Published: October 2023

Keywords:
Phillip Guddemi, Biosemiotics, Bateson Ideas Group, Bateson Archive, Octopus, Gregory Bateson, War, Cuban Missile Crisis, metalogue, Warren McCulloch, What Is an Instinct, Metaphor, Mechanistic Model, Cybernetics, Relational Communication, Factory Farming, Addiction, Is there a Conspiracy?, Nora Bateson, Technology, Ancient Greek Tragedy, G. Spencer Brown, Power, Questions, Research, Schizophrenia, Double Bind.

Phillip Guddemi

Phillip Guddemi is a cultural anthropologist and cybernetic thinker, who studied with Bateson as an undergraduate at U.C. Santa Cruz in the 1970s. He is President of the Bateson Idea Group and one of the Directors of the International Bateson Institute. He is the author of Gregory Bateson on Relational Communication: From Octopuses to Nations (2020). He has also published on topics including the problem of conscious purpose, the cybernetics of “what we mean when we talk about power,” how Gregory Bateson’s early anthropological study Naven prefigured second-order cybernetics, and the use in anthropology of Gregory Bateson's later and more systemic ideas. He was formerly Managing Editor of the journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing. His own fieldwork in anthropology has included studies of art, ritual, and subsistence in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea (upriver from where Gregory Bateson worked in the 1930s). He has also worked on oral history and ethnicity in the Republic of North Macedonia.

Abstract

Phillip Guddemi, in an online discussion, talks to us about his new book, Gregory Bateson, on Relational Communication. From Octopuses to Nations. On this occasion, he focuses on many crucial issues concerning scientists, therapists and humanhood.