Gregory Bateson
| Gregory Bateson MA | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Born | 1904 | ||||||||
| Died | 1980 | ||||||||
| Residence |
25 Bolton Gardens, SW5 [1927] Post Office, Rabaul, Mandated Territory of New Guinea [1931] St John's College, Cambridge [1933] c/o Post Office, Rabaul, Mandated Territory of New Guinea [1937] Dept. of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York; St John's College, Cambridge [census] American Museum of Natural History, 77th Street and Central Park West, New York City 24, USA [1949] | ||||||||
| Occupation | anthropologist | ||||||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
1926.06.22 nominated; proposed by A.C. Haddon, seconded by H. Balfour, H.J. Braunholtz, W.E. Armstrong
1980.09 death noted
Notes From Elsewhere
b. 9 May 1904
Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. In the 1940s, he helped extend systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences. He spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developing in different fields of science.[2] His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). Angels Fear (published posthumously in 1987) was co-authored by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson.
Bateson was born in Grantchester in Cambridgeshire, England, on 9 May 1904. He was the third and youngest son of (Caroline) Beatrice Durham and the distinguished geneticist William Bateson. He was named Gregory after Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who founded the modern science of genetics.[3]
The younger Bateson attended Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921, obtained a Bachelor of Arts in biology at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1925, and continued at Cambridge from 1927 to 1929. Bateson lectured in linguistics at the University of Sydney in 1928. From 1931 to 1937, he was a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, spent the years before World War II in the South Pacific in New Guinea and Bali doing anthropology. During 1936–1950, he was married to Margaret Mead.[4] At that time he applied his knowledge to the war effort before moving to the United States.
In Palo Alto, California, Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland developed the double-bind theory (see also Bateson Project).[5]
Bateson's interest in systems theory and cybernetics forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics, and the later set on Group Processes, where he represented the social and behavioral sciences. Bateson was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology. His association with the editor and author Stewart Brand helped to widen his influence. From the 1970s until his last years, a broader audience of university students and educated people working in many fields came to know his thought.
In 1956, he became a naturalised citizen of the United States. Bateson was a member of William Irwin Thompson's Lindisfarne Association. In the 1970s, he taught at the Humanistic Psychology Institute (renamed the Saybrook University) in San Francisco;[6] and in 1972 joined the faculty of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz.[7] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976.[8] In 1976, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Bateson to the Regents of the University of California,[9] in which position he served until his death (although he resigned from the Special Research Projects committee in 1979, in opposition to the university's work on nuclear weapons). He died on Independence Day, 1980, in the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center.[10]
Bateson's life, according to Lipset (1982), was greatly affected by the death of his two brothers. John Bateson (1898–1918), the eldest of the three, was killed in World War I. Martin Bateson (1900–1922), the second brother, was then expected to follow in his father's footsteps as a scientist, but came into conflict with his father over his ambition to become a poet and playwright. The resulting stress, combined with a disappointment in love, resulted in Martin's public suicide by gunshot under the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus on 22 April 1922, which was John's birthday. After this event, which transformed a private family tragedy into public scandal, all William and Beatrice's ambitious expectations fell on Gregory, their only surviving son.[11]
Bateson's first marriage, in 1936, was to American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead.[12] Bateson and Mead had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (born 1939), who also became an anthropologist.[13] Bateson separated from Mead in 1947, and they were divorced in 1950.[14] In 1951 he married his second wife Elizabeth "Betty" Sumner (1919–1992), the daughter of the Episcopalian Bishop of Oregon, Walter Taylor Sumner.[15] They had a son, John Sumner Bateson (1951-2015), as well as twins who died shortly after birth in 1953. Bateson and Sumner were divorced in 1957, after which Bateson married his third wife, the therapist and social worker Lois Cammack (born 1928), in 1961. They had one daughter, Nora Bateson (born 1969).[14]
Bateson was a lifelong atheist, as his family had been for several generations.[16]
The 2014 novel Euphoria by Lily King is a fictionalized account of Bateson's relationships with Mead and Reo Fortune in pre-WWII New Guinea
Publications
External Publications
Balinese character, 1942;
Naven, 1936;
Steps to an ecology of mind, 1972
Bateson, Gregory (1944). An Analysis of the Film "Hitlerjunge Quex" (1933). New York?. OCLC 41057404.
Bateson, G. (1958). Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View (1936). Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-0520-8.
Bateson, G.; Mead, M. (1942). Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York Academy of Sciences. ISBN 0-89072-780-5.
Ruesch, J.; Bateson, G. (2009) [1951]. Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-1-4128-0614-5. Retrieved 19 March 2013.
Bateson, G. (2000) [1972]. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-03905-6. Retrieved 19 March 2013.
Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences). Hampton Press. ISBN 1-57273-434-5.
(published posthumously), Bateson, G.; Bateson, MC (1988). Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-553-34581-0.
(published posthumously), Bateson, G.; Donaldson, Rodney E. (1991). A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-250100-3.
Articles, a selection
1956, Bateson, The message 'this is play.' In B. Schaffner (Ed.), Group Processes: Transactions of the Second Conference (pp. 145–242) New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.
1956, Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Jay Haley & Weakland, J., "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia", Behavioral Science, vol.1, 1956, 251–264. (Reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind)
Bateson, G.; Jackson, D. (1964). "Some varieties of pathogenic organization. In Disorders of Communication". Research Publications. Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease. 42: 270–283.
1978, Malcolm, J., "The One-Way Mirror" (reprinted in the collection "The Purloined Clinic"). Ostensibly about family therapist Salvador Minuchin, essay digresses for several pages into a meditation on Bateson's role in the origin of family therapy, his intellectual pedigree, and the impasse he reached with Jay Haley.
Documentary film
Trance and Dance in Bali, a short documentary film shot by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the 1930s, but it was not released until 1952. The film was an inductee of the 1999 National Film Registry list.[41]
An Ecology of Mind, a documentary film shot by Nora Bateson and released in 2010 through The Impact Media Group, includes segments from Bateson's early films made in Bali.
House Publications
Related Material Details
RAI Material
census
