Gregory Bateson: biography of this anthropologist and linguist

Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist, linguist, social scientist, and cyber, 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 when it comes to academics, he was also rather peculiar, showing his rejection of how scientific rigidity was squareing up with the sciences social. Let's see his particular life through this biography of Gregory Bateson, in which you will know his vital and intellectual trajectory.

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Summary Biography of Gregory Bateson

The life of Gregory Bateson was characterized by, despite being a professor at several universities, having quite alternative opinions on how things should be done in research, moving away from the rigid way of seeing and investigating science social.

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, researcher of genetic evolution, who had delved into the ideas of Gregor mendel.

Between 1917 and 1921 Bateson would study zoology at the Charterhouse School in London and, later, he would begin his studies in biology at St. John's College, Cambridge.

Later he would carry out field work in New Guinea and Bali with his wife Margaret Mead., along with whom he would post 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 or not they are Westerners.

Academic life

In 1939 he moved to the United States, where he would live for the rest of his life, deciding to become a US 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, being a professor at Stanford University, he 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.

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Last years

In 1964 he moved to Hawaii, where he was appointed head of the biology department at the Oceanic Institute in Waimanalo. Later, between 1972 and 1978 he was professor of anthropology and ethnography at the University of California. He passed away on July 8, 1980, while he was 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 make Batesonian notions influence the work of the MRI. It should be noted that, in part, Bateson's contributions were renowned for the fact that he was Margaret Mead's husband, considered one of the great anthropologists of the last century.

It is interesting to mention Bateson's opinion, which he calls quite a bit compared to the paths that science was traveling at the time. Despite the fact that in his time, the social disciplines were opting for more scientific and objective criteria, both As in research, Bateson did not show much respect for the academic-scientific writing standards of the moment. In his works he used to resort to metaphors, and even citing ancient poets or ignoring recent scientific sources. His papers were more essay-style than scientific dissertations.

Another peculiarity of his work was that he wrote at a very abstract level, something that goes quite in the opposite direction to how scientific articles do. Despite this, Bateson's figure is not ignored at all, and there are not a few academics who consider that his works they are a great contribution of originality in a time that squared him, so to speak, he 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 conjugated with the external reality of the individual, which helps him to build his own individual reality. The body, the material part of each one, manages to transcend that material dimensionality thanks to harboring those psychological aspects in him.

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 from 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. the one of evil. Communication is a fundamental phenomenon for the evolution of society to take place.

Bateson devised a new experimental model, combining neurolinguistics with psycholinguistics, and looking for a common goal: to formulate a systemic theory of communication and be able to use it to create a systemic clinic. People, thanks to language, are capable of creating realities of meaning, through interactions, attributed meanings, behaviors and beliefs. These realities can suppose the well-being or, on the contrary, the discomfort of each one, 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 becomes a determining factor of the social configuration, since 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 certain society.

It should also be said that they are the media where double standards are seen. The same television channel can proclaim, in a program, a moral value, such as the search for knowledge and being critical of the information that is received while, in another, ignorance can be proclaimed, gossip or being carried away by the first impressions. A typical example would be the heart programs that often precede those of increasing vocabulary or knowledge of historical milestones and varied topics.

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Batesonian terms

Gregory Bateson's genius is that of a versatile person, who contributed to the reinvention of words in the academic context. Next 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 organ systems, such as anatomy comparative.

2. Creatura and Pleroma

These two terms are taken from the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, extracted from the work Septem Sermons 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 schizophrenia

Bateson, despite not being a clinical psychologist, proposed a theory for the schizophrenia. According to him, this mental disorder arises in a context of dysfunctional relationship patterns and contradictory communication, through which the subject works, 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 ways, 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 His parents show a continuous rejection of his person through non-verbal behaviors, which penetrate deep into the small. As an adult, raised in an environment that tells him to do one thing that contradicts another, the person lives in constant mental upset.

For this double bind to occur, in addition to having two or more contradictory communication channels, metacommunication must turn out to be an impossible exercise. That is, it is impossible for the person to know which of the two communication channels is the true, and he cannot understand why he is given information that, in theory, is the opposite of the other.

In addition, to generate more tension, the person cannot fail to comply with the contradictory orders. That is, whether he does one thing or another, he is punished, for example, taking love away from him.

4. Metalogue

Considering 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 quirks about him.

The term metalogue takes it out of the work of the Spanish writer, but applying it in educational texts. Make reference to a dialogue about some problematic topic, in which not only is discussed about that specific problem, but the entire structure of the dialogue is given according to the problem.

Bibliographic references:

• Bateson, Gregory (1936). Naven. Stanford University Press.
• Bateson, G., Mead, M. (1942). Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York Academy of Sciences. ISBN 0-89072-780-5.
• Bateson, Gregory; Ruesch, Jurgen (1951). Communication: the social matrix of psychiatry. Norton and Company.
• Bateson, Gregory (1972). Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind: A Collection of Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Ballantine Books.