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, stated by Eli Siegel. We are all trying to like the world aesthetically, as a oneness of opposites. All humanity is more alike than different–kind and cruel, accurate and wild, powerful and delicate, and more—and is trying to put these opposites together in ourselves. Through Aesthetic Realism, anthropology is essential knowledge for us to know ourselves and others with kind, scientific, and critical exactitude.

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

Spring-Summer 2026 classes via video conference are now in session.

SPRING-SUMMER 2026

In each class this semester we will look at a different pair of eminently anthropological opposites in self—for example, Being Pleased and Being Angry. Each pair are opposites which, as I said above, everyone is trying to put together—make logical sense of; opposites in the deepest feelings of people cross-culturally, including ourselves.

  • May 27   The Drama of World and Self in Anthropology

“We cannot live without ever so many objects, from everywhere. The ground we walk on is unthinkable as not being. Our food is a neighbor which becomes ourselves. The air is a universal indispensable. And we need people….This means we are not only separate, we are together.”    —Eli Siegel (Self and World, pp. 102-3)

  • Jun 10   The Anthropology of Being Pleased & Being Angry

Said a Vedda cave-dweller [of India], “It is pleasant for us to feel the rain beating on our shoulders, and good to go out and dig yams, and come home wet, and see the fire burning in the cave and sit round it.”   —R.R. Marret ( Anthropology, p 118)

  • Jun 24   Were Early People Impelled to Put Together Wildness and Precision—& Are We?

“Is it possible for a human being to do truly as he pleases—show his instincts (including the primeval)—and at the same time satisfy his sense of order, of precision?”  —Eli Siegel (Self and World, p. 106)

  • Jul 8   The “Guilt and Anger Seesaw” Among Hunter Gatherers and Ourselves

Here is the exciting, liberating, delightful understanding of how to stop being angry at somebody who doesn’t deserve it—whether in the rainforest with pygmies, on the arctic ice, or your living room—because you feel guilty about something you did. Explains Eli Siegel, “We may change the sense that the cause of the pain is in ourselves to the sense that it is caused by an external object….This anger should be seen as a transformation of guilt.”  —Eli Siegel (Self and World, pp. 56-57)

  • Jul 26   Sunday (Not Wednesday, July 22) 11 am Joint Class of Art and Anthropology taught by Marcia Rackow and Arnold Perey.

The great anthropologist Franz Boas tells us—and we illustrate it —”All tribes, from the richest to the poorest, have produced work that gives to them esthetic pleasure: proof of the craving to produce things that are felt as satisfactory through their form, [that] elevate the mind above the indifferent emotional state of every-day life. This is no less true of primitive art than of our own.”  —Primitive Art (1927, p. 12)

  • Aug 5   Did People Have True Friends, & False, in Paleolithic & Neolithic Times?  

Studying Eli Siegel’s Lecture online: Mind and Friendship with Illustrations drawn from anthropology, Including Lewis Henry Morgan on “Iroquois Hospitality” (1851).

  • Aug 19   Anthropology Further Advances in Science and Kindness: Papers by Students in This class

 

 

 

Want to audit a class?

  • Contact the registrar at 212.777.5055, Mon–Fri, 2–6 PM (ET) or submit this brief form. Be sure to make your request at least 2 days before the class.
  • Once your request has been approved, you will receive an email with a link to pay for the class.

Fees

  • Semester (7 classes): $60
  • Audit (per class): $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

MENU