WINTER 2023

Anthropology is the study of people at their beginnings and how those beginnings are alive and working in us now. This semester we look centrally at how critical aspects of the four classic fields of anthropology are explained in a new, tremendous way through this great principle of Aesthetic Realism stated by its founder, Eli Siegel:

The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.

I continually learn what a big difference it makes to see that Cultural, Physical, and Linguistic Anthropology, and Archaeology—the four fields of anthropology—are vast reservoirs of information waiting to be seen in their fullness as having an aesthetic structure. That structure, in a person, includes the great debate in every self between the value of respecting reality and that of having contempt for it—diminishing its meaning.

• Jan 18   What Is Culture?; or, to What Does Self Conform?—with Samples

A culture is typically described as if it were frozen in time and a template for generations of similar people. See the Dobu, New Guinea; or the Pilagá, tropical America. But really, is a culture as flexible and improvable as the human selves that make it up? Is this a fact at once biological and aesthetic? Aesthetic Realism describes the best and worst possibilities of cultures through time, and provides new means to bring out what is best: the human self in its wholeness. And it understands what makes a person of any culture less than entirely oneself: the disposition to have contempt.

• Feb 1   What Language Begins With, in You & in Evolution

Animal communication, now studied more than ever, asks, How are the chirps of a chickadee like and different from your next sentence? In answer, Aesthetic Realism shows something completely new, and different from decades of anthropological linguistics. A major influence in these decades, Charles F. Hockett, has stated that words, used only by humans, are made up of sounds that arbitrarily and meaninglessly designate objects. This is not true. Eli Siegel has definitively shown that words—of which all languages are made—have in them a picture of the world in sound that is fair to it.

• Feb 15   Acquisition vs. Ethics in Prehistory—What Has It to Do with Us?

We look at, from the Aesthetic Realism point of view, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. It is a tough, wild work—satirical and biting—suggesting that the profit motive in economics is a throwback to primitive self-aggrandizement—and is utterly against biological and cultural evolution. For example, did a large, expensive, well cared-for lawn begin as a hard-working nomad’s goat pasture? What is the meaning of this?

• Mar 1   Primitive Art; or, an Anthropological Affirmation of the Siegel Theory of Opposites

In this class we look at works and quotations about the art of widely different cultures. We study how some of the finest anthropologists describe, about the people they lived with and studied, the fact that opposites are at the heart of their lives and art. Raymond Firth, Warner Muensterberger, Margaret Mead are three whom we quote. And we ask, do they imply that aesthetics—the making one of opposites—is a force that causes a more beautiful, just and kind seeing in people of all cultures?

• Mar 15   Love & the Opposition to It: India, Polynesia, Africa, & the USA

With examples from times and places representing all humanity, from old Polynesia to internet dating, we see how Aesthetic Realism explains what has not been understood throughout history: what love truly is and what in ourselves and others opposes love in our lives. Not knowing this, about such a vital part of life, has caused both false exaltation and much pain, which, through the knowledge Eli Siegel provided in his vitally important works, now no longer has to be.

• Mar 26 [Sunday]  Art, Culture, Selves—Yourself—and Ancient Mesopotamia

The Visual Arts and the Opposites class and Anthropology Is about You and Everyone will meet together in a joint class from 11:00 to 12:30. We study this ancient civilization, revealed largely through archaeology: its depth, its surprising liveliness, and its relevance to us. We look at the leading opposites that make for the beauty in its art, and the resolution of conflict in its selves—and in selves both ancient and modern.

• Apr 12   An Anthropological Fiesta: Papers by Students in the Class