Cybernetics and Human Knowing. Vol. 28 (2021), nos. 3-4, pp. 33–47 Anthropology in the Shadow of Anthropocene Overheating Pantheistic Atheism and the Biosemiotic Turn Thomas Hylland Eriksen 1 This article is about pattern resemblances and connections, and connects the dots between Bateson père and Bateson fille, then argues that a biosemiotic turn is long overdue in anthropology, and finally shows how the mode of thinking developed in Mary Catherine Bateson’s work can shed light on global crises today. The article is framed as a dialogue between anthropology and biosemiotics. In anthropology, there is currently a strong concern with overcoming the Cartesian dualisms and to include the non- human world in its theoretical framework; in biosemiotics, there is a need to show its relevance for the study of human relations. In this, the two are complementary, and whereas anthropology produces substantial knowledge about human diversity and communication, biosemiotics offers a methodology for studying communication at a multispecies level without relinquishing scientific standards or falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. Mary Catherine Bateson’s relational and processual perspective on human lives contributes some of the tools needed to make sense of systems of a very different kind, notably global climate change and the effects of globalization on diversity. Keywords: Biosemiotics, anthropology, diversity, flexibility, globalization For the great irony of our time is that, even as we are living longer, we are thinking shorter. —Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Further Life. Like her parents, Mary Catherine Bateson was an anthropologist. Unlike her mother, however, she spent her life on the outskirts of the discipline and beyond it, making her name as an educator and theorist of learning, a scholar of language and metaphors, a biographer of her parents and a sensitive and wise writer about gender, generations and race. To many, she is best known as a co-author, with her father, of Angels Fear , an exploration of the sacred from a non-religious perspective. However, non-religious may not be the best designation of the father-and-daughter project carried through by Mary Catherine after Gregory’s death in 1980. Rather, the book brims with religious notions, it buzzes with powerful metaphors spinning webs between all kinds of living things, and at the end of the day, perhaps it is best described as a work of pantheistic atheism, or atheistic animism (although this designation fits the father better than the daughter). As in Gregory Bateson’s previous work Mind and Nature (1979), the concept of mind is seen as a supra-individual aspect of the biosphere, creating those connections which make communication possible and information, famously defined in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) as differences that make a difference, available 1. University of Oslo. Email: t.h.eriksen@sai.uio.no Copyright (c) Imprint Academic For personal use only -- not for reproduction