Aesthetic Realism Foundation

How to Study

Anthropology Is about You & Everyone

Taught by Arnold Perey, PhD

Photograpy by Arnold Perey, Boys in New Guinea, on the cover of his novel GWEPeople, everywhere in the world, from the grasslands of Africa to the tents of Asia and North America, are understood through the principles of Aesthetic Realism: we are all trying to like the world aesthetically, as a oneness of opposites. All humanity is alike: kind and cruel, accurate and wild, powerful and delicate—trying to put together opposites in ourselves. Through Aesthetic Realism, anthropology is essential knowledge for us to know ourselves and do away with prejudice.

Alternate Wednesdays, 6:00 – 7:30 PM Eastern Time (USA)

Fall 2023 classes via video conference are now in session.

  • Sep 20    Are We Primitive & Sophisticated at Once?

Consider people on a remote island or a trackless rainforest—or a lovely woodland far away and long past in time. A forest dwelling woman may begin with the primitive—study herbal roots and not pages of a book. And yet she may have more in common with you, a modern city dweller, than you had imagined possible. Are the opposites of primitive and sophisticated alive in all of us? Our evolutionary heritage still active? Our most primal motive is “to take care of ourselves by being fair to the world different from us.” And is it the most sophisticated, most educated purpose? In asking these questions we explore our kinship to humanity of all places and times.

  • Oct 4   The Evolution of Ordinary Objects

A blender, a button, a nutcracker, a kitchen knife, a needle. Our common household objects evolved in daily use over extraordinary, almost inconceivable, periods of time. Can people care more for things and their meaning in seeing the wonder of an African hammerstone 1.5 million years ago evolving into a kitchen blender?

  • Oct 18   The First Australians: What Can We Learn from Their Quest to Like Reality?

Finding their way to the Australian continent some 60,000 years ago—with their culture evolving as all cultures on earth were evolving—they were not in contact with the rest of the world. On their own, the First People of Australia came to a unique way of seeing and feeling reality. Along with knowing how to subsist, how to fight, how to organize, their picture of the origin of the world—the Dreamtime—the Alcheringa—still exists in the minds of the faithful, seeing a great meaning in the outstanding splendor and strangeness and rigor of their land.

  • Nov 1   The Ugly & the Beautiful; or, the Origin of “Beauty & the Beast”

We look at “Beauty and the Beast” and stories surprisingly parallel to it, like “The Frog Prince,” “Cupid and Psyche,” “Maliane and the Water Snake.” What do they come from?

  • Nov 15   The Primeval Trouble about Need—& Our Own

Every creature, including the paramecium, has needs. How have needs been honored and opposed? For instance, what is behind this observation by the anthropologist J.L. Wilson in 1856: “A Pongo chief never drinks in the presence of others without a screen to conceal him.” (Western Africa, p.308).

  • Sunday, Dec 3   (Not Wednesday November 29)

From 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM we meet with Marcia Rackow’s Visual Arts and the Opposites class for our Joint Class in Art and Anthropology, beginning with “Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India” at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.

  • Dec 13   An Anthropological Fiesta: Papers by Students in the class

Want to audit a class?

  • Contact the registrar at 212.777.5055, between 2-6 PM Eastern Time (USA), Monday through Friday.
  • Be sure to make your request at least 2 days in advance of the class.

Once you receive permission to audit a class, click on the “AUDIT” button to pay the fee:

Fee: $60 per semester (7 classes)

Auditing fee: $12

 

See Aesthetic Realism: A New Perspective for Anthropology and Sociology

Three instances of how Aesthetic Realism shows people of different cultures are more alike than has been known:

[1] What Big Mistakes Do Even Smart Men Make? With a consideration of the African story “Maliane and the Water Snake” from Lesotho.

[2] About the Ethical Unconscious. The myth of the flood: discussing anthropology, the anthropologist, and a representative American woman, Daphne Baker.

[3] “How Much Feeling—and What Kind—Should a Man Have?” Discussing my life, the life of Fusiwe, a head man of the Yanomami People, and men of the United States

Part 1  |  Part 2  |  Part 3

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