Gualala Arts Promoting public interest and participation in the arts since 1961
Call Gualala Arts at 707-884-1138 to register.
Students should bring writing utensils, journals, paper, and a yoga mat (on dates to be specified).
Join anthropologist Anne Menne for this class in self-discovery and remembering who we are. While expressing themselves in various art forms, participants will be experiencing and discussing aspects of their interactions as individuals within our evolving cultural setting. Learn more about our common languages of art, ritual and myth. What are our cultural limits and anomalies? What is our collective journey? How can we become the medicine the world needs?
Since ancient times our shamans, seers, poets, saints and children have navigated multiple worlds to bring back healing for the community by restoring its proper forms, forces, and relationships. Humans today live in multiple worlds, but our culture trains us to recognize only one. Many of our human problems appear impossible to solve because this world cannot sustain such dwindling of awareness and action.
We will learn and use anthropology’s main exploration tool, a kind of experiential shape-shifting between living the answers one seeks and sharing that understanding with other cultures. Topics to be explored include the range of human experience typically included in the study of anthropology, as well as new discoveries. As participant-observers, we will explore our spiritual attitudes and ways of being in the world; the correlation between physical position and meditative content; physiological correlations with earth and cosmic movements; common languages of art, ritual and myth; and cultural limits and anomalies.
About Anne Menne
“As a scholar, I have worked with Anne in planning a community art project here in Mill Valley, as an expansion of her work in Peru. In this undertaking, I have been enormously impressed by her originality of thought and her broad, multi-disciplinary understanding of her subject… I work with many talented people at the Community Center; Anne is extraordinary in the enthusiasm, excitement, and thoroughness…” — Candra Day Executive Director, Mill Valley Community Center
Anne is a founding partner of the Cultural Medicine Institute, which focuses on research and education about anthropology, arts, human development, medicine, and anthropology as medicine. Her current focus is research and writing about American society. She has worked as a project and exhibition designer director and writer to initiate, develop and produce research and educational programs for urban and rural, multi-ethnic and international audiences and products for exhibition, instruction, entertainment and public media, including extensive studies in Peru.
Her experience includes:
Executive Director, Heart of Anthropology, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation dedicated to anthropological research and education.
Project Peru Director and Foundation Fellow, Inter-American Foundation.
Guest Curator, Being Ten Years Old in Peru: Children Paint Their World, Junior Arts Center, Cultural Affairs Department, City of Los Angeles.
Project Initiator, Designer, Director and Curator, Children Paint Their World: Being Ten Years Old in Mill Valley, California and Lima, Peru, California Council for the Humanities & the National Endowment for the Humanities and Mill Valley Community Center.
Anne holds a Master of Arts in Creative Arts Interdisciplinary Studies; a Master of Arts in Latin American Studies (Anthropology, Folklore, Education); and a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities. She has produced films and exhibited fiber art and poetry.