Today's blog is brought to you by Lanny Hertzberg, a Professor of Anthropology who is visiting us here on his way to a cool teaching gig in Italy.

I find his take interesting from many angles, not least of which is that it comes without the filters the adoption community installs once adoption becomes a focus.

My wife and I have been guests now at Sandra and Mark’s for the past week. We have gotten to see them and their children in this island paradise. While my wife Jane is very familiar with Sandra’s blog, I am not. In the course of our conversations, several topics have come up that have apparently been quite controversial on Sandra’s blog, but with which I was unfamiliar. One in particular stuck a chord with me and that was a discussion about “culture”. I am a cultural anthropologist, and have been for forty years. The controversy revolved around whether one did a disservice to a child for someone outside their culture to adopt them and take them away from their native culture. This is a reaction to that question from an anthropologist’s point of view.

Culture to an anthropologist means a way of life for a group of people, including their beliefs, their customs, their practices, their possessions. Margaret Mead in her essay “Four Families” stated that “…a child has the ability to be anything at birth; a Russian, an Eskimo, a Hottentot, an Indian, a Frenchman or a Canadian.” She was referring here to the fact that children are blank slates at birth, that their culture is not part of their biology, but rather is learned. From that perspective then, a child learning one culture instead of another does no disservice to the child.

Perhaps the question should be instead: does the culture of a child’s birth parents lose something when the child is brought up in a different culture? That may well be true, but then that would also be the case for everyone who immigrated from one society to another. Cultures are created by people and when any person leaves, the culture is diminished…however humans have been doing that since we first stood upright.

A more important question might be: is the child’s life better with people who chose him or her, than in a society that did not value them? It is my understanding that most international adoptions by westerners involve children from orphanages, street children, or other victims of poverty, war or disease. It seems to me that to suggest a child would be better off in their “own culture” is the height of hubris, when that child’s health and happiness can be improved by adoption. There is nothing biological or genetic about culture. No culture is better or worse for a child based on what they look like or who their birth parents are.