A Theory of Play and Fantasy

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist,and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a newforeword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of hismajor work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers."This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . .. Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not onlyinto anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry,genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of themind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in thebody of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individualwith his society and his species and with the universe at large."--D. W.Harding, _New York Review of Books_"[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast andchallenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and crypticallysuggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder."--RogerKeesing, _American Anthropologist_Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was the author of _Naven_ and _Mind and Nature._