Background
He was born on May 9, 1904, in Grantchester, England, a small village on the outskirts of Cambridge, one of three children born to Caroline Beatrice Durham and William Bateson, a British geneticist at Cambridge University.
anthropologist cyberneticist linguist scientist semiotician
He was born on May 9, 1904, in Grantchester, England, a small village on the outskirts of Cambridge, one of three children born to Caroline Beatrice Durham and William Bateson, a British geneticist at Cambridge University.
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's first anthropological experience, among the Baining of New Britain (1927 - 1928), was unhappy, as the Baining people were too reserved for fruitful observation. His second field experience, however, among the Iatmul of nearby New Guinea (1929 - 1930), provided Bateson with the material for his master's thesis. In 1932 he again visited New Guinea, where he met fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead and gathered the material for Naven (1936), his first book. He and Mead were married in Singapore in 1936. From there, they traveled to Bali, where their fieldwork (1936 - 1938) led to their jointly authored Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942).
Following the birth of their daughter in 1939, Bateson and Mead settled in the United States. The family spent little time together, as both Mead and Bateson sought out opportunities to contribute to the American war effort (though Bateson did not become an American citizen until 1956). During this time he served on the Committee for National Morale, analyzed German propaganda films, and finally, from 1943 to 1945, worked in Southeast Asia for the Office of Strategic Services.
The Batesons helped organize conferences on cybernetics, the new science of self-regulating recursive systems. Although cybernetics originally developed from the study of mechanical systems, both Bateson and Mead felt that cybernetic thought could make a valuable contribution to the understanding and even redirection of human societies.
Bateson never returned to anthropological fieldwork. Instead, he turned to psychiatric observation, joining the staff at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California, as an ethnologist in 1949, where he observed and interacted with the psychiatric staff and their patients. He also worked with the psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch, through a two-year appointment at the University of California Medical School (1948 - 1949), on a project studying communication in psychiatric treatment, resulting in their book Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951).
Bateson directed a small team of researchers investigating the problem of paradox in differing levels of human communication and learning. The team focused on schizophrenia and its possible origins in family communicational paradoxes that produced in schizophrenics "double-bind" situations, severely altering the language with which they communicated about themselves and the world. Simultaneously, Bateson also began observing levels of communication and learning in nonhuman species - first otters and then octopuses, which he collected with Lois Cammack.
His interest in nonhuman species led Bateson to break off his psychiatric observations and move on, first to the Virgin Islands (1963 - 1964) and then to Hawaii (1965 - 1972), in both instances to study communication and learning in dolphins. Bateson's research at this time can be seen as a return to the zoology with which he began, but with a difference: where zoologists of the early twentieth century had been interested in animals only as individual representatives of evolving species, Bateson's interest was in animals as part of living interactive groups, learning and communicating and evolving not in a linear sequence but as parts of a far more complex whole. Not until he returned to California in 1972 did Bateson begin, as a teacher, writer, and lecturer, to challenge the world with the ideas and concerns--holism, ecology, a new sense of the sacred - that had become associated with his name by the time of his death.
s training as a zoologist had instilled in him an interest in patterns, in the relationships between things rather than the things themselves. In the naven ceremonies of the Iatmul, which marked the development of boys into men and girls into women, he had found two patterns of "schismogenesis, " or mutually reinforcing behavior, in the differentiation of sexual roles. He also was aware that as an anthropologist, he, too, was not separate from the phenomena he observed but was an interactive part, an awareness he later brought to his observation of the dynamics of psychotherapy. Schizophrenics and alcoholics were best understood as part of interactive systems that included not only the individuals themselves but also their families, their culture, and their therapeutic environment, as parts of interactive communication-learning systems gone awry. Bateson labeled such systems "epistemologies" and began to question the stability - the sustainability - of Occidental culture's epistemology, one that separates mind from nature and the observer from the observed and that thinks exclusively in terms of linear cause and effect. In cybernetics, Bateson found models for both stable and unstable systems.
In either case, the systems were holistic rather than linear. Function, purpose, and even mind were not isolable elements but were immanent throughout a system. Bateson in his last years asked Western culture to develop a new epistemology based on the cybernetic model before it brought on its own destruction. In keeping with his turn from the West, he spent his final months at the Esalen Institute, an alternative community on the cliffs of Big Sur, Calif. After his health failed beyond recovery, he spent his final days with his family at the Zen Center in San Francisco.
Gregory Bateson is considered one of the greatest scientist of his times. 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.
Where others might see a set of inexplicable details, Bateson perceived simple relationships. In "From Versailles to Cybernetics, " Bateson argues that the history of the twentieth century can be perceived as the history of a malfunctioning relationship. In his view, the Treaty of Versailles exemplifies a whole pattern of human relationships based on betrayal and hate. He therefore claims that the treaty of Versailles and the development of cybernetics - which for him represented the possibility of improved relationships - are the only two anthropologically important events of the twentieth century.
He and Margaret Mead were married in Singapore in 1936. They separated in 1946 and were divorced in 1950, although their intellectual lives continued to intertwine. In 1951 he married Betty Sumner. They had three children before divorcing in 1958. His third wife was Lois Cammack.
