Peter Harries-Jones – författare

The essays in this collection use case studies to address four vital issues of modern social advocacy. The first is the new social framework which has legitimized advocacy and recognized the immense importance of human rights legislation. The second issue explored is the adoption of various strategies by advocates in empowering social groups to achieve better self-management. A third issue is the link between the process of advocacy and social movements. In the past the sociological study of collective conflict focused on the confrontation between capital and labour, but in recent years social movements have shifted the focus to quality of life or "programmed society" conflicts. Fourth, the essays examine the role of academic social science in the new process of advocacy. Harries-Jones and the other contributors propose that outdated notions of objectivity in the social sciences be replaced by reflexiveness, social commitment, and interested knowledge. The case studies of advocacy in this collection include those concerning human rights in Chile, race relations, refugees, community and labour advocacy, alternative work training, and advocacy in the women''s movement. The contributors to this volume are Howard Adelman, Jinny Arancibia, Marcelo Charlin, John Cleveland, Stewart Crysdale, Harry Diaz, Don Dippo, Jacques Doyer, Peter Harries-Jones, Elspeth Heyworth, Peter Landstreet, Ronnie Leah, Stan Marshall, Gareth Morgan, Tim Rees, Metta Spencer, and Carol Tator.

Gregory Bateson was one of the most original social scientists of this century. He is widely known as author of key ideas used in family therapy - including the well-known condition called 'double bind' . He was also one of the most influential figures in cultural anthropology. In the decade before his death in 1980 Bateson turned toward a consideration of ecology. Standard ecology concentrates on an ecosystem's biomass and on energy budgets supporting life. Bateson came to the conclusion that understanding ecological organization requires a complete switch in scientific perspective. He reasoned that ecological phenomena must be explained primarily through patterns of information and that only through perceiving these informational patterns will we uncover the elusive unity, or integration, of ecosystems.Bateson believed that relying upon the materialist framework of knowledge dominant in ecological science will deepen errors of interpretation and, in the end, promote eco-crisis. He saw recursive patterns of communication as the basis of order in both natural and human domains. He conducted his investigation first in small-scale social settings; then among octopus, otters, and dolphins. Later he took these investigations to the broader setting of evolutionary analysis and developed a framework of thinking he called 'an ecology of mind.' Finally, his inquiry included an ecology of mind in ecological settings - a recursive epistemology.This is the first study of the whole range of Bateson's ecological thought - a comprehensive presentaionof Bateson's matrix of ideas. Drawing on unpublished letters and papers, Harries-Jones clarifies themes scattered throughout Bateson's own writings, revealing the conceptual consistency inherent in Bateson's position, and elaborating ways in which he pioneered aspects of late twentieth-century thought.

This intellectual biography covers the trajectory of Bateson's career, from his anthropological work in Bali alongside his wife, Margaret Mead, to his contributions to family therapy in the United States, and to studies of recursion as a feature of communication patterns in both the human and in the animal world. Layers of feedback with their many differing contexts, highlight the presence of meaning in social relations in contrast to that absence of meaning, purposefully proposed, within information theory. Throughout the human and in the animal world, recursion of feedback accounts for grasp of patterns, their difference, and with ability to communicate, enable transduction of perceptions of difference.Bateson's insistence on feedback and communication re-frames many aspects of culture, psychology, biology, and evolution. His legacy is recognized as an important precursor to the formation of a new science called Biosemiotics.Harries-Jones argues that Bateson turns conventional causality upside down through showing how humanity's perceptions, as with perceptions of all sentient beings, are anticipative. All sentient beings abduct from recursive patterns, rather than relying on linear evidence gathered about time/space movements of objects. Thus circular pattering provides clearer perceptions of the difference between sustainable creativity and current biocide, between our appreciation of nature's aesthetics and time/space 'games of power' which underlie so many social and biological theories.