Familiar ways: Child circulation in Andean Peru

This dissertation addresses the social, economic, and relational consequences of the ways in which people construct senses of belonging, whether to kin groups or communities. It explores the practice of child circulation, which contributes to social relations between adults, local ideologies of betterment through education, and the building and maintenance of economic and class hierarchies. Gathered together under the term 'child circulation' are several different life experiences, including fostering, adoption, apprenticeship, and child labor for domestic service. These movements are infused with ambiguity, as young people must negotiate the complexities of a new social situation while also managing the expectations of what sorts of improvements (social, economic, or otherwise) might arise from the transfer. Child circulation is further complicated when Andeans, state organizations, and NGOs all connect it to both international adoptions and child trafficking. The dissertation demonstrates how people in the south-central Andean context build up their social worlds through kinship, patronage, and community, and in so doing register their own ideas of kin-based morality and the political economy of childhood.