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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

Mary Catherine Bateson

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Mary Catherine Bateson
Age: 81 †
Born: 1939
Born: December 8
Died: 2021
Died: January 2
Anthropologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Mary C. Bateson
Tend
Sacred
Regard
Beings
Natural
Often
Human
Conventions
Humans
Societies

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Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
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Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.
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The caretaking has to be done. Somebody's got to be the mommy. Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.
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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.
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When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Improvisation and new learning are not private processes they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.
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...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere.
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I had repeatedly accepted inappropriate burdens, stepping in to do what needed to be done. In retrospect, I think I carried them well, but the cost was that I was chronically overloaded, weary, and short of time for politicking, smoothing ruffled feathers, and simply resting.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.
Mary Catherine Bateson