Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and EpistemologyGregory 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 will continue to delight and inform generations of readers. "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 |
Contents
Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? | 1 |
Why Do Frenchmen? | 7 |
About Games and Being Serious | 12 |
How Much Do You Know? | 19 |
Why Do Things Have Outlines? | 25 |
Why a Swan? | 31 |
What Is an Instinct? | 36 |
Culture Contact and Schismogenesis | 59 |
The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication | 277 |
A Theory of Alcoholism | 307 |
Comment on Part III | 336 |
On EmptyHeadedness Among Biologists and State Boards of Education | 341 |
The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution | 344 |
Prohlems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication | 362 |
A Reexamination of Batesons Rule | 377 |
Comment on Part IV | 398 |
Experiments in Thinking Ahout Ohserved Ethnological Material | 71 |
Morale and National Character | 86 |
The Value System of a Steady State | 105 |
Style Grace and Information in Primitive Art | 126 |
Comment on Part II | 151 |
Social Planning and the Concept of DeuteroLearning | 157 |
A Theory of Play and Fantasy | 175 |
Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia | 192 |
Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia | 199 |
The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia | 226 |
Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia | 242 |
Douhle Bind 1969 | 269 |
Cyhernetic Explanation | 403 |
Redundancy and Coding | 415 |
Conscious Purpose versus Nature | 430 |
Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation | 444 |
Form Suhstance and Difference | 452 |
Comment on Part V | 470 |
From Versailles to Cyhernetics | 475 |
Pathologies of Epistemology | 484 |
The Roots of Ecological Crisis | 494 |
Ecology and Flexihility in Urhan Civilization | 500 |
Index | 513 |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract achieve action alcoholic Alcoholics Anonymous analogy animal Balinese Bateson become behavior bilateral symmetry biological called character structure characteristics circuit communication complementary complex consciousness context culture cybernetic Daddy determined differentiation double bind dream ecology environment epistemology error evolution evolutionary example experience fact flexibility frame genes genetic genotypic genotypic change Gregory Bateson groups habit homeostatic human hypothesis Iatmul iconic ideas immanent individual instinct interaction Jay Haley kinesics language learning logical type look matter mean mental Metalogue metaphor mind mother muddle nature occur organism paralanguage paralinguistic patient patterns perhaps person phenomena phenotype play pleroma possible premises primary problem propositions psychological question redundancy reduplication relationship rote learning rules schismogenesis schizophrenic scientists sense sequence signals social somatic sort species step structure survival symmetrical talk theory things thought tion unconscious variable whole words