The Individual, Communication, and Society
Essays in Memory of Gregory Bateson

A collection of essays on communication written by leading scholars in honor of the work of the late Gregory Bateson.

Robert W. Rieber (Edited by)

9780521134170, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 March 2010

360 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

"Valuable and thought-provoking; few recent books are as ambitious or catholic in their scope and succeed as well in surveying so many topics."
--Choice

The Individual, Communication, and Society is a collection of original essays on communication written by leading scholars in honor of the work of the late Gregory Bateson. Bateson, who began his career as a zoologist at Cambridge University, was one of the most provocative social scientists of the twentieth century. His major contribution was a theory of communication that integrated biological, psychological, and social phenomena. The theory had an important impact on the thinking of a number of influential anthropologists, psychologists, zoologists, and psychiatrists, who found Bateson's ideas not only relevant in their own research settings, but productive for the practical insights they offered into the nature of broader cultural systems. All of the chapters were written by scholars whose own work has been inspired by Bateson. The contributions are diverse, but each extends the implications of Bateson's concepts to the problems of human communication. The volume is designed not only as a tribute to Gregory Bateson, but also as an effort to advance the study of diverse problems involving communication across disciplinary boundaries that engaged Bateson in his lifetime.

Preface
1. In search of the impertinent question: an overview of Bateson's theory of communication Robert W. Rieber
Part I. Mending the Connection Between Mind and Society: 2. Power, method, and ethics: a reflection on Bateson's view of moral and national character David Bakan
3. The psychopathy of everyday life: antisocial behaviour and social distress Robert W. Rieber and Maurice Green
4. Bateson's concept of mental illness Theodore Skolnik
Part II. Language and Communication in Context: 5. Language, languages, and song: the experience of systems (1968) Mary Catherine Bateson
6. Affective and communicative problems in young, developmentally deviant language users Theodore Shapiro and Elena Goldstein Lister
7. A cross-cultural study of language universals: the emotional meaning of iconic and graphic stimuli Robert W. Rieber, Oliver S. Tzeng and Carl Wiedmann
8. Machine dreams: computers in the fantasies of young adults John M. Broughton
Part III. Mind and Paralinguistic Communication: 9. In search of coronary-prone behaviour Aron W. Siegman
10. Two principles of communicative functioning Norbert Freedman
Part IV. Dialogues and Dialectics: 11. Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900): a heavenly discourse Peter Ostwald
12. Body and mind: a dialogue Gregory Bateson and Robert W. Rieber
Index.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH]