Gregory Bateson essays

Gregory Bateson essays Gregory Bateson was born on May 9th, 1904, in Grantchester England. His parents were Caroline Durham and William Bateson. William was a renowned geneticist at Cambridge University. Gregory attended Charterhouse public school in London from 1917 to 1921, where he studied zoology. He continued his education at St. Johns College, Cambridge University from 1922 to 1925, where he earned his B.S. in biology at the age of 21. It was during a trip to the Galapagos Islands, that Bateson decided that he would study anthropology. Upon returning to England, he pursued his graduate studies in Cambridge under the guidance of A.C. Haddon, an English anthropologist and comparative anatomist who helped establish anthropology in Britain. During 1927 and 1928, Bateson did his first anthropological fieldwork with the Baining in New Britain. He considered this early fieldwork a complete failure, because he felt he didnt know what he was doing. In late 1928, he became Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he worked under A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. During 1929 and 1930, Bateson went to New Guinea, where he did his fieldwork among the Iatmul. After this fieldwork, he was able to complete his thesis and receive his M.A. from Cambridge. Bateson would then go on to develop his study of Iatmul culture in the highly influential book Naven, which was published in 1936. The title is taken from an Iatmul initiation ceremony. This book contained ideas such as feedback that later became central to the fields of cybernetics and information science, as well as an innovative analysis of behavior as cultural communication. In 1931 Bateson became a research fellow at St. Johns College. He returned to New Guinea in 1932 to continue his fieldwork. It was during this trip that Bateson met his future wife, fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead, whom he married in 1936. They spent the next two years conductin...