BATESON

Posted by Cathy Gowdy on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 05:00:44 :

Independent Journal
Monday, July 7, 1980

GREGORY BATESON

A memorial service will be held July 20 at the Green Gulch Ranch Zen Center near Muir Beach for Gregory Bateson, anthropologist, University of California regent and, in his later years, a reclusive thinker.

The hour of the service is to be decided later.

Bateson died Friday at the age of 75.

Bateson, who studied subjects ranging from schizophrenia to the language of dolphins, succumbed to a respiratory illness at the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center, where a number of his friends lived.

He was born in Grantchester, England and grew up in Cambridge, where his father was a noted geneticist.

Bateson received his master’s degree in anthropology from St. John’s College. During the 1930s he did his early field work in New Guinea where he met anthropologist Margaret Mead, to whom he was later married for 14 years.

After World War II, Bateson moved to California, where he studied alcoholism and schizophrenia at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. He also spent several years in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands, studying how dolphins communicate.

From 1951 to 1963 he was a visiting professor at Stanford University. He taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz from 1972 to 1978, and was appointed to the University’s Board of Regents in 1976 by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.

Bateson, who described himself as an elitist, called the Board of Regents deliberations “ephemeral, even trivial,” but attended the sessions anyway. He strongly advocated the university’s withdrawal from nuclear weapons research.

After nearly succumbing to cancer in 1978, Bateson became a scholar in residence at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, Calif. He developed a large following of disciples as his thinking became more spiritual. He said mankind was doomed if people continued attempts to conquer nature.

Although Bateson did not practice Zen Buddhism, his ideas were linked to Buddhist principles and he developed friendships with Buddhist living at San Francisco’s Zen Center. Bateson would often stay at the center’s guest house when he visited San Francisco.

Bateson is survived by his wife, Lois, two daughters, a son, a stepson and four grandchildren.