Editing Gregory Bateson (section)

=== New Guinea ===
Bateson's beginning years as an anthropologist were spent floundering, lost without a specific objective in mind. He began in 1927 with a trip to [[New Guinea]], spurred by his mentor [[A. C. Haddon]].<ref name="lipset1982"/>{{rp|125}} His goal, as suggested by Haddon, was to explore the effects of contact between the [[Sepik]] natives and whites.  Unfortunately for Bateson, his time spent with the [[Baining people|Baining]] of New Guinea was halted and difficult. The Baining were not particularly accommodating of his research, and he missed out on many communal activities. They were also not inclined to share their religious practices with him.<ref name="lipset1982"/>{{rp|128}} He left the Baining frustrated. Next, he set out to study the [[Sulka language|Sulka]], belonging to another native population of New Guinea. Although the Sulka were very different from the Baining and their culture was more easily observed, he felt their culture was dying, which left him dispirited and discouraged.<ref name="lipset1982"/>{{rp|130}}

He experienced more success with the [[Iatmul people]], an indigenous people living along New Guinea's [[Sepik River]]. The observations he made among the Iatmul people allowed him to develop his concept of [[schismogenesis]]. In his 1936 book ''Naven'' he defined the term, based on his Iatmul fieldwork, as "a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals" (p.&nbsp;175). The book was named after the 'naven' rite, an honorific ceremony among the Iatmul, still continued today, that celebrates first-time cultural achievements.  The ceremony entails behaviours that are otherwise forbidden in everyday social life. For example, men and women reverse and exaggerate gender roles; men dress in women's skirts, and women dress in men's attire and ornaments.<ref name="lipset1982"/>{{rp|136}} Additionally, some women smear mud in the faces of other relatives, beat them with sticks, and hurl bawdy insults.  Mothers may drop to the ground so their celebrated 'child' walks over them.  And during a male rite, a mother's brother may slide his buttocks down the leg of his honoured sister's son, a complex gesture of masculine birthing, pride, and insult, rarely performed before women, that brings the honoured sister's son to tears.<ref>Silverman, Eric Kline (2001) ''Masculinity, Motherhood and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea''. University of Michigan Press</ref> Bateson suggested the influence of a circular system of causation, and proposed that women watched:

<blockquote>for the spectacular performances of the men, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the presence of an audience is a very important factor in shaping the men's behavior. In fact, it is probable that the men are more exhibitionistic because the women admire their performances. Conversely, there can be no doubt that the spectacular behavior is a stimulus which summons the audience together, promoting in the women the appropriate … behavior.<ref name="lipset1982"/>{{rp|143}}</blockquote>

In short, the behaviour of person X affects person Y, and the reaction of person Y to person X's behaviour will then affect person X's behaviour, which in turn will affect person Y, and so on. Bateson called this the "vicious circle."<ref name="lipset1982"/>{{rp|143}} He then discerned two models of schismogenesis: symmetrical and complementary.<ref name="lipset1982"/>{{rp|144}} Symmetrical relationships are those in which the two parties are equals, competitors, such as in sports. Complementary relationships feature an unequal balance, such as dominance-submission (parent-child), or exhibitionism-spectatorship (performer-audience). Bateson's experiences with the Iatmul led him to publish a book in 1936 titled ''Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View'' (Cambridge University Press).  The book proved to be a watershed in anthropology and modern social science.<ref>Marcus, George (1985) A Timely Rereading of Naven: Gregory Bateson as Oracular Essayist. ''Raritan'' 12:66–82.</ref>

Until Bateson published ''Naven,'' most anthropologists assumed a realist approach to studying culture, in which one simply described social reality. Bateson's book argued that this approach was naive, since an anthropologist's account of a culture was always and fundamentally shaped by whatever theory the anthropologist employed to define and analyse the data. To think otherwise, stated Bateson, was to be guilty of what [[Alfred North Whitehead]] called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness."  There was no singular or self-evident way to understand the Iatmul naven rite.  Instead, Bateson analysed the rite from three unique points of view: [[Sociology|sociological]], [[Ethology|ethological]], and eidological. The book, then, was not a presentation of anthropological analysis but an epistemological account that explored the nature of anthropological analysis itself.

The sociological point of view sought to identify how the ritual helped bring about social integration. In the 1930s, most anthropologists understood marriage rules to regularly ensure that social groups renewed their alliances.  But Iatmul, argued Bateson, had contradictory marriage rules. Marriage, in other words, could not guarantee that a marriage between two clans would at some definite point in the future recur. Instead, Bateson continued, the naven rite filled this function by regularly ensuring exchanges of food, valuables, and sentiment between mothers' brothers and their sisters' children, or between separate lineages. Naven, from this angle, held together the different social groups of each village into a unified whole.

The ethological point of view interpreted the ritual in terms of the conventional emotions associated with normative male and female behaviour, which Bateson called ethos. In Iatmul culture, observed by Bateson, men and women lived different emotional lives.  For example, women were rather submissive and took delight in the achievements of others; men were fiercely competitive and flamboyant. During the ritual, however, men celebrated the achievements of their nieces and nephews while women were given a ritual license to act raucously. In effect, naven allowed men and women to experience momentarily the emotional lives of each other, thereby to achieve a level of psychological integration.

The third and final point of view, the eidological, was the least successful. Here Bateson endeavoured to correlate the organisational structure of the naven ceremony with the habitual patterns of Iatmul thought. Much later, Bateson would harness the very same idea in the development of the [[Double bind#Schizophrenia|double-bind theory of schizophrenia]].

In the Epilogue to the book, Bateson was clear: "The writing of this book has been an experiment, or rather a series of experiments, in methods of thinking about anthropological material." That is to say, his overall point was not to describe Iatmul culture of the naven ceremony but to explore how different modes of analysis, using different premises and analytic frameworks, could lead to different explanations of the same sociocultural phenomenon.  Not only did Bateson's approach re-shape fundamentally the anthropological approach to culture, but the naven rite itself has remained a locus classicus in the discipline.  In fact, the meaning of the ritual continues to inspire anthropological analysis.<ref>See, most recently, Michael Houseman and Carlo Seviri, 1998, ''Naven or the Other Self: A Relational Approach to Ritual Action'' (Leiden: Brill); Eric Kline Silverman, 2001, ''Masculinity, Motherhood and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea'' (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press); Andrew Moutu, 2013, ''Names are Thicker than Blood: Kinship and Ownership amongst the Iatmul'' (Oxford University Press).</ref>