Overview
- Presents the work of Gregory Bateson in context to biosemiotics
- Examines Gregory Bateson’s concept of “communication about relationship” in a number of realms: from play and mood-signs, to analog and digital, to conflict and peacemaking, in animals (including octopuses), humans, and nations
- Situates in this context for the first time in publication, Gregory Bateson’s own unpublished studies of octopuses
- Demonstrates how Gregory Bateson applied his remarkable analysis of conflict and peacemaking in the instance of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Part of the book series: Biosemiotics (BSEM, volume 20)
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book develops Gregory Bateson’s ideas regarding “communication about relationship” in animals and human beings, and even nations. It bases itself on Bateson’s theory of relational communication, as he described it in the zoosemiotics of octopus, mammals, birds, and human beings. This theory includes, for example, the roles of metaphor, play, analog and digital communication, metacommunication, and Laws of Form.
It is organized around a letter from Gregory Bateson to his fellow cybernetic thinker Warren McCulloch at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this letter Bateson argued that what we would today call zoosemiotics, including Bateson’s own (previously unpublished) octopus research, should be made a basis for understanding the relationship between the two blocs of the Cold War. Accordingly the book shows how Bateson understood interactive processes in the biosemiotics of conflict and peacemaking, which are analyzed usingexamples from recent animal studies, from primate studies, and from cultural anthropology. The Missile Crisis itself is described in terms of Bateson’s critique of game theory which he felt should be modified by an understanding of the zoosemiotics of relational communication.The book also includes a previously unpublished piece by Gregory Bateson on wolf behavior and metaphor/ abduction.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Gregory Bateson on Relational Communication: From Octopuses to Nations
Authors: Phillip Guddemi
Series Title: Biosemiotics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52101-1
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life Sciences, Biomedical and Life Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-52100-4Published: 04 October 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-52103-5Published: 05 October 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-52101-1Published: 03 October 2020
Series ISSN: 1875-4651
Series E-ISSN: 1875-466X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 189
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations
Topics: Behavioral Sciences, Semiotics, Communication Studies, Ethnography, Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, multidisciplinary