This article offers an interpretation of the gift relationships in legal adoption between strangers, in Qu bec, in the 1990s. It shows which values and representations tend to exclude the notion of gift from the legitimate actions in the domain of adoption.
Adoption tends to circulate parental status rather than children.
The state system which regulates it is based on an individualist and instrumental conception of kinship ties. There is thus a dissociation of the interrelated dimensions of the traditional genealogical model.