Gregory Bateson - Biography

Biography

Bateson was born in Grantchester in Cambridgeshire, England on 9 May 1904 – the third and youngest son of Beatrice Durham and of the distinguished geneticist William Bateson. The younger Bateson attended Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921, obtained a BA in biology at St. John's College, Cambridge in 1925, and continued at Cambridge from 1927 to 1929. Bateson lectured in linguistics at the University of Sydney in 1928. From 1931 to 1937 he was a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, spent the years before World War II in the South Pacific in New Guinea and Bali doing anthropology. During 1936-1950 he was married to Margaret Mead. At that time he applied his knowledge to the war effort before moving to the United States.

In Palo Alto, California, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland developed the double-bind theory (see also Bateson Project).

Bateson's interest in the scientific paradigm of systems theory and cybernetics forms a thread running through his work; as one of the original members of the core group of the Macy Conferences he extended their application to the social/behavioral sciences. Bateson's take on these fields centres upon their relationship to epistemology, and this central interest provides an undercurrent to his thought. His association with the editor and author Stewart Brand was part of a process by which Bateson's influence widened – for from the 1970s until Bateson's last years, a broader audience of university students and educated people working in many fields came not only to know his name but also into contact to varying degrees with his thought.

In 1956 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Bateson was a member of William Irwin Thompson's Lindisfarne Association. In the 1970s, he taught at the Humanistic Psychology Institute in San Francisco – which later became Saybrook University - and also served as a lecturer and fellow of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. In 1978, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Bateson to the Board of Regents of the University of California, in which position he served until his death (although he resigned from the Special Research Projects committee in 1979, in opposition to the university's work on nuclear weapons). He died on Independence Day, 1980, at the age of 76, in the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center.