Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolu [Paperback]

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers.

"This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."—D. W. Harding,New York Review of Books

"[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder."—Roger Keesing,American Anthropologist

 

Foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson, 1999
Foreword, 1971
Introduction: The Science of Mind and Order
Part I: Metalogues
Metalogue: Why Do Things Get in a Muddle
Metalogue: Why Do Frenchmen?
Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious
Metalogue: How Much Do You Know?
Metalogue: Why Do Things Have Outlines?
Metalogue: Why a Swan?
Metalogue: What Is an Instinct?
Part II: Form and Pattern in Anthropology
Culture Contact and Schismogenesis
Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material
Morale and National Character
Bali: The Value System of a Steady State
Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art
Comment on Part II
Part III: Form and Pathology in Relationship
Social Planning alC%