Public Apology Research Articles

Ishi in Three Centuries (review)

Karl Kroeber & Clifton Kroeber, eds. in Three Centuries. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2003, 416 pp. This book was conceived in the aftermath of the repatriation controversy that erupted with the discovery that Ishi's brain had not been cremated with the rest of his remains but instead had been removed during autopsy and stored for over 80 years in the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. Ishi, a Yana Indian man who emerged from a life of hiding to live for a few years in the Berkeley Museum of Anthropology, and was celebrated in Theodora Kroeber's widely read book, lshi in Two Worlds (Berkeley: UC Press, 1961). In the end, after a long and often painful process, Ishi's brain was returned to Yana country for burial along with his ashes. At long last, Ishi' relatives have been able to help lshi in his final journey. But while peace and care-taking surrounded Ishi's burial, the repatriation process, especially at the University of California Berkeley campus, produced division and rancor, pitting Native American against white, faculty against administration, and colleague against colleague. One casualty includes Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) the man who was responsible for offering Ishi's brain to the Smithsonian. Kroeber was a student of Franz Boas, the founder of the Berkeley Department of Anthropology, author of the influential Handbook of the Indians of California (Wash. D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1925), and a friend of Ishi. Alfred Kroeber was also the father of the two editors of the book, Clifton Kroeber, Norman Bridge Professor of History emeritus, and Karl Kroeber, Mellon Professor in the Humanities. As the product of two sons, the book could be seen as an effort to exculpate the father. In truth, the 100 or so pages addressed to the repatriation controversy are notably balanced, with statements from a wide variety of participants and observers. A historian of the University of California Berkeley, Department of Anthropology, (Buzalkjko) offers a contextualization of Ishi's closest relationships after his arrival at the San museum. The author of the Smithsonian report (Speaker) details the various data used by the Museum in the lshi repatriation case. The public apology issued by the former chairperson of the Department of Anthropology (Brandes) on behalf of the department is followed by the dissenting opinions of two central figures in the difficult intradepartmental process that preceded the official policy: Foster offers an explanation for why he believes that no apology was warranted, and Scheper-Hughes, who advocated for a much stronger apology, gives her interpretation of the process and its implications for Native peoples and the discipline of anthropology. Karl Kroeber, son and humanistic scholar, offers a metacommentary on understanding, repatriation, and humanistic scholarship. Finally, Karen Biestman, lawyer, professor and museum director, analyzes and questions the motives and effects of the passage of the California Assembly Concurrent Resolution (ACR) 25: the Remains of Ishi. If K. Kroeber and C. Kroeber had chosen to publish only this set of essays on the repatriation drama, many readers might have been satisfied. Without question, this portion of the collection is interesting, fair, and important. The vision behind this volume, however, is more expansive. The twenty-two contributors include Native, non-Native, and cross-blood, as well as writer, artist, archaeologist, activist, lawyer, and others. Moreover, the repatriation articles make up only one part of a five part book. The first section, Ishi in San Francisco includes the aforementioned history of Ishi's personal relationships with department personnel (Buzaljko), an evocative and sweet recollection from a man who as a child knew (Zumwalt), and two analyses of Ishi's San experiences. The first analysis (Adams) locates American class antagonisms in the popular press accounts of Ishi's visit to a vaudeville show at the Orpheum Theatre, and the second (Weaver) braids Ishi's story as spectacle with the stories of an enslaved Efe man who was displayed in fairs, a museum, and a zoo, and an Inuit man whose deceased father's bones were kept in a museum. …

The Local/Global Politics of Boston's Viet-Vote

After strolling past Boston's growing Vietnamese business district during an annual spring parade along Dorchester Avenue in 1992, City Councilor Albert Dapper O'Neil, the neighborhood parade's honorary grand marshal, shared his keen, caustic commentary about local demographic change with another city official on the street: just passed up there, I thought I was in Saigon, for Chrissakes. . . . It makes you sick, for Chrissakes!A bystander captured O'Neil's remarks on home video, and the revealing footage was broadcast on local network television news that night. In outrage over such blatant and official disrespect, two hundred from Dorchester's Vietnamese community along with allies from throughout the city rallied at Boston City Hall one week later to call for racial equality and demand a public apology from O'Neil.

“To Lose One’s Soul”: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596-1669

“To Lose One’s Soul”: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596-1669

Caring for Patients’ Graves Helps Hospitals Reconcile With Living

Caring for Patients’ Graves Helps Hospitals Reconcile With Living

Book of the Month: The Medical Profession and Human Rights

Book of the Month: The Medical Profession and Human Rights

Academic economists behaving badly? A survey on three areas of unethical behavior

This article measures the degree to which academic economists have engaged in unethical behavior and the degree to which academic economists believe the profession as a whole engages in unethical behavior. Three main types of unethical behavior are examined: (1) falsification of research; (2) expropriation of graduate student research or including an undeserving co‐author on a research paper; and (3) exchange of grades for gifts, money, or sex. Using a unique data set gathered at the 1998 American Economic Association (AEA) meetings, we find that there is a significant amount of misconduct, particularly in the second category.

The Presidency and Political Leadership

Political leadership is difficult to talk about, because it is difficult to define. It can mean different things to different audiences. It can mean the constitutive elements of rhetorical praxis; it can be the electoral elements of campaigns; it can mean the public elements of presidential politics. For this occasion, I am going to stick closely to my political science roots, and talk about the future of the presidency in terms of policy leadership, which political scientists understand as coalitionbuilding, and which is, of course, a communicative phenomenon. There are two kinds of coalition building that interest us as political scientists: electoral coalitions and governing coalitions. Electoral coalitions are determined by the peculiar logic of the primary processes and the Electoral College. They require would-be presidents to craft an amalgamation of racial, ethnic, geographic, and age-based interests. In this sense, presidential candidates, through the vehicles of the political parties, are powerful forces uniting the mass public—powerful voices determining national identity. This process of forging a single national voice capable of uniting enough of the public to earn a victory in the Electoral College has become increasingly difficult, and is likely to become more so. Admittedly, when Franklin Pierce had to unite the various factions that vied for power in the 1850s, he faced no easy task. The calculus of electoral politics has never been easy. But among the problems the Democrats faced in the 1850s, they did not have to contend with the or the women's or the Hispanic vote. Members of these groups had been silenced as they had been disenfranchised. And even in places where there was say, suffrage, the black vote, as such, did not exist. Franklin Pierce could have gone to Bob Jones University, and could have done so without a qualm and without the public apology George W Bush felt compelled to make. Franklin Pierce could have been aggressively anti-Catholic. Franklin Pierce did not have to worry about losing votes to the Reform Party—he did, however, have the Know Nothings, so perhaps can call that one even. My point is that while it is becoming ever more trite to say we have always been a multicultural nation, it is also true that in many ways have not had to deal with that multiculturalness in the ways that candidates are now doing, and that

Editors' Note: Public Administration and Apology

Editors' Note: Public Administration and Apology

Introduction-States of Shame

Introduction—States of Shame1 Il faut que le colonisé soit bien étrange, en vérité, pour qu'il demeure si mystérieux après tant d'années de cohabitation ... ou il faut penser que le colonisateur a de fortes raisons de tenir à cette illisibilité. —Albert Memmi, Le racisme (1982) The feeling of shame relies upon a sense of empathy that assumes that we are all the same at the same time as it relies on a sense of identity that assumes we are not all the same. [...] The aporia of shame is that it resists the very self/other distinction on which it depends. There is a necessary contradiction at its base. —Desmond Manderson, "Unutterable Shame/Unuttered Guilt: Semantics, Aporia and the Possibility of Mabo" (1998)2 STATES OF SHAME have long been understood as a powerful affective resource. They seem able to alienate and estrange others, while, paradoxically , making intimacy possible. Shame itself does double duty for individuals and groups by uniting and differentiating simultaneously. It produces both the feeling of shared regard between and amongst subjects ("We all recognize this as shameful") and yet, in that same experience of affective belonging, shame just as powerfully marks out the behaviors or desires which earn exclusion from such regard and recognition ("You must be shameless!" or "Shame on you!"). And yet, even in shame's denial of recognition, the apostrophizing words "Shame on you!" function rhetorically to beckon the subject back, to dangle the enticement οι potential, if not actual, inclusion by communicating the fitting codes and conditions of belonging: to fit in, in this context, means recognizing the appropriate sense of shame. Hence, the tremendous rhetorical power that lies in the marshaling and instrumentalizing of shame: in totalizing and totalitarian denials of state recognition to a particular group; in the recent appeals to the supplemental "community strengthening " potential of scenes of public humiliation deemed capable of remedying the failures of legal sanctions here in the U.S.; or in the spate of public apologies by Heads of State and High Court rulings, apologies that seek to arouse feelings of collective shame for past denials of recognition, as in Australia's 1992 High Court majority ruling on the native title rights of indigenous Australians , in Mabo and Others v. The State of Queensland, which overthrew the colonialist doctrine of terra nullius (land belonging to nobody) by mobilizing national shame in the face of a shameful past.3 And when subjects internalize Vol. XXXIX, No. 4 3 L'Esprit Créateur shame's coding of authorized and unauthorized behaviors and desires, shame fuels itself very effectively. What necessarily begins with an explicit or implicit encoding of the terms of social regulation then self-regulates and takes on a life of its own. The contributors to this issue have all asked crucial questions about the ways writers understand, and have understood, the variables—as well as the constants—of states of shame according to their diverse subjects, objects, causes, effects, and contexts. Rather than departing from any definitional unity on states of shame, instead their contributions probe the diversity of expression of these emotional states to ask how different Francophone writers , philosophers, and filmmakers represent the "relational grammar" of states of shame, be they intrapsychic, intersubjective, transgenerational, intercultural , or intracultural relations to name but a few of the passages crossed or closed, through shame's relational grammar." David Carroll, for example, examines Jorge Semprun's response to the collective transgenerational shame of the "survivor's syndrome" (feeling ashamed to be alive) in the wake of the Holocaust; Luke Bouvier also analyzes a response to the transgenerational transmission of shame, but this time in Jules Vallès's individual counter-discourse of shame-lessness in his writings on childhood humiliation. Both of these articles prompt us to ask if there are forms of shame-lessness other than the static retaliatory response of a shamelessness trapped by the very same terms of the shame it repudiates. Given that shame is such an ambivalent emotion , and that emotions themselves are so multifarious in their openness to individual and cultural development, can a writing of the emotions-in this case, shame—offer a way of disrupting...

Nationalistic feelings and sports: The incident of the overseas Chinese protest against NBC's coverage of the centennial Olympic games

In NBC's coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, Bob Costas’ remarks about Team China invited furious and persistent protests from the overseas Chinese. The protests, which were chiefly based on situational ethics, garnered an extensive grassroots support and continued for weeks after the Atlanta Olympics had finished. Under pressure from the protestors, NBC made a public apology. In response to the protests and NBC's apology, the US media expressed strong discontent. The arguments were basically supported by political correctness. Thus, situational ethics collided with political correctness. Although the protest against NBC appeared to be an accidental incident, a careful review of the incident and the opinions voiced by both sides reveals that the anger of the overseas Chinese with NBC, which justified itself in a number of ways, bears a variety of social and political implications, and that the US media's position has also been justified by the norms that have been formed over the past few years and accepted by the media and the majority of the American public alike. An explanation for the causes of the protest incident begs an in‐depth analysis of broad social and political factors.

Business Software Alliance: Industry protector or bully?

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) comprises a number of leading software companies including Adobe Systems, Autodesk, Lotus, Microsoft, Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation. The BSA has been actively pursuing corporate overuse of its members' software in the UK since 1991, and has achieved many high profile successes against leading companies. Using Anton Piller Search and Seize Orders, representatives of the BSA and their lawyers arrive unannounced at the premises concerned and carry out a diligent search of the hard disks of all the company's PCs. If the search reveals unlicensed copies of software on the hard disks (and this is usually identified by the serial numbers of the software), the infringers have generally been required to pay damages and costs and, in some cases, make abject public apologies.

Discipline and the Death Penalty in the British Army in the War against Germany during the Second World War

On 3 August 1943, General George S. Patton, commander of the US 7 Army, visited 15th Evacuation Hospital in Sicily. While touring the hospital he met Private Charles H. Kuhl, who had recently been evacuated from 1 Division suffering from battle fatigue. Patton was incensed, called the soldier a coward and ordered him to leave the tent. When he sat motionless, the general slapped him with his gloves and personally ejected him from the tent. That evening he wrote in his diary that men like Kuhl should be shot. A week later, while visiting a second field hospital, he encountered another private suffering from battle fatigue whom he also slapped, telling him, 'You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. In fact, I ought to shoot you myself right now, god damn you.'1 These incidents nearly wrecked Patton's career. He was compelled to make a public apology for his actions and only Eisenhower's support made it possible for him to be given command of the US 3 Army in time for the Normandy campaign. There is no recorded instance of a senior British general acting in a similar manner. On the contrary, it is now sometimes assumed that, following their own experiences of front-line service during the first world war and the publication in 1922 of the report of the War Office Enquiry into 'Shell-Shock', senior British officers during the second world war adopted a more compassionate policy towards the victims of 'battle fatigue'. The literature on discipline and the death penalty in the British army in the twentieth century stops in 1930, in the belief that, with the abolition of the death penalty for desertion, capital punishment for purely military offences ceased to be an issue which concerned the army.2 Far from equating 'battle fatigue' with cowardice, Research for this article was made possible by a Small Personal Research Grant from the British Academy. I am grateful to the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College London, for permission to refer to material in which they own the copyright. Crown copyright material appears by kind permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. I have not been able to trace the copyright holder of the papers of E.P. Danger. I apologize to them and to anyone else whose copyright I may inadvertently have infringed.

The Judicial and Judicious Use of Shame Penalties

This article analyzes and critiques the recent use of judicial shame penalties. Arguing that these penalties are designed to satisfy a “retributive impulse,” they communicate and enforce normative, as opposed to legal, standards. The power of the sanction is found in the threat of social exclusion. Three classes of shame penalties are identified: public exposure, debasement, and apology penalties. Critique of the penalties focuses on the risk of stigmatization and exclusion, the structural preconditions for offender reintegration, and the potentiality of using shame sanctions in an individualistic society.

Capital Report: A New National Bioethics Commission-Maybe

On 3 October 1995, President Clinton wanted to show how committed he and his administration were to protecting human subjects in On that day he accepted a report from Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, a national commission that had been looking into allegations that nearly fifty years ago,, at height of Cold War, people had unknowingly participated or had been coerced into participating in government-sponsored experiments on effects of ionizing radiation. Some had, commission concluded, and president felt moved to issue a public apology to all those whose rights may have been violated and promised it would never happen again. To back up his promise, president announced two actions. First, he asked all federal agencies involved in research on human subjects to review current rides for protecting human subjects. Second, he announced his intent to create a National Bioethics Advisory Commission, a fifteen-member body appointed to oversee, among other things, of government-sponsored According to president's 3 October announcement, NBAC (pronounced En-back) will have a broad mandate to examine ethical conduct of biomedical research in U.S. Its first responsibility will be to review adequacy of each federal agency's rules for protection of human subjects. Beyond that, NBAC will advise (1) on the appropriateness of departmental, agency, or other governmental programs, policies, assignments, missions, guidelines, and regulations as they relate to bioethical issues arising from research on human biology and behavior and (2) on including clinical applications, of that research. NBAC is supposed only to identify broad principles, not review specific programs. NBAC's first priority will be to look into management and use of genetic information, as' well as questions raised by patenting of human genes. After it tackles these areas, NBAC can set its own agenda, so long as topics picked are related to biomedical research and public health, relevant to federal government's interest in research, and not covered by another bioethics panel--although latter shouldn't be too big a hurdle since there are virtually no federally chartered bioethics panels around these days. And it's to do all this in just two years. NBAC is slated to go out of business two years from day it formally opens its doors--although that could change if president decides to keep it around longer. …

Search of Chinese ship fails to find chemicals

Inspection last week of a Chinese cargo ship that the U.S. believed was carrying chemical weapons precursors to Iran failed to uncover the suspect chemicals. The Chinese government, which had vehemently denied U.S. charges, immediately declared a moral victory and demanded both a public apology and financial compensation from the U.S. Refusing both, the U.S. did, however, praise the Chinese for their cooperation in resolving U.S. concerns. Reaction to the U.S. challenge and its outcome has been mixed. Some observers view the incident as an acute embarrassment for the U.S. Others see it as commendable obstinance on the part of the U.S. in its efforts to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Relying on what the U.S. called credible intelligence, its ships trailed the cargo ship Yin He once it left the Chinese port of Dalian in July, en route to the port of Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). In early August, the ...

Commentary: Beyond Conspecifics: Is Brer Rabbit Our Brother?

Burghardt is professor of pscyhology, zoology, and ecology, Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37916. He is also a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Herzog is an assistant professor with the Department of Psychology, Mars Hill College, Mars Hill, NC 28754. This article is a revised version of a paper entitled Beyond Conspecifics: Ethology and Animal Rights, read at the June 1979 meeting of the Animal Behavior Society at Tulane University. The work was supported, in part, by NSF Research Grant BNS 78-14196 to Burghardt. ? 1980 American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved. has added to the traditional moral arguments of vegetarians. The widespread questioning of government support for basic research has been intertwined with suspicions about the use and worth of any studies on animals, even those purporting to help understand human medical and behavioral problems. New evidence of higher cognitive faculties in some animals including reason, language, and emotional sensitivity have resonated throughout the scientific and lay press (e.g., Gallup 1977, Lawick Goodall 1971, Griffin 1976, Lilly 1975). Ethological work on animal and human behavior has thus eroded the key foundation for the age-old rigid distinctions between human and nonhuman (see Regan and Singer 1976 for an excellent anthology). The study of the animal mind is again fashionable (Burghardt 1978), as evidenced by the highly technical contributions constituting an entire 1978 issue of The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Vol. 1, no. 4). Philosophers, theologians, scientists, and many organizations are now grappling with the issues involved in our treatment of animals (e.g., Allen and Westbrook 1979, Curtis 1978, Henig 1979). We think the issues are basic ones that have serious implications for research (see Broad 1980). Furthermore, we see little consensus on them within the biomedical, psychological, and animal behavior communities. When Aronson's work at the American Museum of Natural History on sexual behavior in cats was under serious assault (Wade 1976), differences within the scientific community itself on both the procedures used and the value of the studies prevented strong support for him. The controversy was surely a factor in the abolition of the Animal Behavior Department, of which he was the last head, by the museum authorities earlier this year. Similarly, Hutchinson's studies on electric shock-induced aggression in animals (including monkeys and people) led to Senator Proxmire's ridicule and Golden Fleece award, resulting in a celebrated suit (Holden 1976) and Proxmire's eventual public apology. Although the research community seems pleased with the outcome, many animal behavior researchers are clearly ambivalent about the scientific and ethical aspects of this kind of work. Indeed, Ulrich (1978), who had performed similar work in the same laboratory, published an apologetic disavowal of his efforts in this field on moral grounds. The research establishment is going to have to formulate a thoughtful response, or it may lose the respect of a new generation of students, researchers, and politicians even when it wins in the courts. Alienation has begun: Already eminent researchers have complained to us that students, particularly in Europe, are becoming too moral.

Experimentation in Children: Sharing in Sociality

he use of children (incompetent to consent) in nontherapeutic research is an extremely delicate and difficult ethical problem. Here I wish to respond to Paul Ramsey's quite interesting commentary on some earlier writings of mine on this subject.1 But first a public apology is due. In the course of his extended remarks, my colleague and friend confides to us that he had to stifle his amazement on at least two occasions. I publicly apologize for being the agent provocateur of such unaccustomed asceticism. However, when all is said and done, in his Report response to me, Ramsey's attempts at amazement-stifling simply collapsed and bubbled-up-as they so often do-by implying that his summary of my argument only skims the surface of its faults. But even so, his attempts must have been painful; so an apology is due. Now to the issues. First we ought to be clear on Ramsey's position, or better, positions, both of which he describes superior to McCormick's. The first regards any attempt to consent to experimentation for the child as a false and violent presumption. For it is to treat a child not a child. Thus, Ramsey's first position rejects in principle any experimental procedures that involve any degree of risk of harm, however minimal. Further, he goes beyond even minimal risk and rejects procedures that involve no risk but simply offensive touching. A subject can be wronged without being harmed, he writes. That is certainly true in general; now whether it is true of nonbeneficial experimentation on infants remains to be seen. So in Ramsey's view those incapable of consent are simply, without qualification and in principle, out of bounds for nonbeneficial research. Any other view, he argues, involves using the child a means only and not also an end.

Testing the Patency of the Nasal Choanae, Continued

In our paper, "Screening for Hidden Congenital Anomalies" (Pediatrics, 41:147, 1968), the point of course was that we do just that, not that we develop arguments over the best method to diagnose choanal atresia. It was also not intended that we torture our little friends by "ramming foreign bodies down their nostrils" (Pediatrics, 42:873, 1968) and public apology is herewith rendered to all infants so molested. There are two objections to Dr. Abel's rarely quoted reference.

Andean Culture History: An Apology and Clarification

Wendell C. Bennett was kind enough to call attention to an error in my recent review of his and Bird's Andean Culture History (American Antiquity, Vol. 16, No. 2, October, 1950, pp. 170-172) which I would like to correct. In discussing the spatial division of the Central Andes I tried to reconstruct the sequence of Bennett's ideas on the subject and made the assumption that order of publication reflected order of composition. This assumption is always dangerous and, in making it in this case, I overlooked the preface date of the work under review. The fact of the matter is that the manuscript of Andean Culture History was completed and submitted to the American Museum of Natural History before the Viking Fund symposium of July, 1947 was held. Hence, Bennett's contributions to the symposium volume (SAA-M No. 4, 1948) represent a later and not an earlier stage in the development of his ideas. Herewith my public apology for the misrepresentation.

Anti-Semitism in the United States

Anti-Semitism has increased sharply in the United States since the last World War. This appears in the great increase in organized forms of antiSemitic agitation and organization, in the occasional occurrence of acts of violence against Jews, unknown earlier, in indications of increased discrimination in employment, in academic enrollment, and in social restrictions and exclusions, and of late years in the increasing tolerance with which these manifestations of antiSemitism have been treated. The highlights of the agitation during this period are well-known. They include the systematic campaign of antiSemitic publication carried on by Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent from 1920-1927; the activities of the Ku Klux Klan during the same general period; sporadic cases of agitation in the early 30's until, stimulated by the Nazi movement abroad, a wave of anti-Semitic publications and organizations began in 1933-34 to inundate the country. Among the more recent and prominent, in addition to publications of the Bund itself, were William Dudley Pelley with his Silver Shirts organization and his publication Liberation; Rev. Gerald Winrod of Kansas with his Revealer and Defender; and Father Coughlin and his Social Justice. During this latter period there flourished briefly, also, the notorious Michigan Black Legion. These major forms of agitation and organization should be seen as highlights, for the stream on which they reached the surface runs deep and wide. So marked have been the manifestations of anti-Semitism in the United States since the period of the last World War, and so sharp the contrast with the milder conditions preceding it, that some have felt anti-Semitism was essentially absent from America earlier, and particularly prior to 1900. The change has been acute in public and official attitudes toward antiSemitism. At the opening of the century, the sober judgment of the American people branded anti-Semitic offenders and offenses with public denunciation and scorn. As late as the 20's, Ford's campaign in the Dearborn Independent was widely denounced and a retraction and public apology for the canards obtained from Ford himself. When Representative McFadden in 1933 introduced anti-Semitic canards in the record of Congressional proceedings, he was censured both in Congress and by press and public. But in May 1941 Representative Rankin indulged in an outburst of anti-Semitism in the House of Representatives which went unchallenged, save by Representative Edelstein of New York, who died from a heart attack as he finished his plea for traditional American tolerance and democracy. But neither press, nor Congress, nor leaders of the Government have censured or denounced this outburst. The event was widely treated with indifference, and in some cases Edelstein's action and death were also