User:Tiya19/Mary Catherine Bateson

Early life and education[edit]
Bateson was a graduate of the Brearley School and received her B.A. from Radcliffe in 1960 and her Ph.D. in linguistics and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard in 1963. Her dissertation examined linguistic patterns in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.

Personal life[edit]
Bateson was married to Barkev Kassarjian, a professor of management at Babson College, from 1960 until her death. They had one daughter, Sevanne Margaret (born 1969), an actress who works professionally under the name Sevanne Martin,[citation needed] and two grandsons. Through her mother's side of the family, Bateson was also the cousin of Jeremy Steig as well as a niece of William Steig and Leo Rosten.

Bateson died on January 2, 2021 in hospice near her home in Lebanon, New Hampshire, age 81. She had suffered from brain damage caused by a fall a few months earlier.

Style of Writing
Bateson considers herself an “activist for peace and justice” and stresses the importance, in our years of “unanticipated longevity,” to continue to be willing to learn. At the beginning of Bateson's career she was a linguist that studied Arabic poetry. Until she shifted her focus from a professional interest in human patterns of communication to highly formalistic studies thus starting her career as an anthropologist. Changing focus in topics Bateson began to use her own life experience to write. Bateson uses her own experience as a woman, daughter, mother, scholar, and anthropologist, who has gone through many different situations, as a guide for her writings. Bateson liked to keep her readers engaged by having them question her ideology and entertain the readings own provoking thoughts with questions. She wrote in a similar style to journaling often using personal examples or quotes for ideas and observations. She also uses cross-cultural experiences of other individuals incorporated into her writings.

One of Bateson’s first books was her memoir With a Daughter’s Eye, reflecting about her life with her deceased parents Margret Mead and Gregory Bateson. The memoir created a path for self-discovery and enablement of experiences she incorporated into her writings for example her next book Composing a Life. Exploring Composing a Life shows how deeply connected Bateson’s own journey as a scholar as parallel to a world, she and other women faced overt sexism and female inferiority was occurring. She questioned the gender expectations and the misogynistic reality of the 1980s with her book using her own experience as a parallel. In all of Bateson’s work she uses this method to help fuel her writings. Many of her books are still being used as inspiration in feminist questioning gendered expectations.

Bibliography[edit]

 * Thinking Race: Social Myths and Biological Realities (2019) with Richard Goldsby
 * Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom (2010)
 * Willing to Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery (2004)
 * Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition (2000)
 * Peripheral Visions - Learning Along the Way (1994)
 * Composing a Life (1991)
 * Thinking AIDS (1988) with Richard Goldsby
 * Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (1987) written with Gregory Bateson
 * With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (1984)
 * At Home in Iran (1974)
 * Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation (1972)
 * Arabic Language Handbook (1967)