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 | | Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology by Gregory Bateson ISBN-10: 9780226039053 ISBN-10: 0-226-03905-6 ISBN-13: 9780226039053 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03905-3 Paperback 2000-03-10 University Of Chicago Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description 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 Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was the author of Naven and Mind and Nature. | ||
Reviews | ||
What is the difference between a nip and a bite? Really, what is the difference between a nip and a bite? They look the same, when you are watching kittens playing, how can you tell if they are biting in earnestness or just fooling around? Well you can't really tell, because a nip is a bite and isn't a bite all at the same time. However, you can tell, of course you can, because a nip has a sign posted on it saying "this is play", a bite on the other hand has a sign saying "this is for real". Moreover tells us Bateson - one of the greatest minds in social thought - whoever cannot tell the difference between a bite and a nip is in big trouble, because the sign stating "this is play" enables us to tell reality from imagination, thus safeguarding our sanity. "Steps in the ecology of the mind" is a profound statement on the mechanisms that make us tick, on the human condition. | ||
A true masterpiece! Bateson's writings are profoundly layered with meaning that a brief glance will overlook. His prolific influence can be found in sundry fields of study, including psychiatry, communication theory, and marriage and family therapy to name a few. This is the type of book (among few) that can be read over and over again while discovering new facets of understanding every time. I highly recommend the metalogues. | ||
Buzzwords mixed toghether in a pile of dross Take all the buzzwords in fashion in psychology and philosophy: classification, genotype, flexibility, somatic, discrete, threshold, characteristics, analytic... mix everything together and you get this book. In other words there's not an ounce of meaning in those 700 pages, it's all worthless. No case studies, no examples, long phrases full of self importance written by someone who thinks he's an authority in everything from zen to medecine to evolution theory to archeology. Not only does he prove he doesn't understand anything, you'll laugh yourself silly reading any paragraph of the book at random. If you have to read this for an assignment, you'd better change major and give it to your worst enemy for toilet paper. That's how low I think of this. And to think that a tree was felled for this. Ha ! | ||
This book is an old friend. Out of the hundreds of books that I was forced to read through high school and college, maybe five caught my imagination. This was one of them. Before anyone was really interested in thinking about thinking, Bateson sat down and did so. He was attempting to raise a bunch of questions that might help some to in-form their search for understanding in the world, or at least for points to be curious about, which in his mind is where science has to begin if it wants to know anything. It certainly helped to inform my thinking. Not only did Bateson do a bang-up job of getting me to think in interesting or useful or maybe somewhat cleaner ways, he's actually pretty good at writing. .... | ||
Oh No no, no- Bateson wasn't a sloppy thinker at all. Yet, he wasn't fond of interiors or dead thoughts. His limitations (and i don't pretend to consider that my greatest capacities begin anywhere near his greatest limits)rest in his eternal (as it should be, i think) struggle with epistemology. Throught his later years he seemed to have a guiding intuition that there was not yet an adequit epistemology to address our modern crises. He would probably be the first to admit he only took small steps in helping this situation. His steps, however small, misguided and/or sloopy, were nevertheless extremely creative and point in a significant direction. If he had read Rudolf Steiner's "Truth and Knowledge" he would have laughed quite a bit, died later, and then re-read it in a much graver (pun intended) tone. Or not, but... | ||