Arnold Perey

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Arnold Perey (born 1940) is an anthropologist, writer, and teaches on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. His education includes a BA in anthropology (minor in physics) from the University of Chicago, a doctorate from the Columbia University Department of Anthropology, and the study of Aesthetic Realism from 1968 to the present: first with Eli Siegel, the educator who founded this philosophy, and then with Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism. His articles have been published online and in print, in professional journals and the popular media.

Perey conducted field research in Papua New Guinea among the Oksapmin people in the Mountain Ok area (Victor Emanuel Range) and in the United States with members of the Paiute-Shoshone nation at Stillwater (Fallon, Nevada).

Perey has taught at CUNY (City University of New York), Drew University, Seton Hall University, and at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation from 1973 to the present.

Brief biographies of Perey are in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Engineering and Science, Who's Who in American Education, on the Aesthetic Realism Foundation website and Getcited.org.

Perey utilized the method of Aesthetic Realism as the basis of his anthropological doctoral dissertation Oksapmin [Papua New Guinea] Society and World View (Columbia, 1973). He wrote:

The method that best gets to the principles at the bottom of the rich and bewidering culture I observed and somewhat shared in Oksapmin is Aesthetic Realism. It also explains the deepest feelings of the Oksapmin people and of myself. It is the point of this dissertation, its thesis, that Oksapmin culture has an aesthetic structure and that this structure is an aesthetic oneness of opposites (p. 1).

He has developed this approach in subsequent publications and lectures, considering diverse cultures and arts in Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. On his website Aesthetic Realism: A New Perspective for Anthropology extracts from a number of these analyses are posted. He states:

Anthropology is art and science at once. As a science, It needs to be fully objective so it can describe cultures and emotions in a way that makes them clear to a person living anywhere in the world. It also is art, because anthropology at its best is beautiful, is kind, gives aesthetic pleasure. The anthropology of the future will be conscious of both its sides, the cognitive and affective, and try to have them unified. If it succeeds in being both accurate and beautiful, it will (1) be a vivid means for people to know and care about human beings of other cultures whose skin may be another color; and (2) it will oppose the contempt with which people see the difference of other people. "Contempt," explained Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, "is the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it." That is, anthropology will oppose racism at its basis: contempt for difference.

Perey states that the Aesthetic Realism method assists the anthropologist "to do a steadily improving job with both accuracy and kindness, with both the objective and subjective dimensions of this exciting field."

[edit] Books

Gwe, Young Man of New Guinea—a novel against racism (2004) ISBN 0-9760590-4-5
Were They Equal? About Tortoise, Hippopotamus, Elephant—And You (2005) ISBN 0-9759813-1-5