Research Framework: For the past fourteen years, I have been thinking about the issue of adoption in Brazil, with the city of Rio de Janeiro as a privileged field of study. As I was focusing on the meaning of kinship, its social and legal implications, the Euro-American conception of kinship (Strathern, 2015) and its moral injunctions, I began to ponder the meaning of a child and youth policy, its relationship with adoption and with the practices of the Brazilian child and adolescent justice system.

Objectives: My objective is to examine how the reflexive posture that is fundamental to social sciences can modify research trajectories, and how ethnographic experiences in the field are likely to produce effects on researchers and respondents.

Methodology: In this article, I discuss the changes in my adoption research trajectory that are linked to my commitment.

Results: To do so, I focus on my ethnographic experiences in adoption support groups and at children and youth protection courts, and how they affected me (Favret-Saada, 1990), triggering – in myself and my research – a change of perspective. I also address some of the contexts surrounding the restitution of research data.

Conclusion: Anthropological research unfolds in the midst of doubt, uncertainty and the fear of being “conquered” or “delighted” by our interlocutors, or even of being hated by them. We must therefore look for a path between autonomy and commitment.

Contribution: The various ways in which data can be returned to the people studied can open up a field of possibilities for cooperative work in the effective register of a committed anthropology.

• adoption
• justice system
• trajectories
• research

https://journals.openedition.org/efg/21256