Don Lathrap in the Classroom: On Gregory Bateson’s Concept of “Schismogenesis” and its Application to Culture Contact in the Archaeological Record.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Reflections and Ripples of the Caiman: Papers in the Spirit of Don Lathrap" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Anyone who has taken an academic course with Don Lathrap rarely forgets the experience, as his lectures were both brilliant in content and disciplined in delivery. It was also in these classroom contexts that he sometimes expounded on authors and ideas central to his thinking but that curiously never made it into his published work. Such is the case with anthropologist Gregory Bateson and his concept of schismogenesis (Bateson 1935, 1958,1972), defined as “a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behavior resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals” and exhibiting two variations labeled symmetrical and complementary schismogenesis. Bateson provided multiple ethnographic examples and social contexts of these behaviors, but Lathrap was especially drawn to cases of rival moieties within a given community and with situations of culture contact such as long-distance trade and conquest warfare. Still, his lack of concrete archaeological examples may have been due to the absence of clear archaeological indicators for such behaviors. This paper explores Bateson’s concept using an archaeological episode of long-distance culture contact in the Jama-Coaque culture of coastal Ecuador. Strengths and weaknesses of the approach are evaluated and then compared with a recent resurgence of the concept in anthropological literature.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Reflections and Ripples of the Caiman: Papers in the Spirit of Don Lathrap   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50573