van Wichelen Sonja
a Institute for Culture and Society , University of Western Sydney , Penrith , New South Wales , Australia.
Med Anthropol. 2014;33(2):109-27. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2013.776046.
This article focuses on adoption medicine as a subject of scientific knowledge that increasingly defines the parameters of adoptability in the world of international adoption. While this biomedical discourse alludes to the health of adoptee bodies, it also constitutes ethico-moral practices that produce new justificatory regimes of adoption in particular and humanitarianism in general. Drawing on discourse analysis of scientific texts in adoption medicine on the one hand, and interviews and ethnographic data from a Dutch adoption agency on the other, I demonstrate the emergence of a new moral economy facilitating the legitimacy of international adoption. I argue that this moral economy retools the humanitarian justification of international adoption by privileging the politics of "life itself." This paradigmatic shift constructs new categories of adoptee bodies, rearranges orders of worth, and makes visible biopolitical techniques of morality in present-day humanitarian discourse.
本文聚焦于收养医学，将其视为一门科学知识学科，它日益界定了国际收养领域中的可收养性参数。尽管这种生物医学话语提及被收养者的身体健康，但它也构成了伦理道德实践，这些实践尤其产生了新的收养正当性制度，总体上也产生了新的人道主义正当性制度。一方面，我借鉴对收养医学领域科学文本的话语分析，另一方面，借鉴来自一家荷兰收养机构的访谈和民族志数据，来展示一种新的道德经济的出现，这种道德经济促进了国际收养的合法性。我认为，这种道德经济通过将“生命本身”的政治置于优先地位，对国际收养的人道主义正当性进行了重新塑造。这种范式转变构建了被收养者身体的新类别，重新排列了价值秩序，并使当今人道主义话语中的生物政治道德技术变得可见。
