ABSTRACT
Gregory Bateson's comments must have raised a laugh when he delivered his paper at the Seventh Conference on Methods in Philosophy and Science in 1940. Bateson illustrated the development of his own thought and its relationship to anthropological analyses across different domains of inquiry, ranging from ethnography to psychiatry to cybernetics. Bateson provided glimpses of his mode of thought and his style of anthropological theorizing. Other anthropologists, especially those who advance a particular reflexive mood, have written about their own lives in a more sustained fashion. At one extreme, these moody anthropologists insist on inserting themselves into their accounts of complex social worlds. A handful of anthropologists have written autobiographies. These include Claude Levi-Strauss; Margaret Mead; Loren Eiseley; Richard MacNeish; Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf; Edward T. Hall; and Robin Fox. The chapter focuses on Levi-Strauss, Eiseley, Mead, and Fox, whose work extends beyond the margins of anthropology and has proven influential in other realms.
