Cryptanalytic Techniques in Gregory Bateson’s Anthropology

This article offers a new interpretation of the methodological foundations of Gregory Bateson’s anthropology. By examining Bateson’s early visual-anthropological studies of Balinese culture, conducted jointly with Margaret Mead, as well as their later theoretical integration within the synthetic project Steps to an Ecology of Mind, the author argues that the core of Bateson’s approach to cultural analysis is constituted by cryptanalytic techniques. The conceptual bridge linking cultural analysis to cryptanalysis is the notion of redundancy, borrowed from Claude Shannon’s information theory. Redundancy, on the one hand, has a highly specialized application in cryptography and cryptanalysis, as it represents the principal vulnerability of most existing ciphers; on the other hand, for Bateson redundancy is identified with pattern (and with meaning). The use of redundancy in cryptanalysis is in many respects analogous to the way the concept of cultural pattern functions within Bateson’s anthropological framework. The anthropologist’s work thus appears largely as a process of deciphering the cultural code by tracing its internal redundancies. Nevertheless, the author approaches the question of Bateson’s conscious borrowing of cryptanalytic techniques with caution, suggesting instead a certain “inertia” inherent in the conceptual apparatus itself. Invoking redundancy as an analytic instrument almost inevitably entails a cryptanalytic strategy of its application. This situates Bateson’s methodology in opposition to the hermeneutic approach exemplified, for instance, by Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology, in which culture is understood as a kind of literary text requiring the elucidation of meanings. By employing “decipherment” rather than “interpretation” and redundancy rather than meaning, Bateson’s anthropology may be regarded as one of the most formalized approaches to the study of culture and behavior.