Birth is a culturally patterned life cycle event that has personal and political significance.
Core cultural values are transmitted to participants during pregnancy and the post-partum period. For illegitimate births, cultural values may be transmitted by punishments for the unapproved mother that include abandonment or, in some instances, pressures to relinquish her child to adoption. In this article relinquishing mothers offer a cultural critique of American adoption programs enacted in earlier decades and provide support for the hypothesis that adoption was used as a form of social control. In this article, the relations between co-management systems, various types of fishing communities, and compliance in the Barents Sea fisheries are discussed. Moreover, the co-management perspective ought to direct more attention toward specifying conditions under which such arrangements work, since there is no contradiction between this and an increased focus on human collectives.