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

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 and the Concept of Deutero-Learning

A Theory of Play and Fantasy

Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia

Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia

The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia

Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia

Double Bind, 1969

The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication

The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism

Comment on Part III

Part IV: Biology and Evolution

On Empty-Headedness among Biologists and State Boards of Education

The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution

Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication

A Re-examination of "Bateson's Rule"

Comments on Part IV

Part V: Epistemology and Ecology

Cybernetic Explanation

Redundancy and Coding

Conscious Purpose versus Nature

Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation

Form, Substance and Difference

Comment on Part V

Part VI: Crisis in the Ecology of Mind

Form Versailles to Cybernetics

Pathologies of Epistemology

The Roots of Ecological Crisis

Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization

Index