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Product Description
In Full Circles, Overlapping Lives, bestselling author and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson looks with an inspired eye at how our very concepts of personal identity and shared fulfillment are changing. Living longer than ever before, alongside increasingly diverse neighbors, we are obliged to rethink our lives at every stage of the life cycle, to question expected roles and relationships, and to discover new possibilities. This is a book rich with the telling observations and subtle wisdom that the author has made her trademarks. Eloquent and persuasive, Bateson not only explores the changing stages of our lives but offers a profound insight: We live with strangers. We meet strangers not only on the street but at the breakfast table and in the mirror. We are constantly surprised or mystified by those closest to us--children, parents, and spouses--as they respond to new situations. Rather than seeing this as necessarily distressing, however, the author shows how even the home can be a training ground for an individual's ability to understand the differences of race, class, and generation: how a family can be enjoyed as a microcosm of the multiplicity around us, rather than as a refuge from the world's diversity.
Bateson explores her groundbreaking theme by weaving together the words of a group of remarkable women whom she taught at Spelman College, drawing on her teaching at George Mason University as well. The lives of these women--young, old, black, white, married, single--provide an exploration of what it means to live in America today and offer a prism through which we all can glimpse facets of ourselves. As in Bateson's bestseller Composing a Life, the stories tell of individual discovery and creative improvisation. Along the way, these women's choices and affirmations challenge many familiar concepts: What is the difference between a child and an adult? What is fidelity? How do illness and death enrich life? Bateson juxtaposes the discussions of their lives and their questions of identity, expectation, and fulfillment with life histories from around the world to allow for new and greater understanding.
Learning from the women she has taught, Bateson has come to believe that listening across generations is key to living creatively and to discovering the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. Her message will resonate with anyone seeking to learn from loved ones, to share more with friends, or simply to see his or her own lifetime with new wisdom and acceptance.
Amazon.com Review
"Home is the heartland of strangeness," writes anthropologist and English professor Mary Catherine Bateson; there are always parts of others, even our closest intimates, that are utterly unknowable. Full Circles, Overlapping Lives explores such "strangeness" between individual lives by turning not only to her family history (she is the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson) but to the stories of her own students.
Bateson teaches a class on "women's life histories" at Spelman College, an all-black women's college in Atlanta, and carefully assembles her students from traditional-age undergrads and older women from outside the school who can offer a different generational perspective. Together they investigate questions about their knowledge of the self and of others through reading multicultural histories of women and by writing their own stories. Bateson is at her best when she draws out her students, finding parallels in their stories with her own well-considered anthropological observations. She's less effective when she wanders off into generalizations about how to live that seem overly didactic and sometimes outdated--the suburbs, for instance, are no longer quite the all-white 1950s hideaway she imagines, where those who don't like the "smell of other people's cooking" escape. Readers who want new tools for thinking about learning, as well as those who loved Bateson's 1989 bestseller Composing a Life, will nevertheless find much to enjoy. --Maria Dolan
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