Contributors: Adela Lynge, Eira Nguyen, Maryam Abusamak

Gregory Bateson: The Mind in Everything

If Tim Ingold’s Making is a conversation between hands, minds, and materials, then Gregory Bateson is one of the most intriguing voices echoing through it. Bateson (1904–1980) was a British anthropologist and systems theorist whose curiosity ranged from communication and psychology to dolphin research and cybernetics. His big question was simple but radical: how do living systems learn and know?

Bateson’s most influential work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1973), gathers essays that link culture, biology, and communication into one vision. He argued that the mind is not really locked inside a human skull but distributed across relationships between people, tools, and environments. This idea formed his “ecology of mind,” which essentially is a living system of thought that includes the world itself. 

One of his key concepts, deutero-learning or “learning to learn,” describes how organisms adapt not just by gaining information but by tuning into patterns of interaction. It’s the skill of learning from experience, of letting the world teach you. 

Bateson’s influence stretches far beyond anthropology; he inspired thinkers in systems theory, ecology, and even digital design. (Fun fact: he was once married to anthropologist Margaret Mead, and their joint fieldwork in Bali transformed how both understood culture and communication.) 

For Ingold, Bateson provides the perfect foundation. Making takes up Bateson’s call to think relationally: knowing and making are not separate from the world but arise within it. Bateson’s insight that “everything is connected” becomes Ingold’s guiding thread, the sense that to know is to correspond with the materials and forces that shape life itself.

Tim Ingold: Embodying the Ecology of Mind

We kept circling back to that opening scene in Making, where Ingold recalls the Saami people telling him, “Know for yourself!” (p. 1). At first, it sounds like tough love. But by the next page, it becomes the seed of his entire method. He realizes that “the only way one can really know things… is through a process of self-discovery” that knowing is movement (pp. 1–2). Bateson’s idea of learning within an ecology of mind (1973) suddenly becomes embodied. The world, Ingold says, “becomes a place of study… [we] learn from those with whom we study” (p. 2).

That insight, learning with rather than about, is the engine that drives the book — every chapter is a variation on it.

Bateson imagined learning as recursive feedback within an “ecology of mind” (1973): perception and action constantly reshape one another. Ingold keeps this loop but breathes life into it. He argues that anthropology itself must be a process of engagement rather than extraction. Participant observation, he insists, is “absolutely not a technique of data collection … it is enshrined in an ontological commitment … a way of knowing from the inside” (p. 5). To cut the loop into “data” is, he warns, to “turn the relation between knowing and being inside out” (p. 5).

Bateson’s deutero-learning describes how we acquire habits of response, learning to perceive and adjust to patterns across contexts. Ingold builds directly on this by introducing the concept of correspondence, which is essentially the mutual shaping that happens between the maker, the materials, and the environment. “The conduct of thought,” he writes, “goes along with the fluxes and flows of the materials with which we work. These materials think in us, as we think through them” (p. 6). To know from the inside is to inhabit that flux, to move and be moved, to think as life thinks.

Bateson’s theories become especially relevant in Making’s seventh chapter: Bodies on the Run. To Ingold, a body is alive when it leaks, exuding itself into its environment and engaging in a constant exchange of material between surroundings and self. Ingold once again relates this to the concept of correspondence, arguing that we are our bodies and experience ourselves moving in ongoing response to the materials surrounding us. Bateson’s concept of deutero-learning is referenced when Ingold expresses that the body, as a site of unfolding activity, is something to think from rather than about (p. 94). 

Bateson’s voice holds strong in Making when placed in conversation with other theorists. As Ingold ponders the mind’s role in the flow of materials, Bateson’s concept of the ecology of mind is used as an argument against Chris Gosden’s beliefs (p. 97). While Gosden is against studying the concept of the mind altogether, Bateson argues for our ability to retain an ecology of mind that complements an ecology of substance, the first dealing with information and the second with the exchange of energy and materials. Bateson’s legacy also ripples through later thinkers that Ingold references, such as Andy Clark, whose influential theory of the “extended mind” argues that cognition spreads across brain, body, and environment (p. 97).  

As a group, we were intrigued by how Ingold’s argument keeps circling back to the body in motion, particularly the hand. Ingold writes that, “Hands, in a word, can tell, both in their attentiveness to the conditions of a task as it unfolds, and in their gestural movements and the inscriptions they yield” (p. 116). Here, the hand becomes a site of knowing. He writes that its intelligence, “arises as an emergent property of the entire ‘form-creating system’… comprising the gestural synergy of human being, tool and material.” Ingold earlier in the book describes this as “a correspondence between mindful attention and lively materials conducted by skilled hands “at the trowel’s edge” (p. 11). 

This again echoes Bateson’s idea of learning as a continuous adjustment to patterns and relations, but Ingold grounds it in body practice. The hand learns by feeling its way forward, guided by touch, rhythm, and resistance. It knows through kinesthesia, the awareness of movements that connects body and world. In this way, Ingold transforms Bateson’s theoretical circuit of learning into a living, embodied correspondence, showing that knowing is not something the mind possesses but something the body performs in motion.

Ingold brings his argument full circle by linking the movement of the hand to that of the entire body, drawing a beautiful connection between dance, writing, and kinesthesia. The quality of movement when writing by hand shares the rhythm and tempo of one’s bodily gestures, and “extends into the lines that appear on the paper,” with these lines arising from experiences and in turn carrying us through life. Rejecting the idea of movement as the mere connection between points, Ingold argues that there is no singular end goal to learning as new opportunities are constantly emerging, and that one must wander the world at their own pace in a constant act of curious self-discovery (pp. 140, 141)

In this final sentiment that concludes Making, Ingold reiterates Bateson’s idea of learning as an ongoing process of adaptation within a living system, an ecology of mind where every gesture, like every thought, grows through its connections to what came before and what is yet to come.

Tracing the Source: Learning to Read Critically

As a group, we wanted to go beyond simply accepting Ingold’s use of Bateson at face value and instead ask: what happens when we go to Bateson himself? What steps does Steps to an Ecology of Mind actually give us that Ingold selectively uses for his own argument-making purpose? 

Ingold takes Bateson’s cybernetic loops and transforms them into lines of correspondence, which are less mechanical and simpler. Where Bateson spoke of systems and information exchange, Ingold speaks of walking, waving, and touching. As he says, “We owe our very being to the world we seek to know” (p. 5). So while Ingold emphasizes harmony through openness, Bateson was more cautious. Bateson’s notion of double bind also shows how communication can entrap rather than enlighten, which is something that Ingold barely acknowledges. 

We realized that maybe Ingold chooses the generative side of Bateson’s ideas, the more optimistic ones, sustaining growth. Still, this selective use of Bateson’s theory gives Ingold’s research a more distinctive perspective. He does not simply borrow Bateson’s idea, but as a companion to think with and bring his theory to life. 

This assignment really made us think about how theory travels, how one thinker borrows from another, reshapes their ideas, and sometimes leaves important pieces behind. Going back to Bateson’s theory helped us see that Ingold is rather reinterpreting it, molding it to fit his vision of anthropology as a living, embodied practice.

We learned that while authors may present strong and convincing arguments, the way theories are chosen, interpreted, and explained is often shaped by their own biases, purposes, and perspectives. This is natural. We are not neutral beings. It doesn’t mean that we should doubt everything we read, but we should stay aware of how knowledge is constructed and framed. 

As media studies students, we think maintaining a critical mindset allows us to engage more deeply with theory, to see not only what an author is saying, but also why and how they are saying it. It’s about reading with curiosity and care, recognizing that every interpretation is a creative act that both reveals and reshapes the ideas it draws from.

---

References

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. Routledge, 2013. 

“Gregory Bateson.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.,https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gregory-Bateson

Image credits: 

Haftner, Keeley. “Keeley Haftner.” Bad at Sports, 30 Jan. 2018, badatsports.com/2018/thinks-tim-ingold/

Vincent van, Vliet. “Gregory Bateson Biography, Quotes and Books.” Toolshero, 27 Aug. 2024, www.toolshero.com/toolsheroes/gregory-bateson

Contributors: Adela Lynge, Eira Nguyen, Maryam Abusamak