Gregory Bateson: Biography Of This Anthropologist And Linguist
Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist, linguist, social scientist and cyberneticist whose work touched on topics pertaining to clinical psychology, social psychology, psycholinguistics, biology and ethnography, among other disciplines.
In addition to being a very versatile person in terms of the academic field, he was also quite peculiar, showing his rejection of how scientific rigidity was fitting into the social sciences. Let’s see his particular life through this biography of Gregory Bateson in which you will learn about his life and intellectual career.
Gregory Bateson’s life was characterized by, despite being a professor at several universities, having quite alternative opinions about how things should be done in research, moving away from the rigid way of seeing and researching the social sciences.
Early years and training
Gregory Bateson was born in Grantchester, United Kingdom, on May 9, 1904, into a family of aristocratic scientists. In fact, His father was William Bateson, a researcher of genetic evolution who had delved into the ideas of Gregor Mendel.
Between 1917 and 1921 Bateson would study zoology at Charterhouse School in London and, later, he would begin his studies in biology at St. John’s College, Cambridge.
He would later carry out field work in New Guinea and Bali with his wife Margaret Mead along with who would publish Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (“Balinese character. A photographic analysis”) in 1942. In this book he emphasizes the importance for the anthropologist of the use of physical supports, that is, photographs and recordings, to be able to describe, in an analytical and objective way, the reality of other cultures. , whether they are Western or not.
Academic life
In 1939 he moved to the United States, where he would live for the rest of his life, deciding to become a nationalized citizen in 1956. In 1949 he would work at the Langley-Porter Clinic in San Francisco, doing research in both the field of psychiatry and communications. In 1951 he would publish with Jurgen Ruesch the book Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry(“Communication: the social matrix of psychiatry”).
Later, as a professor at Stanford University, delved into the processes of animal communication between species, studying mollusks and cetaceans, among other animals. This allowed him to develop new theories about learning.
In 1964 he moved to Hawaii, where he was appointed head of the biology department at the Oceanic Institute in Waimanalo. Then, Between 1972 and 1978 he was a professor of anthropology and ethnography at the University of California He died on July 8, 1980, while a professor at the Esalen Institute in California.
Thought and contributions
Gregory Bateson is known for his development of the double bind theory of schizophrenia, along with Paul Watzlawick, who worked at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto. Although Bateson was never associated with that institution, he always maintained good relations, which would cause Batesonian notions to influence the work of the MRI. It should be noted that, in part, Bateson’s contributions were renowned for the fact that he was the husband of Margaret Mead considered one of the great anthropologists of the last century.
It is interesting to mention Bateson’s opinion, which is quite striking compared to the paths that science was traveling at the time. Although in his time, the social disciplines were opting for more scientific and objective criteria, both in style and in research, Bateson did not show much respect for the academic-scientific writing standards of the time. In his works he often resorted to metaphors, going so far as to quote ancient poets or ignore recent scientific sources. His works were more in the style of essays than scientific dissertations.
Another peculiarity of his work was that I wrote at a very abstract level, something that goes quite in the opposite direction to how scientific articles do it. Despite this, the figure of Bateson is not at all ignored, and there are many academics who consider that his works are a great contribution of originality in times when the grid, so to speak, had acquired too much importance. Of course, reading him must be careful, because understanding him is not an easy task.
Gregory Bateson carried out interdisciplinary work collaborating with sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, biologists, linguists and other academics, researching communication. Although the most rigid circles did not give him due recognition, he came to exert a great influence on American thought.
According to Bateson, the mind, spirit, thought and communication are combined with the external reality of the individual, which helps them construct their own individual reality. The body, the material part of each one, manages to transcend that material dimensionality thanks to housing those psychological aspects in it.
One of the also very interesting aspects of his thinking was the way in which he analyzed society, from an evolutionary perspective but not without resorting to social Darwinism. He studied the changes that a society can manifest through human behavior and conduct. He confronted the passionate and intuitive dimensions of the human being with the struggle of opposites. For example, order vs. conflict, stability vs. change, the concept of good vs. that of evil Communication is a fundamental phenomenon for the evolution of society to occur.
Bateson devised a new experimental model, combining neurolinguistics with psycholinguistics, and looking for a common goal: formulating a systemic theory of communication and being able to use it to create a systemic clinic. People, thanks to language, are capable of creating meaningful realities through interactions, attributed meanings, behaviors and beliefs. These realities can lead to the well-being or, on the contrary, the discomfort of each person, depending on how these same elements interact.
For Gregory Bateson, the concept of communication should include all the processes through which a person managed to influence others. For him, communication was what allowed human relationships. A clear example to understand this is how the media become a determining factor in social configuration, given that through their message they influence the minds of millions of people. These media should be analyzed if you want to know and understand the structure of a given society.
It should also be said that the media is where double standards are seen. The same television channel can proclaim, in one program, a moral value, such as the search for knowledge and being critical of the information one receives, while, in another, it can proclaim lack of culture, gossip or being left alone. Go by first impressions. A typical example would be heart programs that often precede programs to increase vocabulary or knowledge of historical milestones and various topics.
Batesonian terms
The genius of Gregory Bateson is that of a multifaceted person, who contributed to the reinvention of words in the academic context. Below we will see a few that have been modified or reinterpreted by him.
1. Abduction
Actually, the word “abduction” comes from the vocabulary of Charles Sanders Peirce, but Bateson uses it to refer to a third scientific methodology If, traditionally, we have had induction and deduction, Bateson proposes the third: abduction.
The abductive method is the method of comparing relationship patterns and their symmetry or asymmetry, especially useful for the study of complex organic systems, such as comparative anatomy.
These two terms are taken from the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung extracted from the work Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (“The seven sermons for death”).
Pleroma refers to the non-living world that is undifferentiated by subjectivity, while Creatura is the living world, subject to perceptual difference, distinction, and information.
3. Double bind of schizophrenia
Bateson, although not a clinical psychologist, proposed a theory for schizophrenia. According to him, this mental disorder arises in a context of dysfunctional relationship patterns and contradictory communication, through which the subject functions, and is particularly linked to disorders.
Whoever is a victim of the double bind receives contradictory orders, or emotional messages at different levels of communication. To understand it better, the person receives contradictory signals through two or more channels, which induce him to, so to speak, “short circuit.”
For example, a child who is supposedly loved by his parents receives love expressed in words, but his parents show a continuous rejection of him through non-verbal behaviors, which deeply affect the child. As an adult, raised in an environment that tells him to do one thing that contradicts another, the person lives in constant mental contradiction.
For this double link to occur, in addition to there being two or more contradictory means of communication, metacommunication must prove to be an impossible exercise That is, it is impossible for the person to know which of the two means of communication is the true one, and they cannot understand why they are given information that, in theory, is the opposite of the other.
Furthermore, to generate more tension, the person cannot fail to comply with contradictory orders. That is, whether he does one thing or another, he is punished, for example, by taking away his love.
4. Metalogue
Taking into account Bateson’s somewhat eccentric figure, at least in academic terms, It was not surprising that he knew the work of Miguel de Unamuno who also had his oddities.
The term metalogue is taken from the work of the Spanish writer, but applied to educational texts. Make reference to a dialogue about a problematic topic in which not only is that specific problem discussed, but the entire structure of the dialogue is given according to the problem.
