UB and Riverrun Begin Salon Series at Albright-Knox

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The Muse Restaurant at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery will serve as a scholarly salon on select Fridays at 4 p.m. beginning Sept. 5 when the University at Buffalo Humanities Institute and Riverrun present their lecture and discussion series "Scholars at Muse."

The series will feature talks by eight unusual and award-winning speakers in the humanities along with food, drinks and discussion with new and old acquaintances. The talks will be free of charge and open to the public, but because of the venue, seating will be limited.

The first talk, by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology, will explore the spiritual dimensions of social memory and shamanic historical consciousness.

Titled "Forgetting and the Willful Transformation of Memory: The Death and Rebirth of a Mapuche Shaman in Chile," it will be drawn from research as a participant observer of the Mapuche, indigenous agricultural inhabitants of Southern Chile, with whom she has lived intermittently for more than 15 years.

"We want to bring our faculty scholars into discussion with the community without people having to come all the way to the UB North [Amherst] Campus," says Tim Dean., Ph.D., associate professor of English at UB and director of the Humanities Institute.

"This will be a lot of fun," says Patrick Martin, president of Riverrun, an educational organization that provides Irish and American cultural programming to the Western New York community.

"The social setting of Muse, the opportunity to continue the discussion with old and new friends, wherever it goes, over wine, over dinner, is perfect, we think. There's nothing quite like it in Buffalo at the moment," he says.

Martin points to a Buffalo intellectual tradition reflected in these lectures, "that is perfect for this setting."

"It's the reason the UB departments of English and Comparative Literature, for example, are famous and have drawn such great talent over the years," Martin says. It's an avant-garde tradition, rigorous and off-kilter, that likes to make things hard for itself -- to find the profound in the popular and the compelling in the obscure. It's a tradition that is very entertaining, surprising and challenging. If you haven't experienced it, you're missing something exhilarating."

The focus of Bacigalupo's research is the gendered shamanic practices of the Mapuche, which mark the crucial intersection of their spiritual, social and political power in their own culture and with the larger Chilean society.

Bacigalupo is the author of a celebrated groundbreaking study, "Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing among Chilean Mapuche," widely recognized as a significant contribution to the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, studies of culture change and of folk or traditional healing.

"Scholars at the Muse" will continue Oct. 10 with a talk by Erik Seeman, Ph.D., associate professor of history, titled "Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800."

On Nov. 7, Theresa Runstedtler, Ph.D., assistant professor of American Studies, will present "Journeymen: Race, Boxing and the Transnational World of Jack Johnson," and on Dec. 5, Carole Emberton, Ph.D., associate professor of history, will present a talk, "Between the Law and the Lash: Race, Violence and American Citizenship in the Age of Slave Emancipation." The entire program is online at www.riverrunbuffalo.org.