Mary Catherine Bateson (December 8, 1939 – January 2, 2021) was an American writer and cultural anthropologist.
The daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Bateson was a noted author in her field with many published monographs. Among her books was With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, a recounting of her upbringing by two famous parents. She taught at Harvard, Amherst, and George Mason University.
Early life and education
Bateson was a graduate of the Brearley School and received her B.A. from Radcliffe in 1960 and her Ph.D. in linguistics and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard in 1963. Her dissertation examined linguistic patterns in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.
Career
In the mid-1960s, Bateson became a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, studying Tagalog and helping organize a sociology seminar with businessman Sixto K. Roxas in 1968 to better address housing needs for the SSS Village then being built in the town of Marikina, Rizal.
Bateson considered herself an "activist for peace and justice" and stressed the importance in the years of “unanticipated longevity”
Personal life and death
Bateson was married to Barkev Kassarjian, a professor of management at Babson College, from 1960 to her death. As graduate students, the young couple purchased, for a sum of $15,000, an 18th-century farmhouse on a wooded 100-acre New Hampshire property that served, in addition to a Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment, as their home for over 50 years. They had one daughter, Sevanne Margaret (born 1969), an actress who works professionally under the name Sevanne Martin, and two grandchildren.
Through her mother's side of the family, Bateson was also the cousin of Jeremy Steig Toward the end of Bateson's residence in Iran in 1979, Catherine's mother who was paying a visit to her family in Iran died in New York. Her father then died a year later in 1980.
Bateson died on January 2, 2021, at a hospice near her home in Hancock, New Hampshire, aged 81. She had suffered from brain damage from a fall a few months earlier. Bateson liked to keep her readers engaged by having them question her ideology and entertain the readings own provoking thoughts with questions. She wrote in a similar style to journaling and often used personal examples or quotes for ideas and observations. The memoir created a path for self-discovery and enablement of the experiences that she incorporated into her writings, such as her next book, Composing a Life. That book showed how deeply connected Bateson's own journey as a scholar as parallel was to a world in which she and other women faced overt sexism and female inferiority.