Gregory Bateson turned a New Guinea ritual into a theory of escalating feuds
Watching the Iatmul people of New Guinea in the 1930s, Gregory Bateson noticed how one person's behaviour provokes a reaction that provokes more of the same, round and round. He called the spiral schismogenesis. The idea travelled from anthropology into cybernetics, family therapy and, during the war, secret propaganda aimed at dividing enemy troops.
Bateson was born in Grantchester in 1904, the youngest son of geneticist William Bateson, and was named after Gregor Mendel. Family tragedy shaped him: his eldest brother died in the First World War and the second took his own life in 1922, leaving the father's scientific ambitions resting on Gregory. After studying biology at Cambridge, he began fieldwork in New Guinea in 1927. His first attempts floundered; the Baining would not share their rituals and the Sulka culture seemed to him to be dying.
Success came along the Sepik River with the Iatmul. His 1936 book Naven, named after a ceremony celebrating a person's first cultural achievements, in which men and women swap and exaggerate each other's roles, defined schismogenesis. He described two forms: symmetrical, between rival equals as in sport, and complementary, between unequal partners such as parent and child or performer and audience. The book was also a methodological provocation. Bateson analysed the rite from three separate viewpoints, arguing that an anthropologist's account is always shaped by the theory used, not simply read off reality.
He married the anthropologist Margaret Mead in 1936; their daughter Mary Catherine Bateson also became an anthropologist. During the Second World War he worked for the OSS, sharing offices with Julia Child, designing black propaganda broadcasts and using schismogenesis to sow discord among enemy fighters, work that later troubled him. He was a core member of the Macy conferences on cybernetics from 1941, helping carry systems thinking into the social sciences.
In Palo Alto, from 1953 to 1963, Bateson and colleagues including Jay Haley and John Weakland developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. His later books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature, sought a unifying science of knowledge. Appointed a University of California regent by Jerry Brown, he quit a research committee in 1979 over nuclear weapons work, and died in 1980 at the San Francisco Zen Center.
Source: Gregory Bateson
