A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind

In 32 posthumously collected lectures, articles and essays of uneven quality, anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) applies principles of cybernetics, which he helped develop, to psychiatry, the mind/body split, evolutionary biology and linguistics. Bateson discusses Balinese trance-dance, the dynamics of the schizophrenic family, cross-cultural contact and the need to reestablish a ``sacred unity'' between the human mind and the biosphere. Many of the pieces are technical or specialized; they range in provenance from 1942 to 1980; most were previously published. Donaldson, a former colleague of Bateson, has grouped the selections to roughly follow the sequence of Bateson's popular Steps to an Ecology of Mind. But in this volume, the articles do not cohere into a unified whole. (Dec.)