Personal Anthropo-Gazing

Personal Anthropo-GazingOnderkant formulier

Anthropo-Gazing, as an individual, requires learning to think how nature works in ecological systems in context. This way of gazing/thinking/acting is derived from the work of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972; 1979; 1990). From the beginning to the end of his career he was passionate to compare processes of information exchanges between humans (anthropo-logos) with other (mammalian) animal communication patterns. This brought him to the distinction between ‘nature-made suffering’ (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, floods, famines, etc.) and ‘man-made suffering’ (such as murder, domestic and sexual violence, sexisms/racisms, terrorism, wars, genocides, nuclear disasters, famines).

How can we look at human societies, with all its subsystems, in such a way to distinct man-made​-suffering from nature-made human suffering?

In the animal come man – made ​​- suffering as genocide and terrorism, do not occur. This observation led Bateson to study the effects of social and communication systems among sea otters and dolphins and ‘translate’ the results to our human communication patterns. Many of his remarkable insights emerged from this knowledge-producing (epistemological) position.