Gregory Bateson's lost world: the anthropology of Haddon and Rivers continued and deflected

The Sustainability of an Anthropology of the Anthropocene

The societies studied in early social and cultural anthropology were by default considered what we would now call sustainable, in that they were assumed to be capable of reproducing themselves indefinitely, changing only incrementally and almost imperceptibly. Change was considered to be caused by exogenous factors such as colonialism. The contrast with the contemporary practices and theories of anthropology is striking: The anthropology of the Anthropocene accepts globalisation as a fact, seeing societies as interlinked and culture as unbounded, and threats to sustainability are mainly conceptualised in terms of ecological devastation and climate change. The notion of sustainable development, introduced in 1987 and later elaborated in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, shares the global vision of contemporary anthropology but presupposes economic growth and brackets cultural diversity. To this discourse and its associated practices, anthropology is making major contributions, profiting from the methodological advances made a century ago, but contextualising ethnography in the global Anthropocene, using the tools of the discipline to critique facile universalism, engaging in dialogue with local worlds and showing that there are many alternatives. The methodologies devised for research in ostensibly unchanging village societies are still relevant for research on global crises, but the new anthropology is by necessity interdisciplinary.

1919: psychology and psychoanalysis, Cambridge and London - Myers, Jones and MacCurdy

Viewing the reception of psychoanalysis in Britain from Cambridge, the paper examines the intertwining histories of the post-War British Psychological Society and the founding of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, following the initiatives of the two principal psychological entrepreneurs of the era, Charles Myers and Ernest Jones, Reforms in Cambridge in which psychoanalysis played a significant part are analysed, including the foundation of a Clinic for Nervous Diseases and the establishment of a separate Department of Experimental Psychology. The career of J. T. MacCurdy, Jones's student and Lecturer in Psychopathology at Cambridge, is discussed.

Gregory Bateson on deutero-learning and double bind: a brief conceptual history

The concepts of deutero-learning and double bind have acquired an increasingly important status in various fields of social and behavioral science, particularly in psychiatry, psychotherapy, organization, and policy science. With this proliferation, however, their original meaning and significance has become increasingly muted. In this article it is argued that both concepts are important ingredients of a behavioral theory of (organizational) learning. To support this argument, the development of both concepts is traced to the work of Gregory Bateson. In Bateson's thinking, the two concepts have a firm base in dyadic behavior and interaction.