Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T17:09:20.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mind, Messages, and Madness: Gregory Bateson Makes a Paradigm for American Culture Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Jay Mechling
Get access

Extract

In the winter quarter of 1979 I was teaching a junior-level American Studies core course that introduced our students to comparative culture study. Many of the students had taken one or two classes from me already; but I decided, nevertheless, to begin the course with an essay that would say again in a new way exactly what are the characteristics of interdisciplinary thinking. I had begun other courses in this way but not with much success. Faced with student puzzlement and confusion about what made American Studies different from disciplinary study about America, I had had to resort to naming examples for students to emulate. What we lacked was a way to talk about interdisciplinary thinking, especially a way that was accessible to undergraduates. I had read and appreciated the previous summer an essay in The CoEvolution Quarterly; so I decided to try beginning the course with that brief, breezily discursive piece. I was a bit nervous about deciding so. Gregory Bateson's essay “The Pattern Which Connects” reads much like a story and is based on a talk for a general audience in 1977. But Bateson could be “maddeningly obscure” in his writing and speaking. (I recalled my total awe and bewilderment when, sometime in 1972 or 1973, I had my only experience listening to a Bateson public lecture.) My only earlier experience teaching Bateson—two essays from Steps to an Ecology of Mind—had been a miserable failure. My worry was that “The Pattern Which Connects” would be total gibberish to the students—not an auspicious beginning for a course.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 8 , October 1983 , pp. 11 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.

2. Stewart Brand, in editor's note introducing Bateson, Gregory, “The Pattern Which Connects,” The CoEvolution Quarterly, No. 18 (Summer, 1978), p. 5.Google Scholar

3. Since I wrote this essay, Lipset, David's biography, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980)Google Scholar was published. Gregory Bateson died on July 4,1980. For a moving portrait of the last few days of Bateson's life, see Bateson, Mary Catherine, “Six Days of Dying,” CoEvolution Quarterly, No. 28 (Winter 1980), pp. 4–11.Google Scholar I still prefer to refer to Bateson in the present tense.

4. Bateson, Gregory and Mead, Margaret, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1942).Google Scholar

5. Wise, Gene, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly, 31 (1979), 293–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Gregory Bateson, p. 6. This essay appears also as the “Introduction” to Bateson, Gregory, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979).Google Scholar Page numbers in parentheses in the text that follows refer to the CoEvolution Quarterly edition.

7. Bateson, Gregory, Naven, 2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958), p. 175.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., pp. 178–87. See also Bateson, , Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 64.Google Scholar (Hereafter page numbers will be cited in parentheses after the word “Steps.”)

9. Ruesch, Jurgen and Bateson, Gregory, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 177.Google Scholar On the contributions of Wiener, see Heims, Steve J., John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980).Google Scholar

10. Piaget, Jean, Structuralism, trans, and ed. Maschler, Chaninah (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).Google Scholar

11. Ruesch, and Bateson, , p. 169.Google Scholar

12. Bateson, , Steps, pp. 413–45.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., p. 131. For a fascinating application of communication theory and the notion of redundancy in the interpretation of artistic style and meaning, see Meyer, Leonard B., Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967).Google Scholar Bateson also provided insights for Robert Plant Armstrong's brilliant essay on aesthetics and anthropology The Power of Presence (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).Google Scholar

14. That essay continues to influence interdisciplinary research on play. See Schwartzman, Helen B., Transformations (New York: Plenum, 1978)Google Scholar; Bateson, 's own “Play and Paradigm,”Google Scholar the 1977 keynote address at the third annual meeting of The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play (TAASP), published in Salter, Michael, ed., Play: Anthropological Perspectives (West Point, N.Y.: Leisure Press, 1978), pp. 7–16Google Scholar; and Bateson's letter in the TAASP Newsletter, 5, No. 4 (Spring 1979), 2–4.Google Scholar

15. Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper & Row, 1974)Google Scholar, and Bauman, Richard, “Verbal Art as Performance,” American Anthropologist, 77 (1975), 290–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Ruesch, and Bateson, , p. 224Google Scholar, and Bateson, , Steps, pp. 276–78.Google Scholar

17. Although there is considerable debate about the usefulness of the doublebind theory for curing schizophrenic patients, the debate need not invalidate the theory as a rich, useful model for culture studies. Thus, Christopher Lasch appreciates Bateson's insights connecting a mother's communication and psychic dependence, even though he criticizes Bateson for failing to explain why this pattern is so pervasive in Western bourgeois society. See Lasch, Christopher, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp.153–55.Google Scholar

18. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “Structuralism and Ecology,” Barnard Alumnae, Spring 1972, pp. 6–14.Google Scholar

19. Mechling, Jay, “If They Can Build a Square Tomato: Notes Toward a Holistic Approach to Regional Studies,” in Salzman, Jack, ed., Prospects (New York: Burt Franklin, 1979), IV, 59–77.Google Scholar

20. MacCannell, Dean, “Ethnosemiotics,” Semiotica, 27, Nos. 1–3 (1979), 149–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Vogt, Evon Z. and Albert, Ethel M., eds., People of Rimrock: A Study of Values in Five Cultures (New York: Atheneum, 1970).Google Scholar See also Mead, Margaret, “End-Linkage: A Tool for Cross-cultural Analysis,” in Brockman, John, ed., About Bateson (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), pp. 171–231Google Scholar, and Wallace, Anthony F. C.'s discussion of “end-linkage” in his Culture and Personality, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 115–17.Google Scholar

22. On the analogy between gene and custom, see Ruyle, Eugene E., “Genetic and Cultural Pools: Some Suggestions for a Unified Theory of Biocultural Evolution,” Human Ecology, 1 (1973), 201–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. MacKay, Robert W., “Conceptions of Children and Models of Socialization,” in Dreitzel, Hans Peter, ed., Recent Sociology, 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 27–42.Google Scholar

24. Mechling, Jay, “Male Gender Display at a Boy Scout Camp,” in Sieber, R. Timothy and Gordon, Andrew J., eds., Children and Their Organizations (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 138–60.Google Scholar

25. See, for example, the exchange of letters in New York Review of Books, 03 22, 1979, pp. 45–47.Google Scholar

26. Sahlins, Marshall, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. vii.Google Scholar

27. Harris, Marvin, Cultural Materialism (New York: Random House, 1979).Google Scholar

28. Bateson, , Mind, p. 227.Google Scholar

29. See Geertz, Clifford, “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 55–83Google Scholar, and Wallace, 's chapter, “The Evolution of Culture and the Evolution of the Brain,” in Culture and Personality, pp. 41–72.Google Scholar

30. Sebeok, Thomas A., ed., Animal Communication: Techniques of Study and Results of Research (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968).Google Scholar

31. Mead, Margaret, “Vicissitudes of the Study of the Total Communication Process,” in Sebeok, Thomas A., Hayes, Alfred S., and Bateson, Mary Catherine, eds., Approaches to Semiotics (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), pp. 277–87Google Scholar, and Mead, , “End-Linkage.”Google Scholar

32. Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H., and Jackson, D. D., Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967)Google Scholar, and Ruesch, Jurgen, Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations (The Hague: Mouton, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. See Wilden, Anthony, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange (London: Tavistock, 1972).Google Scholar

34. Bateson, , “Pattern,” p. 11.Google Scholar

35. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Journal of American Folklore, No. 68 (1955), 428–44Google Scholar, and Dundes, Alan, The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales, Folklore Fellows Communications No. 195 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1964).Google Scholar

36. Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. Lavers, Annette (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972)Google Scholar, and Wright, Will, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975).Google Scholar

37. Glassie, Henry, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Bouissac, Paul, Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Mechling, Jay, “Sacred and Profane Play in the Boy Scouts of America,” in Schwartzman, Helen B., ed., Play and Culture (West Point, N.Y.: Leisure Press, 1980), pp. 206–13.Google Scholar

38. Goffman, Erving, “The Arrangement Between the Sexes,” Theory and Society, 4 (1977), 301–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).Google Scholar

39. Tiger, Lionel, Men in Groups (New York: Random House, 1969)Google Scholar, and Wilson, Edward O., On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978).Google ScholarPubMed

40. See, for example, the array of responses published as “Considering ‘A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting,’” Signs, 4 (1979), 695–717.Google Scholar The respondents are commenting on an Alice Rossi essay that appeared in Daedalus, 106, No. 2 (Spring 1977), 1–31.Google Scholar

41. Mead, , “End-Linkage,” p. 222.Google Scholar

42. Bateson, , Steps, pp. 210, 309–37Google Scholar, and Bateson, unpublished letter to University of California Regent Vilma Martinez, June 24, 1979.

43. Ruesch, and Bateson, , p. 229Google Scholar, and Bateson, , Steps, p. 464.Google Scholar

44. Bateson, , Mind, pp. 217–18.Google Scholar