So one can see, I hope, why it's hard to say exactly what this book is 'about'. Whether it be a theory of alcoholism or an approach to schizophrenia, a discussion on Balinese painting or a dialog on dolphins, through each runs the current of Bateson's singular worldview, one as richly complex as it is encyclopedic. Informed by an elaborate synthesis of systems and communication theory, cybernetic ideas and logical analysis, the essays here play out like an album of repeated refrains, overlapping and allusive, yet decidedly distinct at every point. As to exactly what the aforementioned weave is made out of, it's not easy to say. To want to dive headlong into expositions of both is just the demand issued by Bateson to any reader who would approach this book. As the man himself writes, 'the would-be scientist who knows nothing of the basic structure of science and nothing of the 3000 years of careful philosophic and humanistic thought about man - who cannot define either entropy or a sacrament - had better hold his peace rather than add to the existing jungle of half-baked hypotheses'.Įntropy and sacrament. More than just an eclectic romp through disparate fields of knowledge however, they attest instead to Bateson's grand and unified vision of the universe, one in which art and science, logic and dreams, pathology and sociology are all threaded through with the same cosmic weave. Just a few of the names traveled under by Gregory Bateson in this magnificent collection of essays.

His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive.This is a book we should all read and ponder.'-Roger Keesing, American AnthropologistĪnthropologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, biologist. ' view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. 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. 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. 'This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. 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.

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead.

Bateson steps to an ecology of mind