Writer and anthropologist Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson’s life in the Monadnock Region mirrored her life’s work, her daughter Sevanne Kassarjian said. “What my mom cared about was engagement,” she said. “She was deeply engaged in the world and with.
Mary Catherine Bateson, anthropologist and author of ‘Composing a Life,’ dies at 81 Matt Schudel Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropologist and writer of wide-ranging interests whose books included a memoir about her parents, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and another book about how women “compose” their lives through a series of conflicting responsibilities, died Jan. 2 at a hospice facility in Dartmouth, N.H. She was 81. She had a fall in the preceding week, said her daughter, Sevanne Margaret Kassarjian. Dr. Bateson was a multilingual scholar whose first book was titled “Arabic Language Handbook.” She taught at many colleges and universities, including George Mason University in Northern Virginia, and explored the intersections of language, women’s studies, public policy and cross-cultural understanding.
Mary Catherine Bateson Dies at 81; Anthropologist on Lives of Women
After a well-documented childhood as the daughter of Margaret Mead, she earned her own renown with a book on women’s lives that became a touchstone to feminists.
Mary Catherine Bateson at her home in New Hampshire in 2010. In “Composing a Life,” about the stop-and-start nature of women’s lives, she wrote of life “as an improvisatory art.”Credit.Trent Bell for The New York Times
Published Jan. 14, 2021Updated Jan. 19, 2021
Mary Catherine Bateson, a cultural anthropologist who was the author of quietly groundbreaking books on women’s lives and who as the only child of Margaret Mead had once been one of the most famous babies in America died on Jan. 2 in Lebanon, N.H. She was 81.