Play and paradigm – TAASP keynote address, April 1977

ABSTRACT

This keynote address was delivered by Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), at the Third Annual Meeting of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, in San Diego, April 1977. It was transcribed, edited, and annotated by Phillips Stevens Jr., and first appeared in Volume 4(1) (1977) of The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play Newsletter (pp. 2–8).

Bateson spoke without notes but tape-recorded his talk and handed me (Phillips Stevens) the tape for transcription. But an apology is due here. Mr. Bateson was one of those extraordinary people whose mind moves faster than the voice, so I often faced the problem of rendering a half-completed statement (which derived of course from a completed thought) into grammatically correct English. I also had the problem of transcribing Iatmul words with which I was not familiar, and at the time of this transcription, Mr. Bateson had retired for 6 months incommunicado. So I have taken some small liberties with his text. But it is all here. The subsequent footnotes are my own, added to assist the reader. I am grateful to Wendy Sebert and Irene Suhr for their assistance in transcribing a working draft of this paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Addiction
• anthropology
• double-bind
• paradigmatic change
• play
• play frame
• signals & messages

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jugen Ruesch, with whom Bateson wrote Structure and Process in Social Relations (1949), and their seminal Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951)

2 In San Francisco.

3 Referring to Bertrand Russell (d.1970), an eminent and pioneering mathematician and philosopher, but also interested in paradoxes and logical types levels. His ‘barber paradox’(the village barber said that he shaved everyone who did not shave himself, yet one might ask, ‘Who shaves the barber?’) is well-known in logic, and this led to the ‘Russell paradox’, which has to do with statements about classes that are members of themselves and classes that are not members of themselves. Russell was an early mentor of Norman Wiener (see Note vii).

4 The Nature of Play - Part I: River Otters (16mm., one reel, 1952)

5 Cretan prophet and seer of the 6th Century BC, credited with having made the statement, ‘All Cretans are liars’, which could not be a true statement, since he himself was a Cretan

6 Norbert Wiener (d.1964), the so-called ‘father of cybernetics’, mathematician and logician (cf. his Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948)

7 Mathematician and logician (cf. his Probability and Scientific Interference, 1957; and Laws of Form, 1969).

8 For elaboration, see Bateson’ A Theory of Play and Fantasy (1955); reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (1972)

9 For elaboration, see Bateson’s (1971) The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism; reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (1972).

10 In A Theory of Play and Fantasy (1955)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904–4 July 1980) was a British anthropologist and social scientist, whose work included and influenced many fields. His most well-known writings include Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). Bateson and his colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. His interest in systems theory and epistemology ran throughout his work.