Anthropology Classes at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation

People, everywhere in the world, from the grasslands of Africa to the tents of Asia and Native America, show that Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism describe us truly: we are all trying to like the world aesthetically, as a oneness of opposites.  All humanity is akin: 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.   

      For anthropology to be relevant to ending the horror of racism today, we must be able to answer these two desperately urgent questions: (1) What is the cause of racism? and (2) How can it be eliminated completely from human social relations? These two questions were not answered in the writing in the September 1998 issue of the AA [American Anthropologist].

     In over 30 years of careful study, I have seen that Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by the great educator Eli Siegel (1902-1978), answers these critical questions. I describe how in the article "Aesthetic Realism: the Solution to Racism," published on the website The Black World Today (http://www.tbwt.com) and reprinted by the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, on whose faculty I teach (http://www.AestheticRealism.org). 

     As I have had the privilege to show in anthropology classes I have taught since the 1970's, Eli Siegel's unparalleled scientific understanding of the human self—the self which is in common among and underlies all cultures—makes relevant to people living today the work done by anthropologists for generations—from Tylor, to Spencer and Gillen, to Grinnell, to Benedict, to Herskovits, to Napoleon Chagnon and Richard B. Lee. 
 

Continued. For more, click here