Mary Catherine Bateson
Mary Catherine Bateson
Mary Catherine Batesonis an American writer and cultural anthropologist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
graduation educational memorable
We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
loss echoes identity
Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
age important way
Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.
goal blinkers defined
Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
caring animal self
A glad welcome to this affirmation by a group of psychologists that the self does not stop at the skin nor even with the circle of human relationships but is interwoven with the lives of trees and animals and soil; that caring for the deepest needs of persons and caring for our threatened planet are not in conflict.
commitment democracy politics
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
sacred natural conventions
Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
biblical opposites ideas
Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizing, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.
perspective retrospect continuity
Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
problem depends solutions
Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.
teamwork sports women
Traditionally in American society, men have been trained for both competition and teamwork through sports, while women have been reared to merge their welfare with that of the family, with fewer opportunities for either independence or other team identifications, and fewer challenges to direct competition. In effect, women have been circumscribed within that unit where the benefit of one is most easily believed to be the benefit of all.
memories thinking games
Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
love age may
... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.
christian imagination religion
The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.