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
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