Complicating the Search Imperative in Transnational Adoption: An Anthropological Analysis of Non-Searching Transnational Adoptees in Belgium and Spain

Abstract

In critical adoption scholarship, significant attention has been devoted to the searching and returning transnational adoptee, while those who opt not to search altogether remain largely overlooked. This article addresses this gap by examining the experiences of transnational adoptees who, despite being raised in the 1990s and 2000s amid increasing openness about origins and adoption, choose not to search. Drawing on two anthropological studies with Bolivian adoptees in Belgium and Nepali adoptees in Spain, the article explores how agency and choice are shaped in relation to the decision not to search. It further examines how socio-political, cultural, and historical legacies—such as the enduring secrecy surrounding adoption and the privileging of closed familial models—have shaped adoptees’ convictions toward their origins, including the decision not to search. Foregrounding the perspectives of non-searching adoptees reveals that their position is not merely oppositional to that of the searching adoptee but rather emerges from the very same structural conditions within the adoption system—namely, a system built on silence, erasure, and restrictive notions of belonging.

1. Introduction

The transnational adoption system has evolved significantly since its inception and expansion in the second part of the 20th century. Historians have pointed out that, at that time, adoption was being restructured around secrecy and closed records, a framework that first took shape in domestic adoptions and subsequently extended to transnational adoption (Carp 2002; Wegar 1997).1 According to these scholars, secrecy was instituted to construct the appearance of a heteronormative biological family, serving primarily the interests of adoptive parents while protecting the child from the prevailing stigma of illegitimacy (Carp 2002; Walton 2012; Wegar 1997). The clean break principle became a central pillar in adoption policy and practice, manifesting itself in several ways. In practice, this was enforced through secret adoption (the social concealment of the adoption status) and closed adoption (the institutional sealing of records) (see also Modell 2002), with the latter becoming the prevailing mechanism in transnational and transracial adoption contexts. On an ideological level, this system drew from what anthropologist Barbara Yngvesson (2003) termed the freestanding child, i.e., an adopted person totally severed from family, culture and nation. However, Yngvesson emphasises that this separation was not solely an institutional mandate but was a site of negotiation within the adoptive family. She contrasts the ‘freestanding child’ with the competing narrative of the rooted child, which acknowledges that an adoptee’s identity remains tied to their origins and heritage (ibid.). This ideological tension between the institutional ideal of a complete break and the varied practices within adoptive families has fundamentally shaped adoption discourse for decades.

By the end of the 1980s, the importance of a child’s origins was internationally recognised and reinforced by the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), particularly through Article 7 which establishes a child’s right to know their parents (United Nations 1989). This was followed by the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (HCIA), which reinforced this principle in Article 16b by requiring that ‘due consideration’ be given to a child’s ‘ethnic, religious and cultural background’ (HCCH 1993). Together, these conventions codified what is now widely acknowledged as the adoptee’s right to know, reframing access to origins not as a privilege but as a fundamental human right (van Wichelen 2019). Various adoption scholars stated that this evolution in adoptee rights prompted adoption professionals towards a culture of openness (De Graeve 2013; Willing and Fronek 2014).

However, this shift has not been without complications. Scholars such as Wang et al. (2015) and Yngvesson (2003) have observed that searches for origins are now morally seen as obligatory instead of optional. Practices such as return journeys, cultural heritage trips, and origin searches are now encouraged—sometimes even imposed—by adoptive parents who have been trained to bring their adopted child in touch with their country of origin, unwillingly forcing their adopted children into engagement with their birth culture (see also Cawayu and De Graeve 2022).

In the wake of increasing openness in transnational adoption, a growing body of scholarship has examined adoptees’ engagements with their birth culture (Bergquist 2006; Leinaweaver 2013; Louie 2015), heritage language (Sacré 2025), return journeys (Kim 2007; Myong 2016; Yngvesson 2003), and experiences of searching and reuniting (Clemente-Martínez and Marre 2025; Docan-Morgan 2024; Prébin 2013). By contrast, transnational adoptees who are not interested in, or who deliberately refrain from, searching have largely been overlooked. Their perspectives are often marginalised or stigmatised within a discourse that equates authenticity and wholeness with reconnection. This article addresses this gap by focusing on non-searching transnational adoptees; those who have grown up within a culture of openness but decided not to pursue their origins. Drawing on two studies of transnational adoptees raised in Belgium and Spain during the 1990s and early 2000s, this paper shows that their reasoning can be situated within the enduring discourses of exclusivity and secrecy that continue to shape adoption systems.

This article is structured as follows. First, we situate our study within the broader debate surrounding the social imperative to search. Next, we review the literature on non-searching adoptees and outline the methodology guiding our research. We then present and discuss our findings, structured around three analytical dynamics: (1) adoptees who affirm belonging in the present, (2) adoptees who resist social expectations to search, (3) adoptees who find peace with the absence of information. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on how these positions complicate dominant understandings of kinship, belonging and the right to know.

2. The Social Imperative of Searching

The shift towards openness in adoption has generated a new normativity: what was once a right has become moralised into an obligation. As Sonja van Wichelen (2019) argues, this is not simply an expansion of rights but the emergence of a moral economy of kinship that compels adoptees to desire and pursue their origins. As the boundary between rights and obligations blurs, what was once understood as a right has become normalised ‘as part of the transnational adoptee lifecycle’ (Kim 2012, p. 300), where adoptees are expected to follow a trajectory of returning, searching, and eventual reunion.

Barbara Yngvesson’s (2003) analysis of the ‘rooted’ and ‘freestanding’ child paradigms helps situate this development within a longer genealogy of Western kinship imaginaries. According to Yngvesson, both models rest on the myth of exclusive belonging, which is the assumption that identity is indivisible and can only attach to one kind of family. In the freestanding model, associated with the era of closed adoptions, the adoptee’s identity is expected to be fully reconstituted within the adoptive family. In the rooted model, by contrast, the adoptee’s ‘true’ identity is presumed to reside in genetic origins to which they are inevitably and ‘naturally’ pulled back (ibid.). Despite their apparent opposition, Yngvesson and others argue that both paradigms exclude hybridity, binding adoptee subjectivities to exclusive kinship logics (De Graeve 2013; Yngvesson 2003). In this light, the current openness paradigm can be understood less as a genuine rupture than as a rearticulation in a new form: the ‘rooted child’ has become the normative figure of openness.

This normativity also functions as a technology of power. In Foucauldian terms, the search imperative constitutes a form of governmentality: a subtle mode of power that shapes how individuals are expected to govern themselves (Foucault 1991). It prescribes how adoptees are to orient their desires and organise their life course around a script of origins, search, and reunion, positioning this trajectory as the normative path to authenticity and self-knowledge. This governance is often enacted by what Signe Howell (2009, p. 258) calls ‘psycho-technocrats’: experts who frame the need-to-know one’s origins as essential for a ‘harmonious development and sense of self.’ In the field of adoption, such practices have taken the form of adoption professionals supporting adoptive parents and, more recently, also adoptee experts and coaches who operate within a rooted child paradigm and work with concepts such as the ‘primal wound’ (Verrier 1993) or ‘genealogical bewilderment’ (Sants 1964), positioning the search as a therapeutic necessity for becoming a ‘whole’ person (Lifton 1994). However, these frameworks are not neutral, but they form part of wider mechanisms that regulate and reinforce a specific vision of kinship: one grounded in exclusive belonging, where authenticity is presumed to lie in biogenetic origins. Howell (2009, p. 258) highlights this ‘increased biocentrism in discourses about personhood and identity,’ which is evident in policies that prioritise the preservation of an adoptee’s background and in parental ‘culture work’ intended to instil a connection to an essentialised ‘quasi-biological’ heritage (De Graeve 2010, 2013). The search imperative thus functions as a technology for regulating kinship, consolidating a biocentric definition of family and identity that structures the normative space within which adoptees are allowed to belong and marginalises those who do not.

3. Understanding Non-Searching Transnational Adoptees

As mentioned above, literature on transnational adoptees who choose not to search is relatively scarce, often overshadowed by a dominant narrative focused on searching and reunion. As anthropologist Signe Howell (2009) notes, the voices of non-searching transnational adoptees ‘are seldom heard, however, and when they speak listeners tend to ignore what they have to say’ (Howell 2009, p. 261).

Much of foundational research on this topic stems from domestic adoptions studies in Anglo-Saxon countries. This early work identified key motivations for not searching, including a strong sense of loyalty and desire not to hurt the adoptive parents (Roche and Perlesz 2000), as well as a fear that uncovering information might be ‘upsetting or unpleasant’ (Smith and Wallace 2000, p. 21). These studies also introduced the important nuance that actively searching is distinct from a complete refusal of one’s origins; many adoptees who choose not to search express a willingness to be found by their family of origin, viewing this as a more passive and less disloyal act towards their adoptive parents (Roche and Perlesz 2000).

More recent anthropological work has documented how many transnational adoptees, particularly those raised in an era of openness, actively resist the normative expectation to explore their origins. Howell’s research in Norway shows that many adoptees are indifferent or even resentful of the constant societal pressure to search, with some even feeling ‘culture terrorized’ into believing they must learn about their ‘original culture’ to become ‘complete human beings’ (Follevåg in Howell 2009, p. 262). Similarly, Leinaweaver’s (2013) observation of Peruvian adoptees in Spain reveals an ambivalence that can manifest as indifference or even a dislike of their birth culture. The decision not to search is also shaped by a fear of what might be uncovered (Howell 2006), a concern amplified by the increasing awareness of corruption and child trafficking in transnational adoption practices (San Román 2021).

Yet, as Théry (2009) insists, a genuine culture of openness must recognise ‘the right not to know’ alongside ‘the right to know.’ For some adoptees, engaging with families of origin or reconstructing pre-adoption histories may indeed provide affirmation, closure, or a renewed sense of belonging. For others, however, such endeavours can produce anxiety, emotional strain, or indifference. According to various scholars, choosing not to search may reflect a conscious prioritisation of present relationships, emotional stability, or an identity already fully articulated without recourse to biological origins (Howell 2006; Roche and Perlesz 2000; Smith and Wallace 2000).

Against this backdrop, non-searching needs to be recognised as an agentive stance rather than a void. Many adoptees deliberately prioritise present relationships, emotional stability, or their already formed identities over the uncertainties of exploring biological origins (Roche and Perlesz 2000; Smith and Wallace 2000). For them, disengagement is not avoidance, but a conscious orientation enacted within—and often against—the normative currents of adoption discourse (Howell 2006, 2009). By foregrounding non-searching as an equally meaningful stance, we move beyond the binary of ‘searching versus refusal’ and open space for a more plural understanding of how transnational adoptees negotiate belonging, kinship and identity.

4. Methodology

This article is based on qualitative, multi-sited research that combines ethnographic and narrative approaches. It brings together two complementary studies that examine adoptees’ engagements with and refusals of searching in distinct yet comparable contexts: Bolivian adoptees raised in Belgium (Author 1) and Nepali adoptees raised in Spain (Author 2).

The Belgian–Bolivian study comprised ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2017. Research with Bolivian adoptees combined in-depth interviews and participant observation during gatherings and festivities organised by Bolivian adoptees in Flanders, Belgium. A total of 12 Bolivian adoptees (eight women and four men), aged between 21 and 37 at the time of the study, participated. All had been adopted as infants or young children, up to a maximum of five years old, between 1983 and 1996. While another publication from this project has examined how these adoptees engage with questions of cultural heritage and origins (Cawayu and De Graeve 2022), the present article zooms in specifically on four cases in which Bolivian adoptees explicitly expressed their decision not to search, foregrounding the ways in which such positions are articulated and negotiated.

The Spanish–Nepali study involved ethnographic fieldwork, combining participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted across several Spanish cities between 2016 and 2024. A total of 35 Nepali adoptees (21 women and 14 men), aged between 10 and 30 years at the time of fieldwork, participated in the study. They had been adopted at different ages, ranging from infancy to 13 years old. For the purposes of this article, six case studies were selected for detailed analysis in order to foreground the complexity of adoptees’ orientations toward searching and non-searching. They were chosen for the depth of reflection and diversity of perspectives they offered regarding non-searching.

Engagement with adoptees in both studies took place in a variety of everyday contexts such as family homes, informal social gatherings, adoptee association meetings. Interviews explored themes such as perceptions of origins, attitudes toward searching, emotional responses to public and familial expectations, and the meanings attributed to belonging. Some of the questions included: “How do you think about your country of birth in your everyday life?”, “What would it mean for you to search for your birth family?” and “How do you relate your origin to your sense of who you are today?” These contexts allowed the authors to observe how adoptees articulated their stance toward searching in collective and performative settings.

Analysis was conducted collaboratively across both research sites. Following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-phase framework for thematic analysis, transcripts and fieldnotes were read and reread to identify recurring motifs and tensions in the narratives. This was not a purely technical exercise but an interpretive process, in which themes emerged at the intersection of our research questions, existing scholarship, and the situated meanings articulated by participants. Iterative discussions between the authors allowed for the reviewing and refining of themes, ensuring that the analysis remained attentive to both shared dynamics and site-specific differences.

To ensure participant anonymity, all names were replaced with pseudonyms and potentially identifying details like specific locations or irrelevant elements of their adoption histories were omitted. A respectful approach to the participants’ stories was a central ethical priority, particularly given the personal and sensitive nature of adoption narratives. This diligence is especially important because, as Kim Park Nelson (2018) highlights, the structures and norms surrounding adoption often deprive adoptees of access to and control over their own histories and identities. It was therefore essential to treat these personal testimonies with the utmost confidentiality to prevent additional harm or misrecognition.

5. Results

Drawing on empirical evidence from both studies, we identified three dynamics that account for Nepali and Bolivian adoptees’ disinterest in searching for their origins and that shed light on their resistance to the social imperative of searching. The first is linked to the freestanding child paradigm, in which adoptees adopt a liberal stance toward personhood and self-definition. The second concerns how adoptees negotiate and resist social pressures to search. The third highlights those who refrain from searching because they have made peace with the absence of information.

5.1. The Freestanding Child in the ‘Here-and-Now’

Since the recognition of the ‘right to know’ in the CRC and the HCIA, this right has reshaped adoption practices and discourses. Combined with the broader ‘geneticization of society’ (van Wichelen 2019, p. 347), technological innovations, and the growing accessibility of DNA testing, it has facilitated searches, contacts, and reunions between adoptees and their families of origin. Yngvesson (2003) argues that adoptees navigate the complexity of their multiple ‘origins,’ perceiving their journeys as unfolding across temporal and spatial dimensions. These individuals often occupy multiple, simultaneous positions—internally within themselves and externally across families, cultures, socio-economic levels, and geographical locations. Building on this, Lindgren and Nelson (2014) identify two orientations in adoptees’ narratives: the ‘here-and-now’ and the ‘there-and-then.’ Both were evident in the present material.

Adoptees who adopt a ‘here-and-now’ orientation tend to downplay origins as irrelevant to selfhood. For these individuals, the past does not constitute a critical element of their identity. Maria, 16, born in Nepal and adopted in Spain, articulated this view:

“We all have a ‘where we come from,’ but that does not define the person. What matters is who we are now and the paths we take from here on. It’s as if where I come from is left behind because it has little to do with who I am now. That ‘where we come from’ is where you are born. In my case, Nepal. I am Nepali, and Nepal is my origin… but I don’t feel attached to it; none of it is who I am. I have lived all my life in Catalonia. My family and friends are here. I was born there, but so what? I have nothing there. The only thing I have from there is my body.”

Maria, who had never returned to Nepal, interpreted her birthplace as a biological fact yet socially meaningless. She remarked: “There are many other places I would rather explore than set foot on Nepali land.” Her case exemplifies how the liberal discourse displaces origins into a purely corporeal residue while affirming belonging to the adoptive country.

Another Nepalese adoptee, Anita, similarly emphasized the primacy of her adoptive environment, but framed it through the lens of everyday practices and embodied belonging rather than outright dismissal of origins:

“I know people expect me to be curious about Nepal, but honestly, it doesn’t cross my mind much. I have the information my parents told me, but it feels like reading about a character in a book—it’s interesting, but it’s not me. My life is here. The way I speak, the food I grew up eating, my friends, the way I think about myself—all of that is Spanish. If someday I travel there, it will be as a tourist, not to ‘find myself.’ I already know who I am.”

Anita’s account extends the ‘here-and-now’ discourse in a distinctive way. Rather than emphasising the irrelevance of biology, as Maria did, she highlighted how her identity is rooted in embodied, mundane practices such as language, food, friendships, and cultural routines. For her, belonging emerges not from genealogy or geography but from the daily enactment of life in Spain. In this sense, her narrative demonstrates how the ‘freestanding child’ discourse operates not only through explicit disavowal of origins but also through the normalization of present attachments and the routinization of identity in everyday life.

These perspectives foreground upbringing, care, and relational environment over biology. They exemplify a liberal, individualistic discourse in which identity is understood as self-authored, socially nurtured, and territorially anchored in the adoptive country. Such narratives contest essentialist genealogies that position biological or geographical origin as the core of personhood.

Importantly, this discourse does not simply emphasise nurture but also mobilises a logic of exclusivity (Högbacka 2011). Elio, a 22-year-old Bolivian adoptee, declared: “I have parents.” With this statement, he asserted that only his adoptive parents count as parents, thereby rejecting the possibility of multiple parenthood. Similarly, Roos, a 24-year-old Bolivian adoptee, dismissed her parents of origin as irrelevant: “Those [Bolivian] parents are no parents.” For both, the recognition of social parenthood went hand in hand with the rejection of biological kinship, leaving little room for hybrid or layered understandings of family. This rejection of multiplicity directly influenced their disinterest in searching.

Taken together, these narratives exemplify what Yngvesson (2003) has described as the ‘freestanding child’: an individual imagined as detached from genealogical continuity and instead rooted in the autonomy of the liberal subject. This discourse is double-edged. On the one hand, it offers adoptees a way to claim stability and exclusive belonging within their adoptive families and nations, countering external assumptions that their identities are incomplete without biological reconnection. On the other hand, by displacing or rejecting multiplicity, it risks reproducing a restrictive understanding of kinship in which the only legitimate parents are the adoptive ones. The emphasis on individual autonomy, while liberating in one sense, may thus foreclose more fluid or plural models of belonging that recognize both social and biological ties.

5.2. Resistance to Social Pressure to Search

While some adoptees adopt a ‘here-and-now’ orientation that renders biological origins relatively peripheral, others actively resist the pervasive social expectation that searching is a necessary condition for authentic selfhood. Such expectations are sustained not only within adoptive families where parents, shaped by prevailing cultural scripts, often encourage genealogical inquiries or birth-country visits but also within the broader socio-cultural imaginary. Media representations, institutional frameworks, and popular discourses frequently inscribe searching as both desirable and inevitable, positioning the adoptee who refrains as somehow incomplete, in denial, or lacking in reflexivity. Neelam, a 25-year-old Nepali adoptee in Madrid, articulated this tension when she questioned what she perceived as an idealisation of origins:

“Some people romanticise Nepal. For me, it’s important, but not idealised. Honestly, I don’t feel the need to return. Some people are mad about it. I plan to return when I’m ready and able, but I had a tough time with the food and climate last time I travelled there.”

Neelam’s stance illustrates the negotiation of what Foucault (2008) terms ‘regulatory ideals’, that is, cultural scripts that prescribe authenticity through reunion or return. By acknowledging Nepal as significant yet refusing to anchor her identity in it, she enacts a form of agency that unsettles normative genealogical expectations. Her testimony exemplifies how adoptees may reframe kinship in ways that do not conform to what Strathern (1992, p. 7) describes as the Euro-American valorisation of ‘the biological’ as the ground of relational truth.

Scholars have long noted the embeddedness of these pressures within broader cultural logics. Howell (2006), Legrand (2009) and Yngvesson and Coutin (2006), trace the rise of biocentrism in late modern personhood discourses, where genetic substance is increasingly privileged over social ties. This privileging resonates with what Schneider (1984) identified as the cultural model of kinship in Euro-American contexts, where ‘blood’ serves as a naturalising metaphor for relatedness. Such logics are further institutionalised through bureaucratic and legal infrastructures such as schools, hospitals and even citizenship regimes that presume universal access to one’s biological parentage. Wang et al. (2015) concept of a ‘climate of openness’ captures this environment, wherein disclosure and biological knowledge are framed as emancipatory, yet risk being transformed from a right into a moral obligation. Read through a Foucauldian lens, such imperatives can be understood as forms of biopower (Foucault 2008), whereby adoptees are disciplined into particular genealogical orientations under the guise of freedom.

The affective consequences of this regime of openness are evident in adoptees’ everyday encounters. Roos, a 24-year-old Bolivian adoptee in Belgium, expressed frustration at the intrusive presumptions that routinely accompanied the disclosure of her adoptive status:

“I sometimes notice that when I tell them that I am adopted, people ask me ‘How are your biological parents’ and ‘Do you have family there?’ I find these annoying questions. […] because they expect that I hope to meet them or that I am busy with that or have difficulties with it [in admitting her interest]. I find it irritating. I am adopted and that’s it. […] ‘It will come’ some people say. That gives me the feeling that I am in denial. I find it tiresome that people react like that.”

Roos’ irritation highlights how deeply entrenched the ‘searching adoptee’ trope is in public imagination. As Yngvesson (2010) and Kim (2012) argue, adoptees who do not pursue biological or cultural reconnections are often marginalised, perceived as resistant to ‘truth’ or as avoiding an inevitable confrontation with their origins. Adoption narratives, in this sense, become what Berlant (2011, p. 228) might call ‘intimate publics’: shared cultural repertoires where strangers feel licensed to intervene, question, and prescribe. The adoptee’s private relation to kinship is rendered ‘public property’, open to surveillance and moral commentary.

Critically, these narratives reveal the ambivalence of contemporary adoption discourses. The historical shift from secrecy to openness, coupled with the valorisation of biological bonds, has undeniably empowered many adoptees to access information once withheld. Yet it has also produced new normative structures, wherein not searching is construed as denial, deficiency, or even pathology. Adoptees like Neelam and Roos demonstrate that resisting these imperatives constitutes a counter-discursive practice of identity-making. Their refusal to ground belonging in biological reconnection destabilises what Carsten (2000) identifies as the naturalised conflation of kinship with biology. In reframing selfhood around lived experience, present relationships, and personal choice, they articulate alternative ontologies of kinship and belonging. Their testimonies underscore the need to conceptualise searching as a right rather than an obligation, and to recognise non-searching not as denial but as a legitimate, self-determined position. By foregrounding these refusals, we open space for a pluralisation of adoption narratives that disrupt biocentric essentialism and affirm the multiplicity of ways in which kinship and identity can be constituted.

5.3. Being at Peace with the (Lack of) Information

Testimonies of the interviewed adoptees reveal that refraining from searching is not necessarily an act of indifference. Rather, it can also be understood as a deliberate stance toward uncertainty, limited information, and personal priorities (see also Roche and Perlesz 2000). Several participants articulated ways of finding peace with their story instead of embarking on a quest that could prove inconclusive or emotionally costly. Elio recounted as follows:

“To start a search, I never saw myself doing that, way too much work also. It didn’t really interest me either. Why go look for something that can hurt me? I have taken peace with my story and that was it. And whether it is true or not… It could be possible my [Bolivian] mom brought me [to the orphanage] under a different name. It could all be possible, but I wouldn’t figure it out anyway.”

From Elio’s account, several elements emerge. He rejects the idea of a search partly because it would be “too much work” and partly because the outcome could be painful. Avoiding the risk of rejection can be read as a form of self-care, in line with the findings of Smith and Wallace (2000) that some non-searching adoptees feared distressing revelations or felt emotionally unprepared for such a process. Elio’s willingness to leave uncertainties unresolved can also be understood, following Das (2007), as a strategy of reworking silence and unknowability so that they become liveable conditions rather than unbearable ones.

Elio’s stance gains further significance in the current climate of transnational adoption, where recent media scandals and official inquiries have increasingly exposed irregularities and fuelled broader criticism of the system. Most importantly, Elio emphasises that he has “taken peace” with his uncertain story, an attitude that can be interpreted as protective and pragmatic, a way of reclaiming control over a narrative shaped by institutional opacity and refusing to expose himself to further vulnerability.

A similar orientation appears in Guillermo’s testimony, a 28-year-old adoptee from Bolivia, who frames non-searching as a matter of priorities: “No, I know it would be a difficult quest, and I would rather invest my energy into something else.” Here, non-searching is not presented as a defensive withdrawal but as an active decision to channel energy toward other life projects. Therefore, Guillermo’s words echo Ahmed’s (2006) notion of orientation, a decision about where to direct affect and energy. By situating meaning-making within his own life priorities, he challenges the dominant cultural script that equates identity with origins and privileges the genealogical quest as the apex of self-realisation.

Furthermore, for some adoptees, the decisive factor is not always an individual choice but the structural absence of information. Passmore and Feeney (2009) note that the lack of names, addresses, or other identifying markers often prevent adoptees from initiating a search. In many contexts, this is a widespread issue where adoptees are systematically deprived of knowledge about their own histories, with files often being incomplete, inaccessible or lost (Laurent et al. 2022; Walton 2012), leaving adoptees with structurally dispossessed of knowledge about their own origins. Naya, a 24-year-old Bolivian adoptee who spent several years living in Bolivia after graduating secondary school, articulated this starkly:

“I took peace with it, and I have given it a place that I will never find or meet my biological family… because I don’t have information, I don’t have names, I don’t have leads.”

Naya was left behind in a hospital, and her adoption file contained no identifying details about her mother. From a young age she understood that no information was available and such absence foreclosed the possibility of search. Over time, this impossibility was transformed into acceptance: the absence of traces became part of her life narrative rather than an obstacle to be overcome. In Carsten’s (2000) terms, the absence of traces becomes part of her ‘relatedness,’ where kinship is constituted not through recovery of biological ties, but through the everyday inhabitation of unknowability.

Taken together, these accounts illustrate how non-searching can be grounded in multiple logics: as self-care in the face of a possible rejection; as the orientation of priorities; or as a pragmatic response to the structural unavailability of information. What unites them, however, is the recurring emphasis on the act of “taking peace” with one’s story. Far from signalling passivity, this stance is an agentive strategy through which adoptees negotiate uncertainty and resist the imperative to search by reclaiming control over their personal narratives and asserting a legitimate choice in how they construct their identity. In Derrida’s (1997) words, origins remain a ‘trace’: absent yet structuring. Hence, by refusing to pursue the promise of a definitive answer, these adoptees transform absence into something liveable, even generative.

In this light, non-searching becomes a critical practice: a way of reclaiming narrative control, challenging the biocentric imperative to know, and affirming belonging without recourse to genealogical recovery, while expanding the possibilities of what it means to live meaningfully with adoption. By making peace with uncertainty, adoptees not only resist normative scripts of authenticity but also articulate alternative epistemologies of kinship—ones that recognise absence, silence, and unknowability as legitimate grounds for selfhood.

6. Discussion: Non-Searching as the Other Side of the Adoption Coin

The perspectives of Nepali adoptees in Spain and Bolivian adoptees in Belgium show that non-searching is not a monolithic stance but is articulated through diverse and intersecting dynamics. These dynamics shed light on the motivations that underlie adoptees’ refusals to search. Crucially, these refusals are not simply passive or oppositional to searching adoptees; instead, they represent agentive responses to structural, cultural, and personal conditions. Recognising these narratives foregrounds adoptees as active agents who negotiate their own positions within, and sometimes against, dominant discourses of kinship and belonging.

First, our empirical findings highlight that discourses of non-searching must be understood as embedded in broader socio-cultural frameworks. Non-searching adoptees do not simply reject origins; rather, they situate themselves within a context shaped by secrecy, biocentric ideals of family, and the privileging of exclusive belonging (Yngvesson 2003). Their testimonies remind us that adoptees engage with kinship imaginaries that both constrain and enable their sense of self. Here anthropological debates on kinship are especially instructive. David Schneider’s (1984) critique of the Western emphasis on biogenetic ties revealed how cultural ideologies of blood and biology are naturalised as universal truths. Subsequent work, particularly Carsten’s (2000, 2004) emphasis on relatedness, has shown that kinship is not reducible to genealogy but is actively “made” through everyday acts of care, co-residence, and shared life. In the context of adoption, Howell (2006) demonstrates how new kinship configurations emerge that disrupt the primacy of biological connection, while Yngvesson (2010) explores the tension between the imagined pull of “roots” and the lived realities of belonging. From this perspective, non-searching testimonies foreground alternative kinship logics, where relatedness is enacted through presence, care, and intentional disengagement from origins, rather than through genealogical recovery.

Second, these findings complicate the dichotomy between the ‘rooted’ and the ‘freestanding’ child. Yngvesson (2003) has shown that both figures are bound by the myth of exclusive belonging, which positions identity as singular and indivisible. Our study suggests that searching and non-searching must be seen as two sides of the same coin: both emerge from and reproduce the cultural scripts of exclusivity. Even when adoptees reject searching, they often reaffirm exclusivity—whether by declaring only their adoptive parents as ‘real’ parents or by accepting the impossibility of having more than one legitimate form of belonging. This echoes Strathern’s (1992) observation that kinship imaginaries often work through the either/or logic of substitution rather than the both/and logic of multiplicity. Non-searching, in this sense, is not external to the adoption system but forms part of its internal logic. While our focus is on transnational adoptees, the dynamics identified—such as the negotiation of belonging, the moralisation of searching, and the tension between choice and expectation—may also resonate with adoptees in domestic contexts and other forms of family-making. We recognise that many adoptees who choose to search construct hybrid identities that reconcile multiple familial affiliations. Our emphasis on non-searching adoptees does not negate these plural experiences but seeks to highlight an equally meaningful, yet underexplored, orientation.

Third, non-searching reveals how adoptees navigate the remnants of a system historically built on silence, erasure, and the regulation of belonging. Discourses of self-care, as in Elio’s case, show how disengagement can function as a protective strategy in contexts where irregularities, secrecy, and painful truths loom large. At the same time, these refusals highlight the paradox of openness: what was once codified as a right has increasingly become a moralised imperative. Situating these dynamics within Yngvesson’s paradigms of the freestanding and rooted child, this alleged paradox becomes clearer. Searching and non-searching, though seemingly opposite, both draw on and reproduce the same logics of exclusive belonging that underpin the adoption system. Where the freestanding child figures identity as wholly reconstituted in the adoptive family and thus rejects multiplicity, the rooted child constructs identity as inevitably tied to origins. Both positions are generated by the same historical regime of secrecy, erasure, and restrictive notions of kinship. Non-searching, therefore, should be read not as external to the system but an articulation within it—an alternative position that unsettles the imperative of searching while still reflecting the deep imprint of adoption’s structural history.

7. Conclusions

This article has examined the perspectives of Nepali adoptees in Spain and Bolivian adoptees in Belgium who choose not to search for their families of origin. From our analysis, three empirical dynamics emerged. First, some adoptees adopt a ‘here-and-now’ orientation that affirms belonging in the present and downplays the relevance of origins. Second, others articulate their stance through resistance to the pervasive social expectation that searching is the only legitimate path to authenticity. Third, a group finds peace with the absence of information, framing non-searching as a way of managing uncertainty and protecting emotional stability. These dynamics are not exhaustive, but they highlight how non-searching is particularly significant among adoptees raised in an era of openness, where the expectation to search has become naturalised.

Our findings demonstrate that non-searching is not a void but a configuration within the very structures of the adoption system. The decision not to search is inseparable from historical structures of secrecy, erasure, and the privileging of exclusive belonging. Importantly, it reminds us that adoptees should not have to make this choice at all: ideally, adoption should not be structured around a ‘clean break.’ The fact that adoptees are still confronted with this dilemma reveals how deeply the logics of family separation continue to shape adoption practices.

At the same time, the recent moralisation of searching as a therapeutic necessity risks reinforcing rather than dismantling these logics. Adoption systems may present improved access to information and support for search as evidence of reform, yet such measures often leave the foundational problem intact: the separation of children from their families of origin as the normative starting point. By foregrounding non-searching, we expose this paradox. Searching and non-searching are two sides of the same coin, both shaped by the enduring regime of exclusive belonging.