Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, 2000 - Medical - 533 pages
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 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

 

Selected pages

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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About the author (2000)

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was born and educated in the United Kingdom, and spent most of his professional life in the United States where he was lecturer and fellow of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among other influentital books he authored Naven and Mind and Nature.

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