Hampshire College

Background and Research Focus

Barbara Yngvesson, professor of anthropology, received her B.A. from Barnard and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She is former Dean of the School of Social Science at Hampshire College, and founding director of the interdisciplinary Program in Culture, Brain, and Development there.

Her interests include the cultural study of law, family and kinship; theories of identity and belonging; and transnational migration (with a focus on transnational families and international adoption).

With research supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, she is the author of Virtuous Citizens, Disruptive Subjects: Order and Complaint in a New England Court (Routledge, 1993); Law and Community in Three American Towns (Cornell, 1994, co-authored with Carol Greenhouse and David Engel), recipient of the 1996 Law and Society Association Book Award; and Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity and Transnational Adoption (Chicago, 2010). Her work has appeared in the American Ethnologist; Law & Society Review; Theory, Culture, & Society; Yale Law Journal; Signs; and Law and Social Inquiry. She is also an associate editor of the American Anthropologist.

Selected Publications

Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption.
2010. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Transnational Adoption and the Transnationalization of Motherhood: Rethinking Abandonment, Adoption, and Return. 2010. In Wendy Chavkin and JaneMaree Maher (eds.), Globalized Motherhood. New York: Routledge.

Figuring Kinship in the Space of Adoption. 2007. Anthropological Quarterly 80(2): 561-579, 2007. Reprinted in Diana Marre and Laura Briggs (eds.), International Adoption: Inequality and the Circulation of Children. New York: NYU Press, 2009.

Backed by Papers: Undoing Persons, Histories, and Return. 2006. American Ethnologist 33(2): 177-190 (co-authored with Susan Coutin).

National Bodies and the Body of the Child: "Completing" Families through International Adoption. 2004. In Fiona Bowie (ed.) Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption. London: Routledge.

Going "Home": Adoption, Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots. 2003. Social Text 21(1): 7-27, Special Issue on Transnational Kinship. Reprinted in Toby Volkman, (ed.) Cultures of Transnational Adoption. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Placing the "Gift" Child in Transnational Adoption. 2002. Law and Society Review 36(2): 227-256, Special Issue on Non-Biological Parenting.

In the Mirror: The Legitimation Work of Globalization. 2002. Law and Social Inquiry 27(3): 801-43 (co-authored with Susan Coutin and Bill Maurer).

"As One Should, Ought, and Wants to Be": Authenticity and Belonging in IdentityNarratives. 2000. Theory, Culture and Society 17(6):77-110 (co-authored with Maureen Mahoney).

Negotiating Motherhood: Identity and Difference in “Open” Adoptions. 1997. Law and Society Review 31(1): 31-80.

Recent Courses

Creating Families: Law, Culture, and Technology (Spring 2010)

Culture Through Crime (Fall 2009)

Culture, Identity, and Belonging (Fall 2010)