Work
Bateson's beginning years as an anthropologist were spent floundering, lost without a specific objective in mind. He began in 1927 with a trip to New Guinea, spurred by mentor A. C. Haddon. His goal, as suggested by Haddon, was to examine the effects of contact between the Sepik natives and whites. Unfortunately for Bateson, his time spent with the Baining of New Guinea was halted and difficult. The Baining were non particularly accommodating of his research, and he missed out on many communal activities. They were also non inclined to share their religious practices with him. He left the Baining frustrated. Next, he category out to study the Sulka, belonging to another native population of New Guinea. Although the Sulka were very different from the Baining and their culture more easily observed, he felt their culture was dying, which left him dispirited and discouraged.
He professional such(a) as lawyers and surveyors more success with the Iatmul people, an indigenous people alive along New Guinea's Sepik River. The observations he exposed among the Iatmul people authorises him to determine his concept of schismogenesis. In his 1936 book Naven he defined the term, based on his Iatmul fieldwork, as "a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals" p. 175. The book was named after the 'naven' rite, an honorific ceremony among the Iatmul, still continued today, that celebrates first-time cultural achievements. The ceremony entails behaviours that are otherwise forbidden during everyday social life. For example, men and women reverse and exaggerate gender roles; men dress in women's skirts, and women dress in men's attire and ornaments. Additionally, some women smear mud in the faces of other relatives, beat them with sticks, and hurl bawdy insults. Mothers may drop to the ground so their celebrated 'child' walks over them. And during a male rite, a mother's brother may slide his buttocks down the leg of his honoured sister's son, a complex gesture of masculine birthing, pride, and insult, rarely performed ago women, that brings the honoured sister's son to tears. Bateson suggested the influence of a circular system of causation, and reported that:
Women watched for the spectacular performances of the men, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the presence of an audience is a very important factor in shaping the men's behavior. In fact, it is probable that the men are more exhibitionistic because the women admire their performances. Conversely, there can be no doubt that the spectacular behavior is a stimulus which summons the audience together, promoting in the women the appropriate behavior.[]
In short, the behaviour of adult X affects grown-up Y, and the reaction of person Y to person X's behaviour will then impact person X's behaviour, which in make adjustments to will affect person Y, and so on. Bateson called this the "vicious circle." He then discerned two models of schismogenesis: symmetrical and complementary. Symmetrical relationships are those in which the two parties are equals, competitors, such(a) as in sports. Complementary relationships feature an unequal balance, such(a) as dominance-submission parent-child, or exhibitionism-spectatorship performer-audience. Bateson's experiences with the Iatmul led him to publish a book in 1936 titled Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View Cambridge University Press. The book proved to be a watershed in anthropology and contemporary social science.
Until Bateson published Naven, nearly anthropologists assumed a realist approach to studying culture, in which one simply covered social reality. Bateson's book argued that this approach was naive, since an anthropologist's account of a culture was always and fundamentally shaped by whatever theory the anthropologist employed to define and analyse the data. To think otherwise, stated Bateson, was to be guilty of what Alfred North Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." There was no singular or self-evident way to understand the Iatmul naven rite. Instead, Bateson analysed the rite from three unique points of view: sociological, ethological, and eidological. The book, then, was not a presentation of anthropological analysis but an epistemological account that explored the nature of anthropological analysis itself.
The sociological module of view sought to identify how the ritual helped bring about social integration. In the 1930s, nearly anthropologists understood marriage rules to regularly ensure that social groups renewed their alliances. But Iatmul, argued Bateson, had contradictory marriage rules. Marriage, in other words, could notthat a marriage between two clans would at some definite section in the future recur. Instead, Bateson continued, the naven rite filled this function by regularly ensuring exchanges of food, valuables, and sentiment between mothers' brothers and their sisters' children, or between separate lineages. Naven, from this angle, held together the different social groups of each village into a unified whole.
The ethological point of view interpreted the ritual in terms of the conventional emotions associated with normative male and female behaviour, which Bateson called ethos. In Iatmul culture, observed Bateson, men and women lived different emotional lives. For example, women were rather submissive and took delight in the achievement of others; men fiercely competitive and flamboyant. During the ritual, however, men celebrated the achievement of their nieces and nephews while women were given ritual license to act raucously. In effect, naven enable men and women to experience momentarily the emotional lives of used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other, and thereby toa level of psychological integration.
The third andpoint of view, the eidological, was the least successful. Here Bateson endeavoured to correlate the organisation appearance of the naven ceremony with the habitual patterns of Iatmul thought. Much later, Bateson would harness the very same idea to the development of the double-bind theory of schizophrenia.
In the Epilogue to the book, Bateson was clear: "The writing of this book has been an experiment, or rather a series of experiments, in methods of thinking about anthropological material." That is to say, his overall point was not to describe Iatmul culture of the naven ceremony but to explore how different modes of analysis, using different premises and analytic frameworks, could lead to different explanations of the same sociocultural phenomenon. Not only did Bateson's approach re-shape fundamentally the anthropological approach to culture, but the naven rite itself has remained a locus classicus in the discipline. In fact, the meaning of the ritual submits to inspire anthropological analysis.
Bateson next[] travelled to Bali with his new wife Margaret Mead to study the people of the village Bajoeng Gede. Here, Lipset states, "in the short history of ethnographic fieldwork, film was used both on a large scale and as the primary research tool." Bateson took 25,000 photographs of their Balinese subjects.
He discovered that the people of Bajoeng Gede raised their children very unlike children raised in Western societies. Instead of attention being paid to a child who was displaying a climax of emotion love or anger, Balinese mothers wouldthem. Bateson notes, "The child responds to [a mother's] advances with either affection or temper, but the response falls into a vacuum. In Western cultures, such sequences lead to small climaxes of love or anger, but not so in Bali. At thewhen a child throws its arms around the mother's neck or bursts into tears, the mother's attention wanders". This utility example of stimulation and refusal was also seen in other areas of the culture. Bateson later planned the style of Balinese relations as stasis instead of schismogenesis. Their interactions were "muted" and did not follow the schismogenetic process because they did not often escalate competition, dominance, or submission.
In 1938, Bateson and Mead returned to the Sepik River, and settled into the village of Tambunum, where Bateson had spent three days in the 1920s. They aimed to replicate the Balinese project on the relationship between childraising and temperament, and between conventions of the body – such as pose, grimace, holding infants, facial expressions, etc. – reflected wider cultural themes and values. Bateson snapped some 10,000 black and white photographs, and Mead typed thousands of pages of fieldnotes. But Bateson and Mead never published anything substantial from this research.
Bateson's encounter with Mead on the Sepik river Chapter 16 and their life together in Bali Chapter 17 is described in Mead's autobiography Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years Angus and Robertson. London. 1973. Their daughter Catherine's birth in New York on 8 December 1939 is recounted in Chapter 18.
In 1956 in Palo Alto, Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland articulated a related theory of schizophrenia as stemming from double bind situations. The double bind refers to a communication paradox described number one in families with a schizophrenic member. The number one place where double binds were described though not named as such was according to Bateson, in Samuel Butler's The Way of all Flesh a semi-autobiographical novel about Victorian hypocrisy and cover-up.
Full double bind requires several conditions to be met:
The strange behaviour and speech of schizophrenics was explained by Bateson et al. as an expression of this paradoxical situation, and were seen in fact as an adaptive response, which should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience.
The double bind was originally presented probably mainly under the influence of Bateson's psychiatric co-workers as an relation of part of the ]
Bateson writes about how the actual physical reshape in the body occur within evolutionary processes. He describes this through the first profile of the concept of "economics of flexibility". In his conclusion he makes seven statements or theoretical positions which may be supported by his ideology.
The first is the idea that although environmental stresses form theoretically been believed to assist or dictate the changes in the soma physical body, the intro of new stresses hold not automatically solution in the physical changes necessary for survival as suggested by original evolutionary theory. In fact the introduction of these stresses can greatly weaken the organism. An example that he gives is the sheltering of a sick person from the weather or the fact that someone who working in an office would have a hard time workings as a rock climber and vice versa. The moment position states that though "the economics of flexibility has a logical structure-each successive demand upon flexibility fractioning the set of available possibilities". This means that theoretically speaking each demand or variable creates a new set of possibilities. Bateson's third conclusion is "that the genotypic change commonly makes demand upon the adjustive ability of the soma". This, he states, is the ordinarily held belief among biologists although there is no evidence to support the claim. Added demands are made on the soma by sequential genotypic modifications is the fourth position. Through this he suggests the following three expectations:
The fifth theoretical position which Bateson believes is supported by his data is that characteristics within an organism that have been modified due to environmental stresses may coincide with genetically determined attributes. His sixth position is that it takes less economic flexibility to create somatic modify than it does to cause a genotypic modification. The seventh andtheory he believes to be supported is the idea that in rare occasions there will be populations whose changes will not be in accordance with the thesis presented within this paper. According to Bateson, none of these positions at the time could be tested but he called for the establish of a test which could possibly prove or disprove the theoretical positions suggested within.
In his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson applied cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology and the concept of homeostasis. He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. Each of these systems has adaptive changes which depend upon feedback loops to domination balance by changing multiple variables. Bateson believed that these self-correcting systems were conservative by controlling exponential slippage. He saw the natural ecological system as innately utility as long as it was allowed to maintained homeostasis and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and its environment.
Bateson also viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that guidance everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme cybernetic system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind. While Mind is a cybernetic system, it can only be distinguished as a whole and not parts. Bateson felt Mind was immanent in the messages an pathways of the supreme cybernetic system. He saw the root of system collapses as a result of Occidental or Western epistemology. According to Bateson, consciousness is the bridge between the cybernetic networks of individual, society and ecology and the mismatch between the systems due to improper understanding will result in the degradation of the entire supreme cybernetic system or Mind. Bateson thought that consciousness as developed through Occidental epistemology was at direct odds with Mind.