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Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work, originally published in 1971, will continue to delight and inform generations of readers.
Foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson, 1999
Foreword, 1971
Introduction: The Science of Mind and Order
Part I: Metalogues
Metalogue: Why Do Things Get in a Muddle
Metalogue: Why Do Frenchmen?
Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious
Metalogue: How Much Do You Know?
Metalogue: Why Do Things Have Outlines?
Metalogue: Why a Swan?
Metalogue: What Is an Instinct?
Part II: Form and Pattern in Anthropology
Culture Contact and Schismogenesis
Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material
Morale and National Character
Bali: The Value System of a Steady State
Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art
Comment on Part II
Part III: Form and Pathology in Relationship
Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning
A Theory of Play and Fantasy
Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia
Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia
The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia
Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia
Double Bind, 1969
The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication
The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism
Comment on Part III
Part IV: Biology and Evolution
On Empty-Headedness among Biologists and State Boards of Education
The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution
Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication
A Re-examination of “Bateson’s Rule”
Comments on Part IV
Part V: Epistemology and Ecology
Cybernetic Explanation
Redundancy and Coding
Conscious Purpose versus Nature
Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation
Form, Substance and Difference
Comment on Part V
Part VI: Crisis in the Ecology of Mind
Form Versailles to Cybernetics
Pathologies of Epistemology
The Roots of Ecological Crisis
Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization
Index
"This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life [...] Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory [...] He [...] examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."
– D. W. Harding, New York Review of Books
"[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive [...] This is a book we should all read and ponder."
– Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist
