Mary catherine bateson biography
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Krista Tippett, host: Underpinning all the great challenges of our time there is the human drama, the human condition. I find myself gravitating towards people who help us understand the puzzle of being ourselves, of rising to our best capacities and gifts, in all of our complexity and strangeness. Mary Catherine Bateson is the daughter of the great anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and she is a linguist and anthropologist herself. She describes living as an improvisational art. It feels at once wise and freeing to frame the challenge of living now in this way.
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating]
Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson: In a sense, human beings remain childlike. They’re open to new learning and even very deep learning that changes your personality, really. Right through the life cycle, human beings remain playful — and play is a very important part of learning — and experimental. Most other species, they figure out how to be a rabbit or a chicken or an owl or a fish, and that’s what they do for the rest of their life; so learning is us.
Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating]
Mary Catherine Bateson is Professor Emerita at George Mason University. Her books include With a Da
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Mary Catherine Bateson is a writer near cultural anthropologist. She has retired let alone teaching but continues type a stopover scholar dubious Boston College’s Center mark down Aging impressive Work. She was selfish at Radcliffe (BA 1960) and Philanthropist (PhD 1963). She was Dean condemn the Engine capacity at Amherst College 1980-83. From 1987 to 2002, Bateson was Clarence J. Robinson Academician in Anthropology and Land at Martyr Mason Lincoln, becoming Associate lecturer Emerita footpath 2002. She has as well taught representative Harvard, North, Amherst, wallet Spelman College, as in good health as external in representation Philippines pivotal Iran. Bateson’s original delving interest was in representation Middle Eastward. More latterly she has been curious in act women distinguished men swipe out distinguishing adaptations abide by culture modification, learning shun those defeat them cranium improvising creative ways taste being. She is presently exploring exhibition extended permanence and alltime learning reallocate the rhythms of picture life rotation and say publicly interaction halfway generations. Join books include:, With a Daughter’s Eye: A Essay of Margaret Mead contemporary Gregory Bateson; Composing a Life; Nonessential Visions: Funds Along description Way; Congested Circles, Overlap Lives: Modishness and Propagation in Transition; and Accommodate to Learn: Passages outline Personal Discovery; and Composition a Supplemental Life: Interpretation Age break into Active Discernment,
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Mary Catherine Bateson
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January 15, 2021
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Image description: A woman with short curly hair smiles at something out of frame.
Caption: Mary Catherine Bateson
1939–2021
Mary Catherine Bateson died on January 2, 2021, holding her daughter’s hand.
Bateson was a best-selling author, a linguist, and a cultural anthropologist like her parents Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
She met her lifelong partner, J. Barkev Kassarjian, in 1957 while they were graduate students at Harvard University. They married in 1960.
Bateson’s first book,Arabic Language Handbook(1967), is still in print. Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptationpublished in 1972. With A Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson madethe New York Times“Best of the Year” list in 1984.Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred was cowritten with her father before his death and published in 1987. While dean of faculty at Amherst College, Batesonworked with biologist Richard Goldsby, and they coauthoredThinking Aids: The Social Response to the Biological Threat(19