened, or broken through failure to share. On Pulap, an atoll in the Western Islands of Truk in Micronesia, adoption follows a similar pattern of sharing among kin, but the focus is not exclusively on the tie between the adoptive and the natural parents, but also the one between the adoptive parent and the child. Both ties are strengthened. Adoption on Pulap takes place exclusively among kin; a person adopts only someone who is the" child" of a" sibling," which reinforces sibling solidarity. In this respect Pulap is similar to many other places where adoption involves siblings, a practice consistent with the general importance of siblingship in Oceania (Brady 1976a; R. Goodenough 1970; Lieber 1970; Marshall 1981a; Ottino 1970). On Pulap, the sibling bond is fundamental to the matrilineal descent system, and adoption strengthens internal solidarity through reinforcing this bond. Pulap has a prefer? ential form of adoption, however, whereby a woman adopts the" child" of a" brother," strengthening a patrilateral tie. This patrilateral relationship between the members of a matrilineal descent group and the offspring of its men is considered significant but somewhat tenuous; it is more contingent and conditional than the sibling bond. Adoption can be said to reinforce not only internal solidarity through the sibling bond but also inter-group solidarity by reinforcing the patrilateral bond (Brady 1976b). In the first instance the focus is on the relationship between the adults, and in the second the relationship between the adoptive parent and the child.

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MAG: 208885
OpenAlex: W208885
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