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67-420: Baining may refer to: Baining people Baining languages Baining Mountains Inland Baining Rural LLG Lassul Baining Rural LLG Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Baining . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to

134-520: A Bachelor of Arts in biology at St. John's College, Cambridge , in 1925, and continued at Cambridge from 1927 to 1929. According to Lipset (1982), Bateson's life was greatly affected by the death of his two brothers. John Bateson (1898–1918), the eldest of the three, was killed in World War I . Martin Bateson (1900–1922), the second brother, was then expected to follow in his father's footsteps as

201-414: A cathartic and transformative experience. The double bind was originally presented (probably mainly under the influence of Bateson's psychiatric co-workers) as an explanation of part of the etiology of schizophrenia . Currently, it is considered to be a more important as an example of Bateson's approach to the complexities of communication, which is what he understood it to be. Bateson writes about how

268-483: A common modern Western perception that the Baining have a "dull" or "Puritan" culture focusing only on practical work and lacking symbolic logic, religion, and artistic expression: to some degree this mirrors early colonial-era studies which characterised them as a primitive 'Stone Age' people whose land was ripe for Western or Melanesian settlement. This modern "primitivist caricature" ignores studies which have described

335-629: A communication paradox described first in families with a schizophrenic member. The first place where double binds were described (though not named as such) was according to Bateson, in Samuel Butler 's The Way of All Flesh (a semi-autobiographical novel about Victorian hypocrisy and cover-up). Full double bind requires several conditions to be met: The strange behaviour and speech of schizophrenics were explained by Bateson et al. as an expression of this paradoxical situation, and were seen in fact as an adaptive response, which should be valued as

402-416: A hard time working as a rock climber and vice versa. The second position states that "the economics of flexibility has a logical structure-each successive demand upon flexibility fractioning the set of available possibilities". This means that theoretically speaking each demand or variable creates a new set of possibilities. Bateson's third conclusion is "that the genotypic change commonly makes demand upon

469-450: A high value in the West, such as individualism and emotional expression, and instead focuses on an egalitarian outer social world where there is a strong commitment to the good of the community. Baining people have been described as having a culture which values work, and encouraging children to mature quickly by discouraging them from playing. They have been described as one of the few, if not

536-440: A ritual license to act raucously. In effect, naven allowed men and women to experience momentarily the emotional lives of each other, thereby to achieve a level of psychological integration. The third and final point of view, the eidological, was the least successful. Here Bateson endeavoured to correlate the organisational structure of the naven ceremony with the habitual patterns of Iatmul thought. Much later, Bateson would harness

603-613: A scientist, but came into conflict with his father over his ambition to become a poet and playwright. The resulting stress, combined with a disappointment in love, resulted in Martin's public suicide by gunshot under the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus on 22 April 1922, which was John's birthday. After this event, which transformed a private family tragedy into a public scandal, the parents' ambitious expectations fell on Gregory. In 1928, Bateson lectured in linguistics at

670-464: A single language. The wider genetic affiliation of the languages is unclear and they are usually classed negatively as non- Austronesian and non- Oceanic . The Baining people are likely the original inhabitants of the Gazelle peninsula. Their more recent history was defined by the arrival on the coast of Tolai immigrants, who subjugated adjacent Baining communities and subjected others to raids. With

737-567: A son, John Sumner Bateson (1951–2015), as well as twins who died shortly after birth in 1953. Bateson and Sumner were divorced in 1957, after which Bateson was married a third time, to therapist and social worker Lois Cammack (born 1928), in 1961. They had one daughter, Nora Bateson (born 1969). Bateson was a lifelong atheist, as his family had been for several generations. He was a member of William Irwin Thompson 's esoteric Lindisfarne Association . Bateson died on July 4, 1980, at age 76, in

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804-627: A specific objective in mind. He began in 1927 with a trip to New Guinea , spurred by his mentor A. C. Haddon . His goal, as suggested by Haddon, was to explore the effects of contact between the Sepik natives and whites. Unfortunately for Bateson, his time spent with the Baining of New Guinea was halted and difficult. The Baining were not particularly accommodating of his research, and he missed out on many communal activities. They were also not inclined to share their religious practices with him. He left

871-400: A system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. Purpose controls attention and narrows perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. Additionally, Occidental epistemology propagates the false notion that man exists outside Mind and this leads man to believe in what Bateson calls

938-409: A watershed in anthropology and modern social science. Until Bateson published Naven, most anthropologists assumed a realist approach to studying culture, in which one simply described social reality. Bateson's book argued that this approach was naive, since an anthropologist's account of a culture was always and fundamentally shaped by whatever theory the anthropologist employed to define and analyse

1005-612: Is taro : the 1957 taro blight caused considerable disruption to Baining agriculture, resulting in the replacement of most taro crops by singapu or kong-kong taro . Attempts to introduce bananas, beans and other staple crops to Baining villages were generally resisted, although a variety of other vegetables are grown alongside taro. Baining garden plots are very productive: they are often at some distance from villages and are provided with shelters in which people can stay temporarily. Ethnographers have noted that, similar to Samoans , Baining culture places little emphasis on attributes given

1072-450: Is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind. While Mind is a cybernetic system, it can only be distinguished as a whole and not parts. Bateson felt Mind was immanent in the messages and pathways of the supreme cybernetic system. He saw the root of the system collapse as a result of Occidental or Western epistemology . According to Bateson, consciousness

1139-478: Is only one way in which to obtain knowledge and without complete knowledge of the entire cybernetic system disaster is inevitable. The limited conscious must be combined with the unconscious in a complete synthesis. Only when thought and emotion are combined in whole is man able to obtain complete knowledge. He believed that religion and art are some of the few areas in which a man acts as a whole individual in complete consciousness. By acting with this greater wisdom of

1206-415: Is that it takes less economic flexibility to create somatic change than it does to cause a genotypic modification. The seventh and final theory he believes to be supported is the idea that, on rare occasions there will be populations whose changes will not be in accordance with the thesis presented within this paper. According to Bateson, none of these positions (at the time) could be tested but he called for

1273-448: Is the bridge between the cybernetic networks of individuals, society and ecology and the mismatch between the systems due to improper understanding will result in the degradation of the entire supreme cybernetic system or Mind. Bateson thought that consciousness as developed through Occidental epistemology was at direct odds with Mind. At the heart of the matter is scientific hubris . Bateson argues that Occidental epistemology perpetuates

1340-630: The Regents of the University of California , a position he held until his death, although he resigned from the Special Research Projects committee in 1979 in opposition to the university's work on nuclear weapons . Bateson spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developed in different fields of science. From 1936 until 1950, he

1407-702: The University of Sydney . From 1931 to 1937, he was a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He spent the years before World War II in the South Pacific in New Guinea and Bali doing anthropology. In the 1940s, he helped extend systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences. Although initially reluctant to join the intelligence services, Bateson served in the OSS during World War II along with dozens of other anthropologists. He

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1474-544: The double-bind theory of schizophrenia . Bateson's interest in systems theory forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics (1941–1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954–1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences. He was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology . His association with

1541-544: The double-bind theory, together with his non-colleagues Donald Jackson , Jay Haley and John H. Weakland , also known as the Bateson Project (1953–1963). In 1956, he became a naturalised citizen of the United States. Bateson was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in cybernetics (1941–1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954–1960), where he represented

1608-399: The soma (physical body), the introduction of new stresses does not automatically result in the physical changes necessary for survival as suggested by original evolutionary theory. In fact, the introduction of these stresses can greatly weaken the organism. An example that he gives is the sheltering of a sick person from the weather or the fact that someone who works in an office would have

1675-456: The Baining as having a very rich cultural life, being based largely on two earlier "failed ethnographic projects" by Gregory Bateson and Jeremy Pool, both of whom failed to communicate effectively with the people they were studying. A more recent study by Jane Fajans notes that existing anthropological theoretical frameworks are poor tools to analyse Baining culture. Online comment following an article by Thomas Hylland Eriksen , characterising

1742-485: The Baining as the "dullest culture" and based heavily on Fajans' work, was made almost entirely by writers unfamiliar with the Baining themselves or even with most of their ethnographers. The Baining have a long history of localistic millenarian cults, notably Pomio Kivung , although the main leaders of the latter have been Mengen speakers. Several Baining villages have formed "proudly local" secessionist movements criticising Mengen cultural hegemony, while still following

1809-597: The Baining frustrated. Next, he set out to study the Sulka , belonging to another native population of New Guinea. Although the Sulka were very different from the Baining and their culture was more easily observed, he felt their culture was dying, which left him dispirited and discouraged. He experienced more success with the Iatmul people , an indigenous people living along New Guinea's Sepik River . The observations he made among

1876-680: The Baining has been inferred to be 15.7 kya . Like other Papuans, the Baining have relatively high levels of Denisovan introgression (4%–6%), but slightly less than mainland Papuans. [REDACTED] Media related to Baining at Wikimedia Commons Gregory Bateson Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist , social scientist , linguist , visual anthropologist , semiotician , and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). In Palo Alto , California, Bateson and in these days his non-colleagues developed

1943-487: The Baining. They are possibly related to the Taulil–Butam languages as well as to extinct Makolkol . The languages, which correspond to clan groups, are: Makolkol neighbored the (other) Baining languages to their southwest. The label 'Baining' was originally applied to speakers of Qaqet, the first group in regular contact with administrators and missionaries, and the language family was originally classed as dialects of

2010-769: The Iatmul people allowed him to develop his concept of schismogenesis . In his 1936 book Naven he defined the term, based on his Iatmul fieldwork, as "a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals" (p. 175). The book was named after the 'naven' rite, an honorific ceremony among the Iatmul, still continued today, that celebrates first-time cultural achievements. The ceremony entails behaviours that are otherwise forbidden in everyday social life. For example, men and women reverse and exaggerate gender roles; men dress in women's skirts, and women dress in men's attire and ornaments. Additionally, some women smear mud in

2077-821: The Sepik river (Chapter 16) and their life together in Bali (Chapter 17) are described in Mead's autobiography Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years ( Angus and Robertson . London. 1973). Their daughter Catherine's birth in New York on 8 December 1939 is recounted in Chapter 18. In 1956 in Palo Alto , Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson , Jay Haley , and John Weakland articulated a related theory of schizophrenia stemming from double bind situations. The double bind refers to

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2144-407: The actual physical changes in the body occur within evolutionary processes. He describes this through the introduction of the concept of "economics of flexibility". In his conclusion he makes seven statements or theoretical positions which may be supported by his ideology. The first is the idea that although environmental stresses have theoretically been believed to guide or dictate the changes in

2211-432: The additional stress of epidemics and forced acculturation, mid 20th century missionaries spoke of the Baining as a "dying" people, but the community has since recovered. Colonial administrators forced the Baining into settled villages, changing their previous semi-nomadic lifestyle, though their cultivation methods remained mostly unchanged. The Baining are swidden ( slash-and-burn ) cultivators whose main traditional crop

2278-560: The adjustive ability of the soma". This, he states, is the commonly held belief among biologists although there is no evidence to support the claim. Added demands are made on the soma by sequential genotypic modifications in the fourth position. Through this he suggests the following three expectations: The fifth theoretical position which Bateson believes is supported by his data is that characteristics within an organism that have been modified due to environmental stresses may coincide with genetically determined attributes. His sixth position

2345-517: The birth of new children; the commencement of harvests and also a way of remembering the dead: in the late 20th century tourism has encouraged their revival. The Baining firedance is also a rite of passage for initiating young men into adulthood; during the ceremony the dancers are considered to be possessed by anthropomorphised animal spirits or masalai that enhance the dancer's own masculinity. The dancers are accompanied by an all-male 'orchestra' of percussion instruments, and take turns parading through

2412-441: The conventional emotions associated with normative male and female behaviour, which Bateson called ethos. In Iatmul culture, observed by Bateson, men and women lived different emotional lives. For example, women were rather submissive and took delight in the achievements of others; men were fiercely competitive and flamboyant. During the ritual, however, men celebrated the achievements of their nieces and nephews while women were given

2479-660: The creation of a test which could possibly prove or disprove the theoretical positions suggested within. In his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind , Bateson applied cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology and the concept of homeostasis . He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. Each of these systems has adaptive changes which depend upon feedback loops to control balance by changing multiple variables. Bateson believed that these self-correcting systems were conservative by controlling exponential slippage. He saw

2546-415: The dance ground: as the tempo increases the dancers will briefly dance through a large central bonfire. The dances last until daybreak, when members of the accompanying 'orchestra' chase the masks out of the dance grounds. The fire dance is performed by men, and traditionally the Baining women and children act primarily as spectators, although the women often perform secret night rituals and dances to "cool"

2613-453: The data. To think otherwise, stated Bateson, was to be guilty of what Alfred North Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." There was no singular or self-evident way to understand the Iatmul naven rite. Instead, Bateson analysed the rite from three unique points of view: sociological , ethological , and eidological. The book, then, was not a presentation of anthropological analysis but an epistemological account that explored

2680-632: The editor and author Stewart Brand helped widen his influence. Bateson was born in Grantchester in Cambridgeshire , England, on 9 May 1904. He was the third and youngest son of (Caroline) Beatrice Durham and the distinguished geneticist William Bateson . He was named Gregory after Gregor Mendel , the Austrian monk who founded the modern science of genetics . The younger Bateson attended Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921, obtained

2747-421: The faces of other relatives, beat them with sticks, and hurl bawdy insults. Mothers may drop to the ground so their celebrated 'child' walks over them. And during a male rite, a mother's brother may slide his buttocks down the leg of his honoured sister's son, a complex gesture of masculine birthing, pride, and insult, rarely performed before women, that brings the honoured sister's son to tears. Bateson suggested

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2814-826: The filmmaker Nora Bateson released An Ecology of Mind , a documentary that premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival . This film was selected as the audience favourite with the Morton Marcus Documentary Feature Award at the 2011 Santa Cruz Film Festival, and honoured with the 2011 John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology by the Media Ecology Association . The Bateson Idea Group (BIG) initiated

2881-403: The future recur. Instead, Bateson continued, the naven rite filled this function by regularly ensuring exchanges of food, valuables, and sentiment between mothers' brothers and their sisters' children, or between separate lineages. Naven, from this angle, held together the different social groups of each village into a unified whole. The ethological point of view interpreted the ritual in terms of

2948-486: The guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center . The 2014 novel Euphoria by Lily King is a fictionalized account of Bateson's relationships with Mead and Reo Fortune in pre-WWII New Guinea. Where others might see a set of inexplicable details, Bateson perceived simple relationships. In "From Versailles to Cybernetics," Bateson argues that the history of the twentieth century can be perceived as

3015-591: The history of a malfunctioning relationship. In his view, the Treaty of Versailles exemplifies a whole pattern of human relationships based on betrayal and hate. He therefore claims that the Treaty of Versailles and the development of cybernetics —which for him represented the possibility of improved relationships—are the only two anthropologically important events of the twentieth century. Bateson's beginning years as an anthropologist were spent floundering, lost without

3082-402: The influence of a circular system of causation, and proposed that: Women watched for the spectacular performances of the men, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the presence of an audience is a very important factor in shaping the men's behavior. In fact, it is probable that the men are more exhibitionistic because the women admire their performances. Conversely, there can be no doubt that

3149-399: The intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Baining&oldid=920841735 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Baining people The Baining languages are a distinct language family spoken by

3216-558: The main Kivung movement's structure. The best-known aspect of Baining artistic culture are night dance ceremonies, often called "fire dances", during which the dancers run through, leap over and kick the embers of a fire. The dances originated in Qaqet (northern) villages, where they were called atut , but have since been taken up by central and southern Baining. The dancers wear large masks laboriously made from bark cloth, bamboo and leaves:

3283-573: The main ritual site beforehand. In recent times the fire dance has become an essential part of local and international cultural festivals and a major draw to tourists: this has led the Baining to adopt it as a symbol of their cultural identity, using its iconic status as leverage to emphasise their differences from the Tolai. DNA studies indicate the Baining have experienced long-term genetic isolation, exhibiting an excess of very long runs of homogeneity. The genetic split time between mainland Papuans and

3350-464: The masks are used just once for the firedance ceremony before being thrown away or destroyed. Masks are of two main types: in Kairak areas these are the kavat and the larger vungvung , the latter featuring an axial bamboo pole up to thirteen feet in length, and traditionally represented various male-associated animals and plants of the forest. The origin of these fire dance ceremonies was to celebrate

3417-420: The natural ecological system as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and its environment. Bateson also viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme cybernetic system

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3484-452: The nature of anthropological analysis itself. The sociological point of view sought to identify how the ritual helped bring about social integration. In the 1930s, most anthropologists understood marriage rules to regularly ensure that social groups renewed their alliances. But Iatmul, argued Bateson, had contradictory marriage rules. Marriage, in other words, could not guarantee that a marriage between two clans would at some definite point in

3551-401: The only, groups to restrict the younger members of society from playing. This assessment has been challenged by several ethnographers, and even Baining villagers themselves, who have confirmed that Baining children play regularly (including in local streams and in team sports) and that there is no general custom of punishing children for playing. This supposed characteristic has contributed to

3618-450: The philosophy of control based upon false knowledge. Bateson presents Occidental epistemology as a method of thinking that leads to a mindset in which man exerts an autocratic rule over all cybernetic systems. In exerting his autocratic rule man changes the environment to suit him and in doing so he unbalances the natural cybernetic system of controlled competition and mutual dependency. The purpose-driven accumulation of knowledge ignores

3685-423: The potential to irrevocably damage and destroy the supreme cybernetic system, instead of just disrupting the system temporally until the system can self-correct. Bateson argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural cybernetic system instead of scientific arrogance as a solution. He believes that humility can come about by abandoning the view of operating through consciousness alone. Consciousness

3752-482: The response falls into a vacuum. In Western cultures, such sequences lead to small climaxes of love or anger, but not so in Bali. At the moment when a child throws its arms around the mother's neck or bursts into tears, the mother's attention wanders". This model of stimulation and refusal was also seen in other areas of the culture. Bateson later described the style of Balinese relations as stasis instead of schismogenesis. Their interactions were "muted" and did not follow

3819-438: The same sociocultural phenomenon. Not only did Bateson's approach re-shape fundamentally the anthropological approach to culture, but the naven rite itself has remained a locus classicus in the discipline. In fact, the meaning of the ritual continues to inspire anthropological analysis. Bateson next travelled to Bali with his new wife Margaret Mead to study the people of the village of Bajoeng Gede. Here, Lipset states, "in

3886-837: The schismogenetic process because they did not often escalate competition, dominance, or submission. In 1938, Bateson and Mead returned to the Sepik River, and settled in the village of Tambunum, where Bateson had spent three days in the 1920s. Their aim to replicate the Balinese project on the relationship between childraising and temperament, and between conventions of the body – such as pose, grimace, holding infants, facial expressions, etc. – reflected wider cultural themes and values. Bateson snapped some 10,000 black and white photographs, and Mead typed thousands of pages of fieldnotes. But Bateson and Mead never published anything substantial from this research. Bateson's encounter with Mead on

3953-586: The short history of ethnographic fieldwork, film was used both on a large scale and as the primary research tool." Bateson took 25,000 photographs of their Balinese subjects. He discovered that the people of Bajoeng Gede raised their children very unlike children raised in Western societies. Instead of attention being paid to a child who was displaying a climax of emotion (love or anger), Balinese mothers would ignore them. Bateson notes, "The child responds to [a mother's] advances with either affection or temper, but

4020-685: The social and behavioral sciences. In the 1970s, he taught at the Humanistic Psychology Institute in San Francisco, which was renamed the Saybrook University , and in 1972 joined the faculty of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz . In 1976, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . California Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to

4087-488: The spectacular behavior is a stimulus which summons the audience together, promoting in the women the appropriate behavior. In short, the behaviour of person X affects person Y, and the reaction of person Y to person X's behaviour will then affect person X's behaviour, which in turn will affect person Y, and so on. Bateson called this the "vicious circle." He then discerned two models of schismogenesis: symmetrical and complementary. Symmetrical relationships are those in which

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4154-449: The supreme cybernetic system and leads to the eventual breakdown of the entire system. Bateson claims that man will never be able to control the whole system because it does not operate in a linear fashion and if man creates his own rules for the system, he opens himself up to becoming a slave to the self-made system due to the non-linear nature of cybernetics. Lastly, man's technological prowess combined with his scientific hubris gives him

4221-470: The supreme cybernetic system as a whole man can change his relationship to Mind from one of schism , in which he is endlessly tied up in constant competition, to one of complementarity . Bateson argues for a culture that promotes the most general wisdom and is able to flexibly change within the supreme cybernetic system. In 1984, his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson published a joint biography of her parents (Bateson and Margaret Mead ). His other daughter

4288-605: The two parties are equals, competitors, such as in sports. Complementary relationships feature an unequal balance, such as dominance-submission (parent-child), or exhibitionism-spectatorship (performer-audience). Bateson's experiences with the Iatmul led him to publish a book in 1936 titled Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (Cambridge University Press). The book proved to be

4355-559: The very same idea in the development of the double-bind theory of schizophrenia . In the Epilogue to the book, Bateson was clear: "The writing of this book has been an experiment, or rather a series of experiments, in methods of thinking about anthropological material." That is to say, his overall point was not to describe Iatmul culture of the naven ceremony but to explore how different modes of analysis, using different premises and analytic frameworks, could lead to different explanations of

4422-526: Was married to American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead . He applied his knowledge to the war effort before moving to the United States. Bateson and Mead had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (1939–2021), who also became an anthropologist. Bateson separated from Mead in 1947, and they were divorced in 1950. In 1951, he married Elizabeth "Betty" Sumner, the daughter of the Episcopalian Bishop of Oregon , Walter Taylor Sumner . They had

4489-716: Was stationed in the same offices as Julia Child (then Julia McWilliams), Paul Cushing Child , and others. He spent much of the war designing ' black propaganda ' radio broadcasts. He was deployed on covert operations in Burma and Thailand, and worked in China, India, and Ceylon as well. Bateson used his theory of schismogenesis to help foster discord among enemy fighters. He was upset by his wartime experience and disagreed with his wife over whether science should be applied to social planning or used only to foster understanding rather than action. In Palo Alto , California, Bateson developed

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