Word: bateson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...great anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson pointed out 20 years ago that this myriad of feedback circuits resemble the mathematical models of thinking being developed for the new science of artificial intelligence. A forest or a coral reef or a whole planet, then, with its checks and balances and feedback loops and delicate adjustments always striving for light and equilibrium, is like a mind. In this way of thinking, pollution is literal insanity (Bateson was also a psychologist). To dump toxic waste in a swamp, say, is like trying to repress a bad thought or like hitting your wife every...
Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, once dean of the faculty at Amherst College, where she fought what she saw as entrenched male chauvinism, jumped to freewheeling George Mason, where she would have more time to write. "I thought it would be fun to try a school with chutzpah," she says. Last week Princeton announced that Toni Morrison, the much honored black female novelist (Song of Solomon, Beloved), was leaving the State University of New York at Albany for Princeton, where all hands insist that she will be no ornament but fully active in writing classes, Afro-American studies and the rest...
...spring of 1961 now say they later realized that they had not had all of the opportunities as the male undergraduates, most of them took their status at Radcliffe for granted. "I didn't feel like a second-class citizen, but I think I was," says Mary Catherine Bateson '61. Virginia Rogers Patterson '61, who lives in Philadelphia and has raised five children, agrees: "We were used to being second string...
...Bateson, the daughter of Margaret Mead and now a professor of anthropology at Amherst College, and other alumnae point to their living arrangements as a symbol of the disadvantages Radcliffe students confronted. "We had to live in the [Radcliffe] Quad, and there was no transportation. But we took it for granted and developed strong leg muscles. Now you can't get anyone to live there unless you provide transportation...
...that makes her look like the last of the 19th century optimists, so be it. But with what enthusiasm, with what generosity she invited the human race to share her faith! This may be what Gregory Bateson meant when he predicted that in the years ahead people will recognize Margaret Mead's contribution as being enormous-without being able to say quite why. -By Melvin Maddocks...