Exploring the Interstices Between Kokajiriri and Adoption: Shifts in Marshallese Practice

Abstract

Local adoption practices among Enewetak/Ujelang Marshallese have received some analytic attention but as local people have become cosmopolitan members of Marshallese residential centres scattered from Hawai’i to the mid-west United States mainland they are increasingly embedded in legal systems that define adoption in unique and unfamiliar ways. Consequently, the contours and conditions of adoption have been rethought to allow local ideas about kokajiriri relationships, including co-parenting and ‘child making’, to be brought into accord with an expanding array of relational possibilities. This includes establishing adoptive relationships with outsiders and working to align kokajiriri practices, so-called ‘adoption’, with the requirements of state laws within the United States. These shifting routines of everyday practice gradually reshape the way Enewetak/Ujelang people conceptualise and discuss kokajiriri relationships. The shifting communal formulations regarding kokajiriri and the correlative changes in daily practice form the central theme of this paper.

Keywords:

• Kokajiriri
• Migration
• Circulation
• Cultural Formulations
• Everyday Practices

Notes

1 While ideas about birth offspring and blood relationships are deeply embedded in the anthropological literature, going back to Radcliffe-Brown (1952) and even Lewis Henry Morgan (1871), these ideas do not align with Enewetak/Ujelang practice. As explained by elders on Ujelang, the Marshallese distinction between kokajiriri and nejin may simply be a difference between the active human creation of clan essence through feeding and caring for (kokajiriri) and building upon core clan essence already initiated through feeding and caring for in the womb (nejin).

2 Pseudonyms are used only when permission to use a person's identity was not requested in advance or when, in the author's judgement, the person being referred to might not elect to have each detail of an episode circulated beyond the bounds of the Marshallese community, even though they may have agreed to share their stories with others.

3 The very idea of serving jail time instilled fear in young members of the Enewetak community initially, but by 2014 serving a week in jail was a frequent choice among the men.