Meeting Once More: The Korean Side of Transnational Adoption

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"Thoughtfully written, drawing on her own life experience as well as her anthropological training, Prébin provides us with a new window into the complex world of trans-national adoption. She weaves together kinship, media, and globalization as well as recent Korean history to offer us lessons about today's adoption practices." —Barbara Katz Rothman, author of Weaving A Family: Untangling Race and Adoption  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, 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. 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.