Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields.
50 Facts About Gregory Bateson
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Gregory Bateson's writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature.
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Gregory Bateson 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.
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Gregory Bateson was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology.
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Gregory Bateson was born in Grantchester in Cambridgeshire, England, on 9 May 1904.
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Gregory Bateson was the third and youngest son of Beatrice Durham and the distinguished geneticist William Bateson.
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Gregory Bateson was named Gregory after Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who founded the modern science of genetics.
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The younger Gregory 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.
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In 1928, Gregory Bateson lectured in linguistics at the University of Sydney.
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Gregory Bateson spent the years before World War II in the South Pacific in New Guinea and Bali doing anthropology.
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Gregory Bateson was stationed in the same offices as Julia Child, Paul Cushing Child, and others.
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Gregory Bateson spent much of the war designing 'black propaganda' radio broadcasts.
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Gregory Bateson was deployed on covert operations in Burma and Thailand, and worked in China, India, and Ceylon as well.
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Gregory Bateson used his theory of schismogenesis to help foster discord among enemy fighters.
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Gregory Bateson was upset by his wartime experience and disagreed with his wife over whether science should be applied to social planning or used only to foster understanding rather than action.
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In Palo Alto, California, Bateson developed the double-bind theory, together with his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley and John H Weakland, known as the Bateson Project.
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Gregory Bateson 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.
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Gregory Bateson 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.
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Gregory Bateson applied his knowledge to the war effort before moving to the United States.
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Gregory Bateson separated from Mead in 1947, and they were divorced in 1950.
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Gregory Bateson was a lifelong atheist, as his family had been for several generations.
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Gregory Bateson was a member of William Irwin Thompson's esoteric Lindisfarne Association.
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Gregory Bateson died on July 4,1980, at age 76, in the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center.
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Where others might see a set of inexplicable details, Gregory Bateson perceived simple relationships.
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In "From Versailles to Cybernetics," Gregory Bateson argues that the history of the twentieth century can be perceived as the history of a malfunctioning relationship.
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Gregory Bateson's beginning years as an anthropologist were spent floundering, lost without a specific objective in mind.
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Gregory Bateson experienced more success with the Iatmul people, an indigenous people living along New Guinea's Sepik River.
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Gregory Bateson suggested the influence of a circular system of causation, and proposed that:.
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Until Gregory Bateson published Naven, most anthropologists assumed a realist approach to studying culture, in which one simply described social reality.
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Gregory Bateson's book argued that this approach was naive, since an anthropologist's account of a culture was always and fundamentally shaped by whatever theory the anthropologist employed to define and analyse the data.
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Not only did Gregory Bateson's approach re-shape fundamentally the anthropological approach to culture, but the naven rite itself has remained a locus classicus in the discipline.
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Gregory Bateson next travelled to Bali with his new wife Margaret Mead to study the people of the village Bajoeng Gede.
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Gregory Bateson discovered that the people of Bajoeng Gede raised their children very unlike children raised in Western societies.
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Gregory Bateson later described the style of Balinese relations as stasis instead of schismogenesis.
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Gregory Bateson snapped some 10,000 black and white photographs, and Mead typed thousands of pages of fieldnotes.
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Gregory Bateson writes about how the actual physical changes in the body occur within evolutionary processes.
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Gregory Bateson describes this through the introduction of the concept of "economics of flexibility".
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Gregory Bateson saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies and ecosystems.
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Gregory Bateson believed that these self-correcting systems were conservative by controlling exponential slippage.
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Gregory Bateson saw the natural ecological system as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and its environment.
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Gregory Bateson viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems.
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Gregory Bateson felt Mind was immanent in the messages and pathways of the supreme cybernetic system.
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Gregory Bateson saw the root of system collapses as a result of Occidental or Western epistemology.
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Gregory Bateson thought that consciousness as developed through Occidental epistemology was at direct odds with Mind.
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Gregory Bateson argues that Occidental epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven.
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Gregory Bateson argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural cybernetic system instead of scientific arrogance as a solution.
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Gregory Bateson believes that humility can come about by abandoning the view of operating through consciousness alone.
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Gregory Bateson believed that religion and art are some of the few areas in which a man is acting as a whole individual in complete consciousness.
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Gregory Bateson argues for a culture that promotes the most general wisdom and is able to flexibly change within the supreme cybernetic system.
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In 1984, his daughter Mary Catherine Gregory Bateson published a joint biography of her parents.