In this article, I draw from ethnographic research in Ayacucho, Peru, to describe how rural‐to‐urban migrants move children between houses as part of a common survival and betterment strategy in the context of social and economic inequality. Such “child circulations” produce and strengthen kinship and are an important part of local family‐making efforts. My investigation of child circulation grounds a critical assessment of Peru's globalized adoption system, which implicitly denaturalizes the parenting of poor, indigenous Peruvians.

Anthropological research around the world has documented informal, kinship-based foster care cross culturally. That research suggests that children are more likely to benefit from informal kinship-based fostering in cultural contexts where fostering expands the pool of relatives rather than substituting one parent for another, fostering is expected to provide children with positive opportunities for learning and development, and/or children are granted some autonomy or decision-making power. However, informal kinship-based fostering seems to place children at risk in cultural contexts where the process of children’s attachment to caregivers resembles the Western child development model, communities are highly stratified along socioeconomic lines, and/or exploitation of children is permitted. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for both research and policy.

Transnational migration transforms houses, the rituals surrounding them, and the people who live in those houses and use them to understand aspects of their social and ethnic identities. I focus on the Andean house-roofing ritual known as the zafacasa to demonstrate the centrality of the house as a mediator for personal relationships, and the importance of such rituals for reconstituting social bonds both in spite of and because of distance. The article goes on to argue that research on consumption should be complemented by a kinship framework in order fully to represent the local meanings of expenditures.

A B S T R A C TTransnational adoption is very difficult to talk about in Spain. For this reason, speakers use "communicative vigilance" to emphasize the appropriate ways to speak and particularly not to speak about it. Part of the difficulty, we demonstrate, is that adoption talk must mediate two contradictory understandings of talk and kinship: (1) a referentialist one in which adoption's undesirability must be first acknowledged and then masked and (2) a performative one in which talk can create a new world where transnational adoption is equivalent to and as valuable as traditional ways of creating families. Our findings have implications for both language-socialization studies and kinship studies.