Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson was born on May 9th, 1904, in Grantchester England. His parents were Caroline Durham and William Bateson. William was a renowned geneticist at Cambridge University. Gregory attended Charterhouse public school in London from 1917 to 1921, where he studied zoology. He continued his education at St. Johns College, Cambridge University from 1922 to 1925, where he earned his B.S. in biology at the age of 21. It was during a trip to the Galapagos Islands, that Bateson decided that he would study anthropology. Upon returning to England, he pursued his graduate studies in Cambridge under the guidance of A.C. Haddon, an English anthropologist and comparative anatomist who helped establish anthropology in Britain. During 1927 and 1928, Bateson did his first anthropological fieldwork with the Baining in New Britain. He considered this early fieldwork a complete failure, because he felt "he didn't know what he was doing". In late 1928, he became Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he worked under A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. During 1929 and 1930, Bateson went to New Guinea, where he did his fieldwork among the Iatmul. After this fieldwork, he was able to complete his thesis and receive his M.A.
During this time (1951-1962), he was also visiting professor of anthropology at Stanford University and became naturalized in 1956. It was during this time that he published his final book, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Bateson and Cammack were married in 1961 and their marriage produced one daughter. Critics have highlighted the concepts of system and environment as central in his work and thinking. He spent a year in the Virgin Islands as director of John Lilly's dolphin laboratory, where he studied the problems of cetacean communication, but felt incapable of dealing with the administrative problems posed by a laboratory of that size. In 1950, they decided to get divorced, and one year later Bateson married Elizabeth Summer. Unfortunately they received no further grants to continue these studies. He occupied posts in China, Burma, Sri Lanka, and India during this period. This book contained ideas such as "feedback" that later became central to the fields of cybernetics and information science, as well as an innovative analysis of behavior as cultural communication. These results were published in the book, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, which was published in 1942. As Bateson developed an interest in non-human communication and learning, he started to observe otters and then octopuses, along with Lois Cammack. Bateson would then go on to develop his study of Iatmul culture in the highly influential book Naven, which was published in 1936. From 1948 to 1949, Bateson taught at the University of California in San Francisco.
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