Gregory Bateson
 Mead with Gregory Bateson, late 1930s (Photograph by C. H. Waddington). | |
| Born |
May 9, 1904 Grantchester, UK |
|---|---|
| Died |
April 14, 1980 (aged 78) San Francisco, US |
GREGORY BATESON was born in 1904, the son of William Bateson, a leading British biologist and a pioneering geneticist. Resisting family pressures to follow in his father's footsteps, he completed his degree in anthropology instead of the natural sciences, and left England to do field work in New Guinea. It was on his second trip there, in 1956, that he met his fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead, whom he later married; their only child, Mary Catherine Bateson, is also an anthropologist. Bateson and Mead were divorced in 1950, but they continued to collaborate professionally and maintained their friendship until Mead's death in 1978. In the years to follow, Bateson became a visiting professor of anthropology at Harvard (1947); was appointed research associate at the Langley Porrer Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco; worked as Ethnologist at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital (where he developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia and formulated a new theory of learning). He worked with dolphins at the Oceanographic Institute in Hawaii and taught ar the University of Hawaii. In 1972 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Visual anthropology
A more ambitious project was Bateson and Mead’s photography and film in Bali, coupled with Mead’s conviction that visual anthropology could serve a scientific, objective anthropology. They studied the people of the Balinese village 'Bajoeng Gede'. David Lipset states, “in the short history of ethnographic fieldwork, film was used both on a large scale and as the primary research tool”. Indeed, Bateson took around 25,000 photographs of their Balinese subjects.
Legacy
The legacy of Gregory Bateson was reintroduced to new audiences by filmmaker and daughter Nora Bateson, with the release of 'An Ecology of Mind' (2011), a documentary that premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Documentary film
'Trance and Dance in Bali', a short documentary film shot by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the 1930s, but it was not released until 1952. In 1999 the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Literature
- Lipset, David (1982). Gregory Bateson the Legacy of a Scientist. Beacon Press.
- Sarah Pink (2006). The Future of Visual Anthropology. Engaging the senses. Routledge. London & New York. [Cap. 2. Interdisciplinary agendas. (Re)situating visual anthropology, pp. 25-29].
