Bateson, Gregory

Bateson’s Early History

Bateson was born into an academic family who were already prominent in the Cambridge University setting. His father, William Bateson, was a famous biologist [Page 76]who is still widely seen as a key founder of the discipline of genetics. Gregory was named after Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who initiated the study of evolution. When Mendel’s theory of dominant and recessive genetic factors was rediscovered and became of real academic and scientific interest, William Bateson was the first to translate his papers into English.

Gregory Bateson (following the family tradition) became a student of St. John’s College, studying the natural sciences for his first degree and then (stepping away from William Bateson’s own scientific emphases and encouraged by a family friend) moving towards anthropology. He went to New Guinea and studied native tribal communities and their interactions. His master’s degree thesis based on these studies later became his first book, Naven, published in 1936.

Bateson was also influenced by Samuel Butler’s theories of evolution as being a process of learning (and transmission of knowledge) through generations. Butler claimed that the process of evolution is like that of a mind, offering ‘a modest pantheism’ suggesting that we could see God as being immanent in all beings, that the designer is the design. This provided the core thoughts for Bateson’s later understanding of ‘the sacred’.

It is relevant to his later anthropological and cybernetic studies and writing to note that when the second edition of Naven was published in 1958, his preface emphasized many new angles to his own thought. He observes that cybernetics and communications theory are now offering partial solutions to questions that were left unanswered in his earlier text. There are new ways of thinking about organization and disorganization and about data on the New Guinea tribes. Western psychology can now be approached by a single body of questions, offering the beginnings of a general theory of process and change, adaptation and pathology which calls for a revision of our understanding of organisms, relationships and the larger systems of which they are a part.

The above work gave Bateson a first class master’s degree, a fellowship at St. John’s College and the possibility of more fieldwork in New Guinea, where he studied conflict (and the limitations of conflict) between tribes. During these years, he also met the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and their collaboration on some tribal process research led eventually to their marriage in 1935. They went on to share joint research in Bali, particularly concerned with artistic and aesthetic practices. They then returned to New Guinea, and after further studies of tribal processes, the increasing imminence of World War II and the fact that Margaret was pregnant with the baby who was to become Mary Catherine Bateson sent them homeward to Britain and the USA.

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