Cultural Anthropologist to Speak at Schreiner University Sept. 19

Dr. Monica Udvardy, a cultural anthropologist from the University of Kentucky, will be the featured speaker in Schreiner University’s Speak Truth to Power lecture series Tuesday, Sept. 19 at 7 p.m.

Speak Truth to Power is free and open to the public. Udvardy’s presentation will be held in the Floyd & Kathleen Cailloux Campus Activity Center ballroom.

In 1985, Udvardy interviewed a Kenyan man about his participation in a secret society and photographed him with two memorial statues erected as part of his ethnic groups’ cultural traditions. A month later, those very statues were stolen and 15 years later Dr. Udvardy fortuitously discovered them in two American museum collections.

Udvardy will chronicle the voyage of these two statues from the Kenyan coastal hinterland to their present locations Western museums. Udvardy’s presentation at Schreiner will describe her action and research, illustrating that one person can make a difference with respect to the global traffic in purloined cultural property.

The story of these artifacts’ travels exemplifies the enormous trade in non-Western cultural property, now estimated to be the third largest illegal global industry. The research of Udvardy and her collaborators has been featured in the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor, and she has been interviewed on NPR’s "All Things Considered" and the BBC World Service program "Outlook."

For more information contact Dr. Tom Wells, at 830-792-7429 or tomwells@schreiner.edu.