Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Gregory Bateson
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S o m e Components of
1. In the wide biological field, where description must be passed on from one
Note first of all that such exercises concern how we, the observ-
ers, shall classify the items of behavior. How shall we structure our
description? And what, if you please, is an "item" of behavior?
But these primary questions turn on another more difficult.
What we are watching are not the impacts of billiard balls but of
organisms, and they in turn have their own classification and struc-
turing of the events in which they participate. The rat has surely
a much more complex structure than the earthworm, and the struc-
ture is, surely, more complex again for the graduate student,
though he, at least, will try to help the observer by trying (and
seeming) to do what is asked of him. Our first task is to learn how
the subject structures his living. Only after that is done can we
build a "psychology," a science of biological categories.
This indeed is the trap of the laboratory in which the experimen-
ter is caught: that the units of behavior are defined by the structure
of the experiment, which structure is unilaterally determined by
only one of the participants . . . and that the wrong one. Under
such circumstances, the only units that can be investigated must al-
ways be simpler, smaller, and of lower logical type than the struc-
ture of the experiment. It is all very well to perform an experiment
with a "naive" rat. When he becomes "test wise," the sophistication
of the experiment will have to transcend that test wisdom.
This need to transcend, that is, to use in the explanations, prop-
ositions of higher logical type than the descriptive proposition used
in the explanandum, has a logical corollary in the familiar rule that
no scientific hypothesis can ever be verified by inductive procedure.
The proposition of lower type can contradict but never verify that
of high type. This rule is especially cogent when the explanandum
contains propositions such as ideas in the heads of rats and people.
Finally, what about cultural contrast? How, if at all, can the an-
thropologist recognize "play," "manipulation," and so on, among
people of another culture? And what about dolphins and octopuses?
All of these questions are embarrassing and all must be faced to
make sure that we do not claim insight to which we are not entitled
by our experience, but I, personally, do not believe that the gross
difficulty of these questions makes invalid all attempts to under-
stand what goes on in other cultures and among nonhuman organ-
isms.
As it seems to me, there are several components of our problem
which suggest that it may be not insoluble and which, conversely,
suggest that research which ignores all these advantageous compo-
nents is likely to be a tilting at epistemologically monstrous wind-
mills. First, "socialization" (by definition) requires interaction,
usually of two or more organisms. From this it follows that, what-
ever goes on below the surface, inside the organisms where we can-
not see it, there must be a large part of that "iceberg" showing
above surface. We, biologists, are lucky in that evolution is always
a co-evolution and learning is always a co-learning. Moreover, this
visible part of the process is no mere by-product. It is precisely that
production, that set of appearances, to produce which is supposedly
the "goal" of all that learning which we call "socialization." More-
over, this aggregate of externally observable phenomena, always in-
volving two or more "pers~ns,"~ contains not only what has been
learned but also all the imperfect attempts of both persons to fit
together in an ongoing process of interchange.
Above all, out there and imaginable for the scientist, are the con-
texts of all those failures and successes that mark the process of
"socialization."
In other words, the scientist who would investigate "socializa-
tion" is lucky in that nature displays before him phenomena that
are already ordered in two ways that should be of interest to him.
He can observe "out there" both the actions of the interacting per-
sons and, by a sort of inductive perception, the contexts of these ac-
tions.
Clearly a first step in defining units or parts of the process of so-
cialization will be the explication of these two levels of order: the
"actions" and the "contexts."
another.
Plates 14, 15, and 16 taken together give us indications about the
Balinese body image. We have, on the one hand, the fantasy of the in-
verted body with its head on the pubes; and on the other, the Balinese
method of learning through their muscles, the discrepant muscular ten-
sions which are characteristic of their dancing, and the independent
movement and posturing of the separate fingers in dance. We have, in
fact, a double series of motifs-indications that the body is a single
unit as perfectly integrated as any single organ, and contrasting indica-
tions that the body is made up of separate parts, each of which is as
perfectly integrated as the whole.
This plate illustrates the motif of the perfectly integrated body im-
age, while Plates 18, 19, and 20 illustrate the fantasy that the body is
made up of separate parts and may fall to pieces (beroek).
REFERENCE
BATESON,
GREGORY, and MARGARET MEAD.1942. Balinese Character:
A Photographic Analysis (Special Publications of the New York
Academy of Sciences, 2). New York Academy of Sciences.