Kinship by Design: Adoption Science and Scientific Adoption in Modern America

项目摘要：SES 00-94318 Ellen Herman设计的亲属关系：收养科学和现代美国的科学收养这个项目通过将儿童收养解释为20世纪美国的一项科学事业，探索科学在行动中的作用。它调查了那些在心理学、行为遗传学、社会学、社会工作和一般的人文科学中的个人的工作，他们用现代的术语重新想象了一个古老的机构：作为人性科学的实验基础，或者作为一系列技术要求高的操作，致力于身份和归属感的系统架构。在一场将“生物陌生人”变成亲人的交易中，科学专业人士看到了一个不同寻常的实验机会，一个具有挑战性的社会实验室，以及一系列复杂的操作，这些操作承诺进行智力发现，并为有需要的儿童带来希望。为什么研究人员转向采用，并坚持认为科学是一个以前从来没有科学过的社会机构的核心？领养回答了哪些科学问题？收养研究是如何进行的，从中提取的知识随着时间的推移是如何变化的？理解收养是如何转变为一门科学的，说明了科学是如何运作的。理解科学是如何改变采用率的，说明了为什么科学很重要。被选中进行研究的人跨越了整个世纪，他们来自一系列人文科学学科，为科学和社会福利留下了重大遗产。两个截然不同但相互关联的研究轨迹被有效地区分开来：收养科学和科学收养。收养科学通过让收养为科学世界服务来提炼对人性的认识，而科学收养则旨在通过让科学为收养世界服务来提高儿童和家庭的福利。收养科学家将收养作为探索先天/后天问题的机会，询问人类是如何以及为什么会变成这样的。科学收养的倡导者们问道，为了更有效地设计家庭，被收养的人会变成什么样。通过考察这两个研究领域的代表性著作，这个项目将为关于现代人类科学的学术对话贡献新的内容--设计的亲属关系例子--同时，它将为收养亲属关系的研究增加一个亟需的科学维度。目前还没有历史研究来探索20世纪美国人类科学家如何利用领养数据的各种方式，也没有人认为领养本身是社会设计和工程的重要案例。然而，收养体现了一种现代倾向，即将社会安排视为事实上的实验，将严格的科学纪律邀请到现代生活中最普通、最私密和最私密的角落--从家庭动态到性取向和自尊--所有这些都是以知识和公共利益的名义进行的。这使得采用成为考虑现代科学专业人员的道德职业、科学与价值问题的交叉以及科学合理化的社会过程的一个独到的视角。这项研究将成为一本书，具有特别的潜力，有助于我们理解社会工程学、自然意识形态、生物科学和社会科学之间的边界、基础科学和应用科学之间的复杂关系，以及政策制定者和一般公众对科学知识和研究的选择性利用。

PROJECT ABSTRACT: SES 00-94318Ellen HermanKinship by Design: Adoption Science and Scientific Adoption in Modern AmericaThis project explores science in action by interpreting child adoption as a scientific enterprise in the 20th-century United States. It investigates the work of those individuals--in psychology, behavioral genetics, sociology, social work, and the human sciences generally--who reimagined an ancient institution in modern terms: as an experimental basis for the science of human nature, or as a series of technically demanding operations devoted to the systematic architecture of identity and belonging. In a transaction that turns "biological strangers" into kin, scientific professionals have seen an unusual experimental opportunity, a challenging social laboratory, and a series of intricate operations that promise intellectual discovery as well as hope for children in need. Why did researchers turn to adoption and insist that science was central to a social institution that had never been scientific before? What scientific questions did adoption answer? How were adoption studies conducted and how did the knowledge extracted from them change over time? Understanding how adoption was transformed into a science illuminates how science works. Understanding how adoption was transformed by science illuminates why science matters. Individuals selected for study span the entire century, are drawn from a range of human science disciplines, and have left significant legacies for science and social welfare. Two distinctive but interrelated research trajectories are usefully distinguished: adoption science and scientific adoption. Adoption science refines knowledge of human nature by making adoption serve the scientific world, while scientific adoption aims to enhance child and family welfare by making science serve the adoption world. Adoption scientists have used adoption as an opportunity to explore the nature/nurture problem, to ask how and why human beings turn out as they do.Advocates of scientific adoption have asked how adoptees turn out in order to design families more effectively. By examining representative work in these two fields of inquiry, this project will contribute new content--examples of kinship by design--to the scholarly conversation about the modern human sciences at the same time that it adds a much-needed scientific dimension to studies of adoptive kinship. There currently exists no historical study that explores the various ways 20th -century American human scientists have utilized adoption data, nor has anyone considered adoption itself as an important case of social design and engineering. Yet adoption exemplifies the modern tendency to view social arrangements as de facto experiments that invite the exacting discipline of science into the most ordinary, intimate, and private corners of modern life--from family dynamics to sexual orientation and self-esteem--all in the name of knowledge paired with the public good. This is what makes adoption an original vantage point from which to consider the moral careers of modern scientific professionals, the intersections of science and questions of value, and the social course of scientific rationalization.This study, which will result in a book, has particular potential to contribute to our understanding of social engineering, ideologies of nature, border-crossings between the biological and social sciences, the complex relationship between basic and applied science, and the selective utilization of scientific knowledge and research by policy-makers and the public at large.