The Functioning Framework of Life. Gregory Bateson’s “Epistemology of the Sacred” and the Performing Arts

Between Gregory Bateson’s thought and ethnoscenology as a field of research there are some interesting points of contact. First of all, we could consider the common belief in “a sacred unity” between the human being and the biosphere. Bateson rejected the traditional mind/body or mind/matter dualism; his seminal concept of mind represents the most radical attempt to go beyond the Cartesian dualism in Western epistemology. When he died, in July 1980, he was working on a book to be called Where Angels Fear to Tread; seven years later it was finally published, co-authored by Gregory’s daughter Mary Catherine. As she says, Gregory «had become aware gradually that the unity of nature […] might only be comprehensible through the kind of metaphors familiar from religion; that, in fact, he was approaching that integrative dimension of experience he called the sacred». In addition, she reveals that in this book Bateson «approached a set of questions that were implicit in his work over a very long period, again and again pushed back: not only the question of the “sacred” but also the question of the “aesthetic”». This seems quite relevant to the conference topic. What does Bateson exactly mean with “sacred”? How the relationship between the “sacred” and the “aesthetic” is expressed? Despite the lack of an articulate discussion by Bateson, the essay tries to show that this relationship is rooted in performing practices (ritual and/or artistic).