Blog / Anthropological Journals
The Aesthetic Realism method belongs to both science and art.
Blog / Anthropological Journals
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"The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites," — Eli Siegel
"There is such a thing as the ethical unconscious," wrote Eli Siegel in Self and World. [P. 267] As I was reading The Big Tree of Mexico, in which John Skeaping, an American artist, tells how he lived close to Zapotec speaking villagers, I found a striking instance of the ethical unconscious that is in every person. It can take the form of organic, unpremeditated ethics. There is a narrative by Skeaping. He tells how Sabina, a young girl, and her older sister, Lupe, are with him as he drives them to the coast to see something they never saw before: the ocean. It frightens them but they are interested in the shells they find and other Zapotec speaking people whose ways are very different. While there, they “come upon a stall selling coloured silk handkerchiefs, one of which took Sabiana’s eye”—
But when they reach home and have “unloaded all the treasures that we had brought back,” the handkerchief is gone. “The car was searched again and again….It was quite certain that Lupe had stolen and hidden it.” And next day the paper wrapping from the handkerchief was found “hidden behind maize leaves.” The mother of the girls “laughed and said, ‘Of course Lupe stole it.’” [P. 108] John Skeaping keeps away from the village for a time. Then what he writes evidences unconscious guilt in Lupe, who seemed quite undisturbed by it all as did the people around her:
The author explains:
What happened is evidence of the following explanation by Eli Siegel for the cause of guilt. (Guilt can be ordinary and in the background, hardly noticeable, but it can sometimes come forth suddenly and inexplicably, and this can include anxiety attacks in our culture.) This is Eli Siegel's explanation:
Lupe has separated herself from reality in that (1) she lies about it; (2) she steals from those representatives of reality called people; (3) she has, specifically, separated herself from her sister’s feelings and has taken something her sister cherished. Lupe has done two things with the opposites of separation and junction: She grabs things that don’t belong to her, or joined herself to them unjustly, and separated them from their owners. Meanwhile she seems immune to the pain she has given the former owners of things she has stolen. And society, represented by her mother, seems to laugh it off. But the side of her that cannot help wanting to be just, punishes the side of her that gets its way unfairly—and she has “fears.” That ethics were alive in Mexico from the earliest recorded time is illustrated by the fact that Fray Bernadino de Sahagun (1495-1590) describes “Confession to a Mexican God.” [Mead and Calas, Primitive Heritage, 1953). In it, the guilty pre-Columbian person must truthfully confess wrongdoing to a representative of the goddess Tlaculteutl in order to make penance and receive absolution. In native North America, purification is, everywhere, a potent concern--to rejoin with a world one has somehow put aside is the basis, for example, of Navaho curing ceremonies. This too speaks of the ethical unconscious.
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ARCHIVE Mission Statement How can people of diverse cultures understand and respect one another? The Permanent Opposites are the Natural Units Anthropology Needs Participant Observation: A Oneness of Opposites Needed by the Field Anthropologist The Place of Contempt in the Failures of Anthropology The Siegel Concept of the Ethical Unconscious Overpopulation and Contempt for the Earth & People Discussing the Philosophy of Culture Change-- & the Dynamic Ethics in Difference and Sameness |
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