Risk-Taking Behavior, “Law of the Jungle” Among Topics to be Explored in UB Lecture Series on Violence

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The "University and the World" lecture series sponsored by the University at Buffalo's College of Arts and Sciences will continue its year-long exploration of violence on Feb. 6 with a lecture entitled "Risk-Taking, Inequity and Violence."

The lecture by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, both professors of psychology at McMaster University in Ontario, will consider the role of risk-taking in behavior -- especially violent interpersonal behavior -- in mating and parental effort, and in life histories and physiology.

The series for 2000-01 is looking at the issue of violence from a number of different perspectives, featuring major figures in the fields of anthropology, psychology, history, comparative literatures and law. It will include lectures, as well as film screenings.

All events, which are free of charge and open to the public, will take place at 4 p.m. in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus.

The rest of the schedule for the spring semester:

• Feb. 12: "How the Law of the Jungle Has Created a Need for Reconciliation: Lessons from the Primates," Frans B. M. de Waal, C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology and director of the Living Links Center in the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University. Human reconciliation may be more complex than that of any other animal because of the greater number of factors that humans take into account and their greater reliance on transmitted value systems. However, in the lecture, de Wall will suggest the general idea that turning off hostility and replacing it with friendliness-or, at least non-hostility-in order to resume cooperative relationships is an old concept-older than humans' appearance on the planet.

• Feb. 20: Screening of the film "Mr. Death," Errol Morris' award-winning documentary of execution specialist and Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter Jr. Elayne Rapping, UB professor of women's studies, will introduce the film and lead discussion afterward.

• March 13: Screening of the film "Seven," in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt star as two police officers sent to work on a baffling and gruesome collection of serial killings. David Schmid, assistant professor of English at UB, will introduce the film and lead discussion.

• March 27: "How We Talk about the Holocaust," Peter Novick, professor emeritus of history at the University of Chicago. In this lecture, which was rescheduled from Nov. 21, Novick will discuss the way the Holocaust is regarded today versus the way it was viewed at the time it took place. He maintains that events such as the Holocaust should be studied, not to extract lessons, but to appreciate their complexities and contradictions.

• April 3: "Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism in South Africa," Jean Comaroff, professor of anthropology and social sciences; chair of the Department of Anthropology, and Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. What might zombies have to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the 20th century? What might they have to do with postcolonial, postrevolutionary nationalism? With labor history? With the "crisis" of the modernist nation-state and its loss of control over the means of violence? Comaroff will explore the connections among such seemingly exotic issues and the hard-edged material, cultural and epistemic realities of our times.

The "University and the World" series is sponsored by Kerry S. Grant, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Department of Anthropology, the Edmund H. Butler Chair (Department of English) and the Thomas B. Lockwood Chair in American History (Department of History). Novick's talk is sponsored by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and Hillel of Buffalo.