THE ECOLOGY OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL MIND: GREGORY BATESON’S INFLUENCE ON THREE LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY PACIFIC SCHOLARS

Authors

Phillip V. Guddemi, Union Institute and UniversityFollow

Abstract

The influence of Gregory Bateson’s path-breaking ethnography, Naven, is well acknowledged in anthropology, as well as his collaborative work with Margaret Mead on Bali. Bateson’s later work, however, departed from anthropology, as conventionally conceived, to focus on issues of communication, psychiatry, animal ethology, cybernetics, and epistemology. These ideas have been influential for relatively few anthropologists. This essay focuses on the influence of Bateson’s later ideas on three anthropologists, all of them Oceanists: Roger Keesing, Robert I. Levy, and Roy Rappaport. These scholars shared an exposure to Bateson’s ideas prior to their popularization in collected essays published in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). This essay pays particular attention to how Batesonian epistemology informed the work of these anthropologists.

Recommended Citation

Guddemi, Phillip V. (2009) "THE ECOLOGY OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL MIND: GREGORY BATESON’S INFLUENCE ON THREE LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY PACIFIC SCHOLARS," Pacific Studies Journal: Vol. 32: No. 2, Article 12.
Available at: https://digitalcollections.byuh.edu/pacific-studies-journal/vol32/iss2/12