Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Meeting Once More: The Korean Side of Transnational Adoption
ISBN: 9780814764961
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / NYU Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Intercountry adoption -- Korea (South); Interracial adoption -- Korea (South); Adoptees -- Korea (South) -- Identification;

Examines the impact of adoptees on their birth country and birth families

A great mobilization began in South Korea in the 1990s: adult transnational adoptees began to return to their birth country and meet for the first time with their birth parents--sometimes in televised encounters which garnered high ratings. What makes the case of South Korea remarkable is the sheer scale of the activity that has taken place around the adult adoptees' return, and by extension the national significance that has been accorded to these family meetings.

Informed by the author's own experience as an adoptee and two years of ethnographic research in Seoul, as well as an analysis of the popular television program "I Want to See This Person Again," which reunites families, Meeting Once More sheds light on an understudied aspect of transnational adoption: the impact of adoptees on their birth country, and especially on their birth families. The volume offers a complex and fascinating contribution to the study of new kinship models, migration, and the anthropology of media, as well as to the study of South Korea.

Elise Prébin was born in South Korea in 1978, was raised in France, and is now living in New York City with her husband and daughter. In 2006 she obtained her PhD at University of Paris X-Nanterre in social anthropology, was a postdoc and lecturer at Harvard University from 2007 to 2009 and served as Assistant Professor at Hanyang University (South Korea) from 2010 to 2011. She is now an independent scholar.