Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson's World of Difference

by Peter Harries-Jones

Overview

"Science's conventional understanding of environment as an inert material resource underlies our unwillingness to acknowledge the military-industrial role in ongoing ecological catastrophes. In a crucial challenge to modern science's exclusive attachment to materialist premises, Bateson reframed culture, psychology, biology, and evolution in terms of feedback and communication, fundamentally altering perception of our relationship with nature. This intellectual biography covers the whole trajectory of Bateson's career, from his first anthropological work alongside Margaret Mead through the continuing relevance of his late forays into biosemiotics. Harries-Jones shows how the sum of Bateson's thinking across numerous fields turns our notions of causality upside down, providing a moral divide between sustainable creativity and our current biocide."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823270347
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	05/02/2016
Series:	Meaning Systems
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Harries-Jones is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at York University.

Table of Contents

A Brief Biographical Chronology of Gregory Bateson

Introduction: A Search for Pattern

Part I: Title TK
1. Culture: A First Look at Difference
2. A Science of Decency
3. Cybernetic Loops
4. Why We See in Outlines
5. The Bonds That Bind

Interlude

Part II: Title TK
6. Pattern and Process
7. A Post-Genomic View
8. Towards the Semiosphere
9. Ecological Aesthetics as Meta-Pattern

Appendix: A Context Lexicon

Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Upside-Down Gods is a gift of meticulous scholarship and insight for all interested in the extraordinary intellectual path of Gregory Bateson and the wide-ranging, multidisciplinary debates he was central to-debates that are still relevant-about anthropology, psychology, animal cognition, biosemiotics, ecology, epistemology, and systems theory." — Tyler Volk, New York University, author of Metapatterns Across Space, Time, and Mind

From the Publisher

Harries-Jones has clearly thought deeply about the totality of Bateson's corpus while drawing upon a wide variety of sources including personal correspondence. The result is an illuminating study that, amongst other accomplishments, productively positions Bateson’s work as a foundation of today’s burgeoning field of biosemiotics.

New Books Network

Upside-Down Gods is a gift of meticulous scholarship and insight for all interested in the extraordinary intellectual path of Gregory Bateson and the wide-ranging, multidisciplinary debates he was central to—debates that are still relevant—about anthropology, psychology, animal cognition, biosemiotics, ecology, epistemology, and systems theory.

Tyler Volk