Adoption, a birthright

Responsible and loving parents are not just a privilege, asserts assistant professor of law Paulo Barrozo; they are a child’s fundamental right. Governments and institutions can satisfy a child’s practical needs for shelter and food, but it is the care, protection, and affection parents supply that provide “the best environment for . . . the potentials with which a child was initially endowed,” Barrazo writes in “Finding Home in the World: A Deontological Theory of the Right to be Adopted,” published in the 2010–11 New York Law School Law Review. In particular, Barrozo takes issue with policies that, despite their “charitable sensibilities and human rights rhetoric,” hinder international adoptions (a 2004 United Nations study reports no less than 16 million double orphans in Asia, Latin America, and Africa alone).

In an article principally devoted to theoretical foundations, Barrozo traces the history of adoption from ancient Rome, where the institution was used to enhance the social and financial status of a paterfamilias by combining estates; through William Blackstone’s 18th-century codification of the rights of parents (“as a recompense for [their] care and trouble”); to the orphan trains of 19th- and early 20th-century America, which carried homeless children from eastern cities to farming communities short on help. It is no accident, Barrozo maintains, that mid 19th-century adoption records in Mississippi and Texas (the first states to establish registries) followed the format developed for entering property deeds. Adoption was a contract for the benefit of the adopter.

Post–World War II policies in the United States brought an increase in placements of disabled and minority children, but most international protocols still treat children as national, cultural, and ethnic resources. Barrozo cites the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which accords nations a “sovereign-like” ownership of unparented children and is concerned not with a child’s right to be adopted but rather “with violations (e.g. abduction, sale, trafficking) of states’ monopolistic dominium over their populations.”

Branded

Even if you never open a can of Red Bull, this sugar-and-caffeine-laced beverage delivers the stimulation its producers promise—“for better or worse,” report S. Adam Brasel and James Gips in the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Brasel, an associate marketing professor, and Gips, the Egan Professor of Computer Science, found in an experiment that the mere sight of the energy drink’s logo—two scarlet bulls poised to lock horns in front of a fiery sun—seems to instigate aggressive risk-taking. This effect does not derive from prior consumption of the product; the Red Bull brand has as powerful an effect on individuals who have never tasted the drink.

The experiment took the form of a video game in which 70 college student subjects each raced five virtual cars in individual time trials. Four of the cars sported the logo of a beverage company—Coca Cola, Guinness, Red Bull, or Tropicana. One car was unbranded. A questionnaire previously administered to a separate group of 33 students found familiarity with the four brands to be essentially equal and Red Bull to be associated with the characteristics of “fast,” “powerful,” “energetic,” and “daring.” The driving records reflected these perceptions. Though the virtual cars all had the same capabilities, the Red Bull car tended to finish the course with the best times—or with the worst times, as overly aggressive driving could cause the car to skid off the track. Red Bull, the researchers note, was “the only brand with a significantly uneven race speed distribution.”

This experiment shows how “brand exposure can exert double-edged effects,” write Brasel and Gips, who suggest that virtual brand exposure in the increasingly prevalent interactive world may have “especially powerful” effects on consumers.

Identity check

Though Western news outlets from the Economist to the New York Times refer to the “Arab World” of the Middle East, in reality there is no such place, writes Franck Salameh, assistant professor of Near Eastern studies, in “Towards a New Ecology of Middle Eastern Identities,” which appeared in the March 2011 issue of Middle Eastern Studies, even as the so-called Arab Spring was underway. The term, he says, reflects a “patently European” model in which “race, nationality, language, and territory run parallel.” The Arab World, he says, is in fact a “patchwork of hybrid ethnicities, languages, and narratives.”

Focusing on the Arabic language, “the prism through which to view and understand the whole of the multicultural, polyglot Middle East,” Salameh notes that Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the public language of established religious and political leaders, is incomprehensible to more than half of the 300 million inhabitants of the Middle East, particularly the less educated and less affluent, many of them minorities. Most Middle Easterners communicate in regional variants of Arabic—some 30 in all—as distinct from one another as French is from English, so that a Cairene finds Algerians, Iraqis, and Moroccans virtually unintelligible.

Introduced to the region in the seventh century as the language of the Koran, Salameh writes, MSA today plays a role akin to that of Latin in 14th-century Italy (when Dante began composing in his native Tuscan). Like Latin, Arabic survives as an “administrative language,” one that is “bound to the strictures of theology”; it is, says Salameh, “a pristine primordial idiom” that in the view of many in the Middle East, “must not be sullied with . . . trivialities.” Increasingly, Salameh observes, writers and intellectuals in the region are employing their native or local vernaculars, which can accommodate the “settled life and information superhighways.”

Thomas Christopher is a Connecticut-based writer.

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