Identitäten in Bewegung. Ausländische Adoptierte, Rassismus und hybride kulturelle Identität. Eine biographieanalytische Studie

Abstract

At the center of this qualitatively-oriented study is an insight into the world and the autobiographical development of adult adoptees. We consider the feature of double parenthood, the way experience of racism are dealt with, plus spaces of opportunity and the process of a hybrid formation of cultural identity. The theoretical starting points comprise the phenomenon of international adoption, racism, the notion of a hybrid cultural identity, as well as the concept of biography. It is our goal to develop an empirical theory on our research subject, thereby we access the Grounded Theory. The autobiographical narrative interview serves as instrument of data collection (cf. Schütze 1983). In order to be able to analyse the point of view of the individual informant and the reconstruction of their resepective experience, we use Schütze’s (1984) concept of the cognitive figures in improvised autobiographical narrations. The study sample consists of 19 female and male individuals aged 18 to 37: There are 17 international adoptees from a number of different Asian (India, South Korea and Vietnam), Central (Nicaragua) and South American (Bolivia) and African (Ghana) countries of origin; besides, there are two controls, a female German adoptee and one young woman from Japan who hat not been adopted. The international adoptees in our study are both phenotypically different from their adoptive parents and from the fictitious image of the blond, blue-eyed ‘standard German’ (cf. Mecheril 2003); in our society, they tend to be viewed as (unwelcome) strangers. All adoptees (ordinary and international adoptees, likewise) have in common that they have both biological and adoptive parents. The autobiographical narratives of adult adoptees show that adoptive parents deal with the double difference (i.e., the twofold parenthood and the clearly visible foreign origins) of their children in various ways. We can define it typologically as follows: The adoptive parents in our study represent the accepting, the minimizing and the ambivalent types. According to the individual parent type, different developmental spaces and conditions as regards the way double parenthood is dealt with, the coping with the experience of biologically or culturally motivated racism, and the development of a hybrid cultural identity are accessible to the adopted child. In the course of the biographical process (cf. Alheit 1990), these basic conditions are shaped, according to his or her individual ‘self-will’, by the adopted child in a difficult and at times painful learning process.