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EDGE: What are you teaching at George Mason?

BATESON: After I got my doctorate, when I was teaching Arabic at Harvard, I volunteered to teach a section of Erik Erikson's course on The Human Life Cycle, which planted a seed of interest in the way people live their lives. I picked that up when I wrote the memoir of my parents and then I went into writing Composing a Life where I looked at a number of women's lives. So although I had not taught on life histories since the Erikson experience, when I went to Mason I began teaching courses related to life histories, autobiography, the life cycle, in various different forms, sometimes about men and women, sometimes just women, sometimes memoirs of adolescence. I've also taught a course with the title "Ecology and Culture." And in some years I've taught a course about the relationship between medical risk on the one hand and race and gender on the other.

EDGE: What do you mean by "Ecology and Culture"?

BATESON: What I mean by that is, of course, not what was meant when the title was put into the catalog. Ecology and Culture is most commonly taught in terms of the way a given environment determines the possible cultural patterns that human societies develop to adapt to that environment, sometimes also in terms of the impact of a given human community . What I was mainly focusing on however came out of work that I'd done with my father, namely the relationship between the ideas, the beliefs, the understandings, and so on, of a group of people, and the way they impact their environment. Gregory believed that the way we in industrial civilization mistreat the natural world comes from a set of cultural premises, starting with the body-mind separation — deeply embedded cultural premises that are built into the experience of growing up, are deep in our theoretically secular educational system and played out in the economy and so on. Such premises are often expressed in religious terms, but of course such socially constructed concepts as "money" or "credit" are our equivalent of deities or ancestral ghosts, telling us how to run our lives.

I was very interested in the work of an anthropologist named Roy Rappoport, who wrote about the way the ritual cycle of a New Guinea people regulated both their impact on their environment and their rhythms of warfare and peace-making. Basically what I did in "Ecology and Culture" was to pose the question of how ideas, particularly religious ideas, but not exclusively so, and the way they're expressed, may regulate or moderate the impact of a group on their natural environment.

I've always taught the first half of the course using examples from preliterate peoples, ethnographic examples let's say, and the second half of the semester, looking at different religious traditions, old and new, trying to get the students to think about what their environmental implications might be.

EDGE: Examples?

BATESON: Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam. I work with class presentations, so a group of students explores a given tradition and then tries to extrapolate from the belief system to the potential effects on population growth, on the way resources are used and technologies adopted. Then we look at some of the new systems of ideas, like deep ecology.

EDGE: How about saying a little more about the key themes of your new book?

BATESON: Full Circles came out of a convergence of two lines of thought. I had been thinking of writing a book based on a cross-cultural look at the life cycle and the way it is changing. In the process of thinking about that I'd become very aware that not only are individual life cycles changing as we live longer, but the way the life cycles of different generations overlap is changing. Let me put this differently. Where will I be in my life cycle when my first grandchild is born? This is obviously going to have an effect on the nature of our interaction. The fact that many of us will live to see great-grandchildren is also going to have an effect. In the book I say we sort of assume that human beings have synchromesh — that the gears of the different generations can just fit smoothly together when the ratios between them have changed. But that's not self-evident. The relationship between generations is fundamental to the transmission and development of human culture. That was one line of thought that I was following, and it's fun to look at.


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