Meeting Once More - by Elise M Prébin (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A compelling ethnography of Korean adoptee reunions, which come to life not as inevitable kinship connections, but as social and cultural work. To great effect, Prébin zooms in on South Koreas signature reunion television program as a window on nothing short of the countrys emotional life. . . . A must-read for those with interests in adoption, kinship, media, and the Koreas."--Nancy Abelmann, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Anthropological readers will admire the innovative way in which the author uses various recent anthropological perspectives when dealing with a topic that did not even exist a generation ago. She also invites us to rethink the supposedly fundamental distinction between the anthropologist and 'the other' that dissolves in her case."--Jan de Wolf "European Association of Social Anthropologists"

"In this beautifully written book, Elise Prébin breaks new ground in the literature on transnational adoption. Juxtaposing the halting, uncertain course of her own emerging relationship with her birth family to the highly stylized emotional scripting of a popular Korean TV show, Prébin situates adoption in the context of other narratives of separation while analyzing its potential for realizing biological relatedness. She offers a highly original account that moves away from polarized debates to engage with the implications of transnational adoption over time for the birth family, the adopted person, and the sending nation, providing a powerful new voice that will transform the way we understand relatedness."--Barbara Yngvesson, Hampshire College