A landmark work that broke new ground in anthropology, psychology, cybernetics, and more--and remains relevant today Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. In 1972, he published this career-spanning collection, and it has remained highly influential in multiple fields ever since. Ranging across anthropology, psychology and psychiatry, cybernetics, and much more, Bateson addresses culture, the self and the mind, addiction, the then-nascent field of computer science, and the very components of thought itself. This edition offers a new foreword by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson reflecting on his career and thought, showing why this astonishing book continues to delight and inform readers, decades after its original publication. “This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large.” -- D. W. Harding ― New York Review of Books “[Bateson’s] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder.” -- Roger Keesing ― American Anthropologist "Philosophical depth, conceptual rigor, and an uncanny scientific imagination are the hallmarks of this invaluable collection by one of the most influential minds of this century.”   -- Carlos E. Sluzki, editor of Double Bind: The Foundation of Communicational Approach to the Family Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was born and educated in the United Kingdom, and spent most of his professional life in the United States where he was lecturer and fellow of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among other influentital books he authored Naven and Mind and Nature.