Rainbow in the Valley: Papua New Guinea
Photograph © by Arnold Perey.
Guide to Anthropology
Why Anthropology?
Through anthropology, with the Aesthetic Realism method as your basis, you can learn about yourself and people worldwide in a richer way, a deeper way than before. How necessary this is, you're invited to see.
It's the purpose of our Guide to Anthropology to encourage this greater self-knowledge as we give you a straightforward tour of a field I love: anthropology.
Well, don't we already know enough about ourselves? Of course not. If we did, a startling example of deception that is only one instance among many would not have occurred. It was in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, when Robert Ardrey came out with the notion that our ancient ancestors were "killer apes;" and therefore our heritage as humans is violent. He was a respected anthropological scholar—and the Western world seemed to agree he was right. While the American government was making choices to bomb a small Asian land, the last thing we needed was a scholar who, through false reasoning, made it seem that it was inevitable for us modern humans to murder our own kind. He used a sort of bastardized anthropology to convince people. All along, I may say, Aesthetic Realism showed this view of humanity is untrue. But did people know it? Well, we did not. Do we know it well enough now? Unfortunately we do not.
Only a completely different, a completely fair way of seeing people can make people realize how ugly and untrue this "predatory" conception of of humanity is. Aesthetic Realism, the great philosophy of Eli Siegel, is that fair way of seeing people. In the atmosphere of our time NOW just how important is it for people to understand and respect their own deep, ethical drive--and criticize the aggression toward nations and the economic injustice at home that is still running things? I can think of nothing more important and more urgent.
In these three principles (I'll say more about them throughout this Guide) Mr. Siegel delineates clearly what the best and worst in humanity are. And what's good is the deepest thing in us:
1. The deepest desire of everyone is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.
2. The greatest inward danger of a person is giving way to contempt as a means of establishing one's own personality. Contempt is the addition to self through the lessening of something else.
3. All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.
These three great concepts represent humanity. The ways of mind they describe in people grew richer as humanity evolved from our early ancestors, who were, after all, pretty much like ourselves some two million years ago. There's no "killer ape" in the picture.
If we begin with trying to imagine how an early person saw the world, how that person was for and against it, we get a clearer picture of ancestral hominids than the "mindlessly aggressive" view of them. Let's take a fossil ancestor from East Africa who may be discovered in the next few months. You'll see, perhaps, photographs of bits of skull, a few finger bones, a limb bone. I hope you'll be thinking how that skull, those bones, belonged to a person who thought, and ran, and loved and fought, and had feelings akin to yours.
What were those feelings like? Did this person delight in meeting the world in many ways—a delight in speed as he or she ran across the ground; a delight in being accurate as he or she threw a stone or stick at a target and hit it; a delight in drinking clear water on a hot day and giving water to another? These are ways of liking the world, seeing meaning in it, wanting other people to be stronger.
But did this person also want to defeat presumed enemies? Did he or she have volcanic thoughts, unjust suspicions; strut in a superior way to show off; add to onself by making less of other people and things? These are ways of having contempt for the world and the things and people in it.
We see these two conflicting ways of seeing the world in every one of us, in tribal folk, even in a less "formed" way in the primate stock we came from.
It was in classes taught by Mr. Siegel, which I had the great privilege to attend from 1968-1978, that I learned about these elemental forces in our own minds, our own ethics. These forces propel us every day as we love, fight, have a cup of tea, read a paper, lift weights, do yoga exercises in St. Paul or San Diego or Newark. And we can choose which represents us.
In an Aesthetic Realism lesson on anthropology, Mr. Siegel said to me, "The purpose of Aesthetic Realism as to anthropology is to show that every person is at once primitive and sophisticated, or now. A working definition of anthropology is the study of mind where it begins and in the places where it begins."
Our primal beginnings are in us as we feel depressed or joyful in our sophisticated, 21st century way. They are the same in every tribal man, woman, and child. Knowing this changed me as an anthropologist and as a man. Without knowing anthropology, explained Mr. Siegel, we can't understand our very selves with the fullness and richness we're hoping for. I have seen this to be true.
Next: Part 1. Now We Begin
|
