Gregory Bateson on Relational Communication: From Octopuses to Nations

Gregory Bateson on Relational Communication: From Octopuses to Nations

Author: Phillip Guddemi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-03

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 303052101X

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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 In this letter Bateson argued that what we would today call zoosemiotics, including Bateson’s own (previously unpublished) octopus research, should be made a basis for understanding the relationship between the two blocs of the Cold War.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 using examples 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 The book also includes a previously unpublished piece by Gregory Bateson on wolf behavior and metaphor/ abduction.


Understanding Nonverbal Communication

Understanding Nonverbal Communication

Author: Marcel Danesi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 135015265X

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The human body is a primary source of meaning-making, with the body conveying over two-thirds of our messages. But how can we understand these physical communicative cues? How are they being expressed and exploited in new media and multimodal online and mobile interaction? Offering an in-depth guide to help you investigate and understand real and virtual nonverbal communication using semiotic theory, this book assumes little previous knowledge of semiotics or linguistics. With in-depth, comparative case studies, each chapter deals with a traditional aspect of nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions, touch, and gesture, before extending the discussion to new media and cyberspace. Explaining the issues step by step and supported by exercises, directed further reading and a glossary of key terms, Understanding Nonverbal Communication provides you with all the tools you need to understand how nonverbal communication unfolds in all kinds of contexts, and the kinds of messages that it makes possible.


Tripping on Utopia

Tripping on Utopia

Author: Benjamin Breen

Publisher: Footnote Press

Published: 2024-04-25

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1804441104

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'It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents.' The generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the centre of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists - and star-crossed lovers - Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists and the founders of the Information Age.


Communication

Communication

Author: Igor E. Klyukanov

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-06-10

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1800735251

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Focusing on the scientific study of communication, this book is a systematic examination. To that end, the natural, social, cultural, and rational scientific perspectives on communication are presented and then brought together in one unifying framework of the semiotic square, showing how all four views are interconnected. The question of whether the study of communication can be considered a unique science is addressed. It is argued that communication is never separate from any object of study and thus we always deal with its manifestations, captured in the four scientific perspectives discussed in the book.


Curating the Self and Embracing the Community

Curating the Self and Embracing the Community

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-09-29

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 9004688064

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This edited volume comprises a compilation of autoethnographic evocations from U.S. doctoral students in the fields of social sciences and humanities, who narrate and analyze their experiences in the doctoral journey and beyond. Through 11 select contributions, the book examines the intersections and shifting roles of the personal and the community in the doctoral student journey, illustrating the complex and unique nature of pursuing a doctoral degree. Part 1, Curating the Self, includes five autoethnographic accounts that speak directly to the personal challenges and transformations experienced in the doctoral journey. Part 2, Embracing the Community, includes six autoethnographic accounts illustrating supportive communities’ life-changing power during the doctoral journey. Contributors are: Gabriel T. Acevedo Velázquez, Ahmad A. Alharthi, Afiya Armstrong, Nick Bardo, Caitlin Beare, Rebecca Borowski, Anya Ezhevskaya, Christopher Fornaro, Melinda Harrison, Linda Helmick, Joanelle Morales, Olya Perevalova, Alexis Saba, Kimberly Sterin, Katrina Struloeff, Rebecca L. Thacker, Lisa D. Wood, Erin H. York, Christel Young and Nara Yun.


Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Author: Gregory Bateson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9780226039053

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Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. This classic anthology of his major work includes a new Foreword by his daughter, Mary Katherine Bateson. 5 line drawings.


Many Things Under a Rock: The Mysteries of Octopuses

Many Things Under a Rock: The Mysteries of Octopuses

Author: David Scheel

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2023-06-13

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1324020709

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“Mind-blowing and soul-expanding.” —Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus A behavioral ecologist’s riveting account of his decades-long obsession with octopuses: his discoveries, adventures, and new scientific understanding of their behaviors. Of all the creatures of the deep blue, none is as captivating as the octopus. In Many Things Under a Rock, marine biologist David Scheel investigates four major mysteries about these elusive beings. How can we study an animal with perfect camouflage and secretive habitats? How does a soft and boneless creature defeat sharks and eels, while thriving as a predator of the most heavily armored animals in the sea? How do octopus bodies work? And how does a solitary animal form friendships, entice mates, and outwit rivals? Over the course of his twenty-five years studying octopuses, Scheel has witnessed a sea change in what we know and are able to discover about octopus physiology and behavior—even an octopus’s inner life. Here he explores amazing new scientific developments, weaving accounts of his own research, and surprising encounters, with stories and legends of Indigenous peoples that illuminate our relationship with these creatures across centuries. In doing so, he reveals a deep affinity between humans and even the most unusual and unique undersea dwellers. Octopuses are complex, emotional, and cognitive beings; even as Scheel unearths explanations for the key mysteries that have driven his work, he turns up many more things of wonder that lurk underneath. This is the story of what we have learned and what we are still learning about the natural history and wondrous lives of these animals with whom we share our blue planet.


The Cybernetics Group

The Cybernetics Group

Author: Steve J. Heims

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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This is the engaging story of a moment of transformation in the human sciences, a detailed account of a remarkable group of people who met regularly to explore the possibility of using scientific ideas that had emerged in the war years as a basis for interdisciplinary alliances.


Evolution and Consciousness

Evolution and Consciousness

Author: Michael Michelo DelMonte

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-09-02

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 9004408754

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This volume provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the emerging concept of the evolution of consciousness. The simple, but dynamic, theory of evolving consciousness blends the powerful insights of modern science with the deep wisdom of age-old cultures, synthesising the traditions of East and West, of the head and heart, of the feminine and the masculine and of science and spirituality. By integrating diverse multi-disciplinary approaches, it provides an overarching and transcending model that moves us to a new level of meaning and understanding of our place in the world. An appreciation of the evolution of consciousness can deepen our connection to ourselves, to others and to the natural world, while bringing a new dimension to the work of psychotherapy.


Curious Minds

Curious Minds

Author: John Brockman

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2004-08-31

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 0375423427

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What makes a child decide to become a scientist? •For Robert Sapolsky–Stanford professor of biology–it was an argument with a rabbi over a passage in the Bible. •Physicist Lee Smolin traces his inspiration to a volume of Einstein’s work, picked up as a diversion from heartbreak. •Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist and the author of Flow, found his calling through Descartes. Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Humphrey, Freeman Dyson . . . 27 scientists in all write about what it was that sent them on the path to their life's work. Illuminating memoir meets superb science writing in stories that invite us to consider what it is–and what it isn’t–that sets the scientific mind apart.