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- Convenors:
-
Jennifer Speirs
(University of Edinburgh)
Iris Marchand (University of Edinburgh)
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- Stream:
- Morality and Legality
- Sessions:
- Monday 29 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Public acknowledgement of responsibility and apology for past policy decisions and actions about strategies of reproduction, adoption and kinship are often controversial, and raise issues for anthropologists concerning law, human rights, activism, and memory.
Long Abstract:
It has been suggested that we live now in an Age of Apology (Mookherjee et al 2009) which has ethical, social and political dimensions. Citing examples such as the Australian government's apology to the 'stolen generations', the indigenous children forcibly removed from their families as part of the policy of assimilation, the authors highlight 'the ethical pitfalls of seeking an apology, or not uttering it' and the varied understandings of apology and forgiveness across different social groups within the same state.Yet before apology there has to be acceptance of responsibility, and this is often controversial, with claims that today's citizens cannot be responsible for the actions of earlier generations, even if with hindsight and the passage of time it is acknowledged that those actions were wrong. Further, saying sorry in today's risk-averse environment can be seen as paving the way to demands for compensation and recourse to legal proceedings.This panel seeks to explore, based on ethnographic research, how different societies are dealing with retrospective regrets and claims for apologies. What kind of controversies or positive impacts result for those involved and for wider society? Are there rituals of revenge, celebration, forgiveness or reconciliation involved? How do anthropologists study and analyse the counterclaims and ambivalences inherent in saying sorry for past policies and actions? Are we able to remain neutral, and should we be so?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 29 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the concept of Irreconciliation and its implicit demands for an ethics of responsibility.
Paper long abstract:
Conflict and Post-conflict situations are today marked by the urgency and need for forgiveness, apology, expression of ‘regret’ ‘remorse’ and reconciliation. Apologizing for past injustices has become a significant speech act (Mookherjee et al 2009; 2019). Following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the post-apartheid period in South Africa in 1994, debates on reconciliation have also had a particular currency in addressing violent pasts, seeking ‘closure’ and ‘moving forward’. The idea of ‘national reconciliation’ emerged from a particular set of historical and political experiences, namely the transitions to liberal democracy that occurred at the end of the Cold War (Wilson 2003: 368). Intrinsic to all these processes of reconciliation is the encouragement and imperative to forgive. In all these instances of reconciliatory and apologetic exercises it is thereby incumbent upon survivors to forgive, reconcile and seek closure as an exhibition of peacefulness. However, what are the instances of not saying sorry, not reconciling, remaining irreconciled? How does irreconciliation implicitly make the demand for an ethics of responsibility while at the same time becoming a tool of governance, nationalist discourse? Drawing from the Bangladesh war crimes tribunal and other ethnographic instances, I wish to make a theoretical and ethnographic case for Irreconciliation in this paper, as both a social and a political phenomenon, as a political stance, to think through the ideas and aspirations of justice embedded in it, as a concept in and of itself rather than through its opposition to peace.
Paper short abstract:
We examine the process of construction and transformation of the meanings surrounding the serious violations of the Right to Identity in Chile, during Pinochet’s dictatorships and its relationship with the broader transitional justice processes.
Paper long abstract:
Chile actively participated in the global intercountry adoption circuit during the Pinochet dictatorship. Selman (2012) identifies Chile as one of the top six countries was sending children for ICA in the period from 1980 to 1989. The phenomenon known locally as ‘irregular adoptions' (Salvo Agoglia & Alfaro, 2019) remained for decades as a 'public secrecy' (Taussig, 1999; Mookherjee, 2009). Only became visible in 2014, when numerous denunciations came to light that occurred during this period and the first organizations were formed (NGOs “We Are Looking for Each Other” and “Children and Mothers of Silence”). The Chilean historical tradition of agreeing to amnesty laws to politically foreclose litigations and extinguish the memory of conflict based on the argument that shared impunity is the basis of social peace (Loveman & Lira, 2000) and the silence is a tool of peace-making (Frei, 2018). Currently, the Chilean State has not guaranteed the creation of public policy of justice and repair, which has resulted in the privatization of the demand of truth and justice for the people directly affected, circumscribing the meaning and scope of human rights issues through patterns of social silence historically rooted in Chilean political culture which are very difficult to reconfigure and disarm. In this paper, we examine the process of construction and transformation of the meanings surrounding the serious violations of the Right to Identity in Chile, during Pinochet’s dictatorships and its relationship with the broader transitional justice processes.
Paper short abstract:
The absence of an apology does not necessarily imply the denial of responsibility. Defining or reframing past actions and policies as justifiable at the time are ways of accepting some responsibility whilst trying to avoid contemporary demands to apologise.
Paper long abstract:
The use of anonymously-donated semen (DI) as a strategy for circumventing male infertility has been practised in the UK since the late 1930s. In order to protect everyone with a personal and professional involvement, the clinics kept the identity of the donors from the recipients and destroyed the donors’ records.
The doctors who pioneered the development of the services were aware that anonymous DI was viewed publicly as a challenge to the moral edifice of the family. It was described as adultery and the child was illegitimate yet the doctors continued to provide the services despite opposition from other colleagues and from other quarters such as law and religious bodies. Their good intention was to provide a medical solution to childlessness, to help desperate childless couples to become parents. Responsibility for dealing with any long term implications was strategically avoided, firstly by recruiting the type of donor whose semen was presumed to be less likely to pass on disease or genetic defects, and secondly by discouraging any sense of connection between donors and recipients. The mother of the child and her husband were told to keep the matter a secret.
Anonymised donation is now legally forbidden in the UK although some doctors are not convinced that it should be, believing that anonymity is in everyone’s best interests. They keep silent in order to avoid the wrath of the activist donor-conceived people who blame them and their own parents for colluding in denying access to their genetic origins.