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Is Social Structure a Oneness of Aesthetic Opposites, Including Order and Freedom? [Apr. 25th, 2008|01:23 pm]
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This discussion of opposites in social organization is a new introduction to Chapter 3 of my Ph.D. thesis for Columbia University, which is based on Aesthetic Realism.
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INTRODUCTION, 2008
Chapter 3 of Oksapmin Society and World View
Dissertation for Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
by Arnold Perey, Ph.D., 
Columbia University, 1973
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Every society is at once firm and flexible--orderly and free--and it must be. No society can be so rigid it can't adapt to changing circumstances. No society can be so flexible that it has no organization. Every society must be both. Meanwhile, freedom and order are opposites which are made one in a beautiful painting, poem, even landscape: "Does every instance of beauty in nature and beauty as the artist presents it," asks Eli Siegel, "have something unrestricted, unexpected, uncontrolled?—and does this beautiful thing in nature or beautiful thing coming from the artist's mind have, too, something accurate, sensible, logically justifiable, which can be called order?"  [Siegel, Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? http://www.terraingallery.org/IsBeauty.html Terrain Gallery, New York: 1955] 

It surprised me to see that a society has the same elemental structure that a work of art has. But it is a logical explanation for the feeling that scientists have expressed, that the certain social structure has beauty. For instance, the Australian Aboriginal kinship rules in their complication and economy have a beauty that's been noticed. And we may ask, if a society seems to be structured in a beautiful way, is it because opposites (including order and freedom, firmness and flexibility) seem to be working together in an accurate, coherent manner? And if a society is not just, and so does not look beautiful, is it because these opposites--by nature always present--are in a disproportionate relation? The evidence from Oksapmin and elsewhere has convinced me the answer is yes.
Freedom and Order in Social Theory

I speak now of the tendency to see social structure as representing order only, and not freedom or flexibility as well. From the time of W.H.R. Rivers's discovery that tribal societies always have an order that is based on kinship ties, there has been a tendency to mute or leave out other things (for example friendships, antipathies, and the individual choices of people).

However, every society is also based on non-kin ties and individual choices. Since life frequently consists of meeting disorderly events in ecology and history, any social grouping must be able to adapt to changing circumstances—and so will have ways to "bend" or ignore its regular kinship rules when necessary.

The tendency for a scientist to think in terms of kinship order—or predetermination—is especially strong when a society is described as unilineal. A unilineal society is one in which a child is born either into its mother's kin group (matrilineal) or its father's kin group (patrilineal) but not both (bilateral). Each person bears a clan name which, like a family name among north Americans, comes from one side of the family only. The moment one is born, one is included amongst one strictly defined group of relatives and excluded from another. One has a position and rights only with one group. However, since both sides are relatives, in reality the child belongs to both. 

The "Flexible" within the "Rigid" 

Take the unilineal societies of Africa. Anthropologists have created classic descriptions of them —including The Nuer of E.E. Evans-Pritchard. These societies give an impression that one is rigidly affiliated with one group of kin only. For instance, as Evans-Pritchard describes, Nuer political organization is based on the opposition of patrilineal segments. Since, in a unilineal society, membership in a group of kin is ordinarily determined from birth—we would expect the consanguineal tie to override all other considerations. However, Evans-Pritchard also describes strikingly strong maternal bonds that affect the choices a patrilineal lineage may make—when it decides where to travel for pasture, with whom to associate—and whom to fight. And friendly strangers are adopted into Nuer kin groups. And even small familial groups who are friendly will become attached (almost by default) when they stay close for pasturage or defense. Freedom of choice prevails along with the determinism of blood relationships.

Futher, in works like the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, we see the tie to mother's family can be crucial to a strongly patrilineal society of West Africa (Igbo):

"Okonkwo was well received by his mother's kinsmen in Mbanta....He was taking his family of three wives and their children to seek refuge in his motherland....Okonkwo was given a plot of ground on which to build his compound, and two or three pieces of land on which to fram during the coming planting season. With the help of his mother's kinsmen he built himself an obi and three huts for his wives. He then installed his personal god and the symbols of his departed fathers." [Pp. 129-30]

Meanwhile, in Bronislaw Malinowski's work--take his Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia--we see how ties to the father and father's kin still matter in a strongly matrilineal society, and rules of inheritance cause conflict because of this sentiment. 

Then too, in areas like the foothills of the Papua New Guinea Highlands, societies were discovered in the 1960s with "flexible" social organization: affiliations were more casual, changeable, adaptable to uncertainties, than expected.

Opposites in Reality As Such or Philosophically

Togetherness and separation, as well as order and freedom are inevitable in any organization. While this is a social fact, it is also related to facts in the inorganic sciences. For example, electrons are together and separate in that minuscule swarm of subatomic particles called an atom. And as is well known, every electron is also both free and determined. To say things are separate and together is to imply there is more than one thing that we're talking about: that is, many things. To say they are together means they have something in common which unites them and makes them like a mathematical unit,that is, a one. Therefore One and Many are also crucial opposites when we describe either an atom or a social organization. 

There is no conceivable object that is not a oneness of these three pairs of opposites and more: it is one thing with many parts; it is both orderly and free; and is together with and separate from every other object in the universe.

Philosophically and in terms of life as we really live it, it's impossible for a society to have an utterly rigid organization. If it did, it couldn't adapt to changes in rainfall or pasturage over the years, or alterations in the relative numbers of kin in diverse segments, or changes in the fertility of land over time. New people could not enter the social group nor could others leave it. So every society must not only be firm but flexible too. Likewise, no society can be only flexible: it is necessary for people to know how they are related to one another so that food can be produced by cooperating friends and relatives, valuable goods and services can be exchanged on a mutually-agreeable basis, and groups of men and women can rely on one another to provide for the common defense. Every society has to be both firm and flexible in a workable, possibly even beautiful, way.

And Now, to Oksapmin

As I was thinking about how to describe the social organization of the Oksapmin community where I did field research in 1967-8, I came to realize that there was an underlying interplay of four closely related pairs of opposites which I had gathered data for, unbeknownst to myself: one and many, order and freedom, junction and separation, flexibility and firmness. For one thing, the people of Oksapmin did not go strictly by the unilineal kin ties that they recognized in their clan inheritance rules (this can be observed, for instance, in the flexibility of their marriage rules). For another, people came and went as the desires of friendship or enmity, love or hate impelled them. Further, they formed new associations and yet still were affected by the lastingness of the old; and as the land they occupied became more fertile or less, more populated or less, they were not unable to move to new places and to live with friends or relatives close to land that was available. All this happened through much more individual choices than one could predict from kinship alone. Against the background of my previous anthropological study, what I saw in Oksapmin was unexpected to me. I later came to see that it is more staple than anthropology has seen. After all, we are writing about people much more like ourselves than we have realized.

The people I lived with in Oksapmin had a flexible mode of organizing that maintained the orderliness, the predictability, the firm social relations that every person and society needs, and at the same time permitted flexibility, fluidity, freedom to change. People were together, yet separate, in a way that affected me greatly because I felt myself to be separate even at a party or in a crowd. That separation and junction belonged to the very structure of society I was yet to see. The fact that many people would see themselves as one igira, whether that igira was a household, a lineage, or a temporary work group, I thought was tremendously interesting.

I became aware of these opposites--many and one, freedom and order, separation and junction, flexibility and firmness--in the study of art, as I studied Eli Siegel's Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? and then in anthropology, through my study of Aesthetic Realism itself: first with its founder, Eli Siegel, and then with the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, Ellen Reiss.

In the method of anthropological research and explanation that I see as definitive, the philosophic or ontological opposites are necessary. They are, Mr. Siegel has demonstrated, "the things that all things have in common." That is, the opposites as Aesthetic Realism describes them are culture-free units or ideas: the very things anthropologists have been longing for.

In the pages of this chapter, I will focus (as I said above) on four major pairs of opposites which are always present in social organization: (1) Many and One, (2) Order and Freedom, (3) Separation and Junction, (4) Flexibility and Firmness. These can take diverse forms. Separation and junction, for example, can take the form of dispersal and connection (dispersal is a form of separation, connection is a form of junction).

This fact has a general meaning for anthropology as a whole. In these pages I will describe the quantitative and measurable factors that separate people and join them in Oksapmin. We will see that they comment on both the flexibility and firmness that every society must have. Study of these opposites made for an exciting and efficient way to observe how social order and social freedom interact.

We also ask whether the oneness of these opposites makes for a beauty that the observer can enjoy. I believe it does.

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The Online Library is where you'll find printed material about Aesthetic Realism richly [Apr. 18th, 2008|05:16 pm]
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The best place to find out about publications re: Aesthetic Realism is on the Aesthetic Realism Online Library.

Every two weeks there 1s a new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, dealing with the subjects everyone wants to understand, in a new, deep, wonderfully intelligent way.

Lately the subject of how men can be good husbands is right there. What a gift!

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Two important discussions by Ellen Reiss of poetry and economics [Mar. 22nd, 2007|05:01 pm]
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1) The commentary "Jobs, Discontent, and Beauty" by Ellen Reiss leads off The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, issue no. 1324. This commentary is given in its entirety on the page this links to. Her discussion of America's unjust profit-driven economic system and the great Robert Burns of Scotland--a poet who was intensely opposed to this kind of economics--is a masterpiece. Ms. Reiss begins: "The huge discontent of Americans--on assembly lines, at computers, in trucks, operating machines of every kind, on construction sites, in fields, working in hospitals--is part of that historic occurrence which Eli Siegel identified and explained in 1970. He showed, with opulent evidence, that economics based on using human beings for profit had failed and would never recover...."

One reason I love this commentary is because it describes what's affecting every American sadly yet it is immensely hopeful writing: the profit system is increasingly faltering and cannot recover. And another reason is, it shows how a poet of great stature and popularity felt (including about unjust economics) many years ago--as she takes up two poems: "Man Was Made to Mourn" and "Merry Hae I Been Teethin a Heckle."

2) Ellen Reiss writes in Clothing and Emotion, The Right Of no. 1290, on Eli Siegel, the most amazingly musical, subtle, philosophic, and diverse of poets. She discusses 8 poems under the title "The Persistence of Fabric." First, she places fabric itself in the history of economics the last few hundred years, a history with a great deal of pain. She tells what that pain arises from. And then, how she talks of the effect of the 8 poems of Mr. Siegel! You really see what is in them, the beauty you may have felt or may even have missed. For instance, she writes: "In the first poem, 'Not Muslin,' the bewilderment of a woman both rustles delicately and is presented with brisk clarity. Muslin can stand for femininity as airy, innocent, hopeful--and a woman doesn't understand how she got from that to something so bitterly different. The three adjectives in the last line, with their assonance, make for a music that brings together sharp distress and poignant wonder." I cannot help but quote that whole short but vastly meaningful poem:

1. Not Muslin

When a girl is
In muslin
On a lawn,
Of a spring morning—
She doesn't seem to be the woman
Going to a divorce court
Of a spring morning—
Angry, sad, legal.

The complete merging of literary criticism and social criticism that you see in Ellen Reiss's writing is simply not to be found in any source outside of Aesthetic Realism. And I love John Ruskin as critic of art and economics, and William Morris as poet and social critic, and Dickens as passionate opponent of injustice and great writer.

....from....

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Technorati [Mar. 15th, 2007|04:16 pm]
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Aesthetic Realism and Structuralism [Jun. 13th, 2005|03:34 pm]
Some writers have noticed a resemblance between structuralism and Aesthetic Realism because both respect the dialectic process and see opposites as primal in our understanding of the world. A dialectic, writes musicologist Rose Rosengard Subotnick [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectics], "enables one to grasp the two opposed priorities as simultaneously valid".

Aesthetic Realism sees the dialectic process as essentially aesthetic. Eli Siegel presented reality as having a dialectic structure, yes, but more fundamentally as having an aesthetic structure. That is why, he stated, the world--or reality--can be liked: it has a structure that is beautiful the way a painting or poem is beautiful. This differs from structuralism, which does not neccessarily accent the value--or beauty--of an object's structure, but the structure itself.

This brings us to another difference between structuralism and Aesthetic Realism. The opposites which, Siegel explained, are at the basis of reality are the metaphysical or ontological opposites: such as freedom and order, one and many, sameness and difference, matter and energy. These are qualities which are in reality as such (see for instance Aristotle's discussion of One and Many in his Metaphysics). How these opposites are present in every object can be seen by considering the electron. An electron is both matter and energy, a particle and a wave--or substance (a thing of weight) and form (which is weightless). A sonnet is both substance and form (a Shakespearean sonnet about the Dark Lady has subject matter and sonnet form) -- see the similarity? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle describes every instance of matter as both definite and indefinite (we can know position or momentum but not both). Monet's Waterlilies are both definite and indefinite--and beautifully so! We feel both opposites at once: hence the idea of dialectic. We see it as beautiful: hence the term aesthetic.

Siegel wrote in his preface to The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict (Definition Press, New York: 1946): "For a fair consideration of this publication, a person must put aside probable previous associations with 'aesthetics.' Were there a word as exact as aesthetics for the purpose, we would have been glad to use it. The nearest word, other than aesthetics, is dialectics."

Claude Lévi-Strauss by comparison--the best known of structuralists today--relies on such opposites as ''sky and water'', ''succulent and dessicated'', ''raw and cooked'' which are not ontological, along with such opposites as ''diversity and unity'', ''order and disorder'' which are ontological; but the structuralist approach does not see it as necessary to differentiate between them. That is, ''Raw'' and ''cooked'' are not ontological the way ''disorder'' and ''order'' are; they are not fundamental or inescapable in the description of any reality--though we do use them to describe food as well as other things that we process, e.g.: "He ''cooked up'' a plan for revenge. But it was only a ''half-baked'' plan."

To quote from a Wikipedia entry: "Lévi-Strauss explained that opposites are at the basis of social structure and culture. In his early work he demonstrated that tribal kin groups were usually found in pairs, or in paired groups that both oppose one another and need one another. For example, in the Amazon basin, two different expanded families would build their houses in two facing semi-circles that together make up a big circle. He showed too that the congnitive maps, the ways early folk categorized animals, trees, and so on, were based on a series of oppositions. Later in his most popular work ''The Raw and the Cooked'' he described the widely dispersed folk tales of tribal South America as all related to one another through a series of transformations--as one opposite in tales ''here'' changes into another opposite in tales ''there''. As the title implies, for instance, Raw becomes its opposite Cooked. These particular opposites (Raw/Cooked) are symbolic of human culture itself, in which, by means of thought and labor, raw materials become clothes, food, weapons, art, ideas. Culture, explained Lévi-Strauss, is a dialectic process: thesis, antithesis, synthesis."

While Aesthetic Realism has a resemblance to structuralism and other philosophic thought, and arises from the Western philosophic tradition, it also differs in this fundamental way: Eli Siegel stated that art, the self, and the sciences have in common a structure of fundamental opposites--opposites which make for beauty. This had not been stated elsewhere.
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Anthropological Anecdotes, IV [Apr. 27th, 2005|03:12 pm]
Fourth Anecdote.

When Margaret Mead told her classes what she was aiming at in her now-controversial book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, she explained that nobody knew the degree to which temperament is biologically determined by sex. So she hoped to see whether there were cultural or social factors that affected temperament. Were men inevitably aggressive? Were women inevitably "homebodies"? It turned out that the three cultures she lived with in New Guinea were almost a perfect laboratory--for each had the variables that we associate with masculine and feminine in an arrangement different from ours. She said this surprised her, and wasn't what she was trying to find. It was just there.

Among the Arapesh, both men and women were peaceful in temperament and neither men nor women made war.

Among the Mundugumor, the opposite was true: both men and women were warlike in temperament.

And the Tchambuli were different from both. The men "primped" and spent their time decorating themselves while the women worked and were the practical ones--the opposite of how it seemed in early 20th century America.

I refrain from commenting at any length here on the accuracy of her conclusions. However, later investigators, who had a broader historical context (thanks in part to her own work in opening the area and evoking interest in it), have amended her specific conclusions to some degree.

As to the Tchambuli: I read one account which explained that they lived in a region that had just been pacified. This means that the job of men, which was to wage war with men of other tribes, had been taken from them. Meanwhile they continued to keep themselves ready to fight by maintaining their war costumes, including face paint, and did little else. They were at loose ends. It was at that point that Mead lived among them and described their way of life, not knowing for sure what the historical context was.

As to the Arapesh: I have read lately that Arapesh men, revisited, have said Mead was wrong: they did fight with their neighbors. I imagine this was so. It is not hard to miss something when one is in the field and undergoing difficult circumstances. Meanwhile, the accent in Arapesh culture, which ran through it in many respects, was against conflict and for gentleness.

Especially, Mead points out, this culture was against open anger between relatives. So when a person was very angry at a relative, that relative jumped out of the category "relative" and into the category "stranger"--toward whom the most violent acts are acceptable. There was no middle ground, she pointed out. (So the Arapesh, like ourselves, as Aesthetic Realism has taught me to recognize, do not very well relate their angry feelings to their warm feelings--their feeling against to their feeling for.) This division in a society as a whole, between peace and war, is in keeping with the practice of sometimes making war with neighbors one can't get along with. But the Arapesh, if Mead is right, were not the sort of people who based social glory in a big way with fighting; it was a last resort. And this, I believe, was true.

As to the Mundugumor, I have not seen any "revisiting" information.
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Anthroological Anecdotes III [Apr. 27th, 2005|03:09 pm]
Third Anecdote.

Professor Robert F. Murphy at Columbia told his classes this story about his article titled "Levi-Strauss: Zen Marxist" [which I haven't been able to find yet].

When Levi-Strauss, who had read this article, met Professor Murphy, he said to the younger man, "At last, somebody understands me."

Said Murphy, "But I don't--that's the whole point!"
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Anthropological Anecdotes - II [Apr. 27th, 2005|03:04 pm]
Second Anecdote.

When Margaret Mead was describing the purpose of her research in Samoa, she told her class that there was so much turmoil in adolescence in the United States, that there was a question of whether the turmoil is biological. If it's biological, there should be the same adolescent turmoil in every culture. She went to Samoa to see if it was there.

She found it was not.

Coming of Age in Samoa was an attempt to understand why.
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Anthropological Anecdotes [Apr. 27th, 2005|02:53 pm]
First Anecdote.

Margaret Mead told us how she came to the research problem on which she based her Growing Up in New Guinea. She reasoned as follows: If primitive adults think in an animistic way, like our children, how do primitive children think?

In her research on Manus island of New Guinea, she discovered that "primitive" children think in a very practical way and do not begin to think in terms of spirits etc. until they grow up.

Note: Animistic thinking gives feelings or personality to objects. For example, a child can say "Bad sidewalk!" if she falls and hurts herself on it--seeing the sidewalk as mean for causing her pain. The term animism comes from the Latin for soul, "anima." And tribal cultures often do have animistic concepts: Pueblos see the clouds as cloud people, who can be pleased or displeased by what man does--and give rain or drought.
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Getting to the truth [Apr. 24th, 2005|01:27 pm]
I began a website before blogs existed, called Aesthetic Realism, a New Perspective for Anthropology. This website provides an understanding of Aesthetic Realism as it explains culture and the human self.

It has some of the papers I wrote beginning more than 30 years ago. (The first one was, yes, "A New Perspective for American Anthropology" and it was published in India by the Anthropology Department of the University of Delhi. It was very exciting to see the acceptance letter--my first published paper!)

For the moment I'll also refer you to my blog A New Perspective for updates.

But to begin here on Live Journal, I'd also like you to know about more comprehensive websites and blogs that tell you what Aesthetic Realism is--what it really is. This is very important to me because there are misconceptions about it, here and there on the internet, introduced by a "band of liars"--whom I would prefer never to have to mention by name. It's easy enough for anyone to find out.

These misconceptions ought to be resolved by now, but they aren't. So for your information, there are truthful sources you can, and should see:

* The Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

* Edward Green, Composer & Music Educator who tells what is true about the Aesthetic Realism understanding of music: it is kind and revolutionary, and anti-prejudice. He is a professor of music.

* The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known tells what's true about the news today and the literature and art of all time. Commentaries by Ellen Reiss are the most honest in the world today and the most penetrating.

* The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company in New York City. See the lively theatrical events--classical and so avant-garde.

* Lynette Abel's website. Look at her art section in particular for a beautiful discussion of Sargent's famous "Madame X" and her Aesthetic Realism class report--which illustrates what a class with Eli Siegel was like.

* Friends of Aesthetic Realism--Countering the Lies is the website that takes up the lies I mentioned above--takes them up one by one, and shows how false they are. And it tells the truth, quoting what the best people in the media have been saying for years--things the "band of liars" prefers you don't know about and don't believe.

* And finally see my "Statement by Arnold Perey, Ph.D., Anthropologist and Aesthetic Realism Consultant" and when you finish it, read the funny story (an allegory) that tells the truth about the ugly motive of these individuals who would like to deceive you. Their motive isn't love for truth or the desire to do a public service. In the story you'll see how a brilliant philosopher of the past was hated by a clever and very mean person for the very things that made this philosopher important: His depth and origninality. And so the story is called "A Dramatic and Cautionary Tale about an Unknown and Very Unimportant Person."

Good reading!

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