Chapter 4 mobilizes second-order cybernetics theories that were first adopted in 1960s social sciences as a comparative framework for reading Gertrude Stein’s quasi-ethnographic writing about American culture. Love pairs Stein’s work with writing by second-order cybernetic anthropologists Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and – most extensively – Mary Catherine Bateson. Love illustrates how Stein and M. C. Bateson both employ (a) the term “composition” as a framework for understanding the everyday habits of behavior that constitute American cultural identity, and (b) a combination of seemingly repetitive representational strategies and juxtapositional contexts as platforms for cultivating self-reflexive cultural awareness. They see this perspective as increasingly necessary within the twentieth century’s technologically complex networks that require us to respond in creative and flexible ways to our ever-changing circumstances. The chapter positions Stein’s work in dialogue with emergent social scientific strategies for cultural observation and analysis, and therefore as an important precursor to the anthropology-based theories at the forefront of cybernetics’ second-order turn.

Mead and Bateson were two of the most famous and influential anthropologists whose research and advocacy have had broad influences on social sciences and mental health in the twentieth century. Although their marriage lasted only four years, they continued to influence each other until their dying days. After Mead’s death, their only daughter, Catherine Bateson, also an accomplished anthropologist, found out that Mead had been a closet lesbian since her early adulthood, and for years was a lover of another famous anthropologist, Ruth Benedict. These entangled relationships are described and discussed in the context of their achievements and contributions. Also included in the narratives are Mead’s original fieldwork in American Samoa and controversies surrounding Samoan teenagers’ sex life; Mead’s relationship with Benjamin Spock and their influences on contemporary child-rearing practices; Bateson’s complicated and tragic family background; and Bateson’s contributions to systems biology, double bind theory, and cybernetics.