Gregory Bateson
was an English anthropologist, psychologist, biologist, and
epistemologist who was also a holistic thinker. He was born on May 9, 1904
in Grantchester, England. Batesn was born into a family with a long
history of scientific minded members. His father, William Bateson, was a pioneer in the
field of genetics.
Bateson attended a charterhouse school in 1917 and then transferred to St. Johns College-Cambridge University , where he studied Natural History. He graduated in 1925 at the age of 21. Bateson returned to Cambridge University to study anthropology, where he studied with many well known anthropologists. He served as a lecturer in linguistics under Radcliffe-Brown. Bateson received his Masters Degree in 1930.
After getting his Masters Degree, Bateson went to New Guinea to study for two years. While there, he met his future wife, anthropologist Margaret Mead. They were married in Singapore in the spring of 1936. Bateson and Mead spent three years doing research in Bali and New Guinea. They worked on characterizing cultures by gender and temperament. While there, they developed an innovative use of film and photography as an ethnographic media. Bateson and Mead published their work, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, with seven hundred black and white photographs, in 1942. He also wrote Naven, a book about New Guinea's Iatmul people, which was published in 1936.
After his studies in New Guinea, he traveled around the United States, teaching and lecturing on subjects in all fields at many different colleges. He enjoyed cybernetics, which he studied with John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. This new field was a way of expressing his long-standing interest in the process of communication within and between individuals. Bateson and Mead were both Participant observers, who not only observed their own lives and the life of their daughter, but they participated in the lives of the others they were observing. Their daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who also became an anthropologist, wrote a book about her life with her parents, With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
In 1941, he worked as an analyst of German propaganda films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He then went on to work at the Office of Strategic Services, lecturing at Columbia University and later serving in China, Burma, Ceylon and India as a teacher. After the war, he spent a great deal of time at Harvard University as a Visiting Professor. Mead and Bateson divorced in 1950.
After a short time at Harvard, Bateson went to San Francisco for a
year to study communications. From 1963 to 1964 he was the Director of the
Communication Research Institute at St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and then
from 1964 to 1972 he served as Director at the
Oceanic Institute in Hawaii.
During this period, he was studying porpoise communication, a still-debated
subject. He accomplished very little from his long study.
In the summer of 1972, Bateson became a
part-time lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. On his
first day there, he and Stephen Nachmanovitch, a new graduate student
there, bumped into each other while walking on a path. That day was the
beginning of a friendship that lasted until Bateson's death. By 1975,
Bateson was a Fellow of Kresge College there.
Bateson was not involved in just one department but many different areas of study. By the end of Bateson’s life, he had moved through zoology, psychology, anthropology and ethnology. Gregory Bateson died of cancer on July 4, 1980 in the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center at the age 76.
All of the photos have been graciously provided courtesy of Jeff Bloom. They were taken in 1975 at the Naropa Institute and at the Naropa "Workshop on Education".
Additional information about Gregory Bateson can be found at the University of California, Santa Cruz (McHenry Library) Special Archives collection of Bateson's letters and work. It includes letters, photos and other papers as well as published materials.
References
Photo Courtesy of: Jeff Bloom,' 75
Written By: Anthropology Students at Minnesota State University, Mankato
Edited By: Lillian Dolentz, 2008