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"In this delightful volume Nora Bateson playfully and poetically follows in her father's footsteps in search of complex wisdom for our uncertain world."
Alfonso Montuori, Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies

“The way we see affects what we do,” writes Nora Bateson near the start of this exploratory, far- ranging  foray into  “unauthorized knowledge.” In a series of premise-investigations undertaken  by way of essays, conference talks, autobiographical story, quotes and poems,  ranging through linguistics, biology, semantics, cognitive theory, justice awareness  and embrace of paradox, Bateson invites and advocates suppleness of perception, rigor of mind, and depth of  feeling. In this  book that moves above all by its questions, Bateson embodies that rarity, a truly free thinker also fully engaged with the fates of all."
 
Jane Hirshfield, Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and author of The Beauty and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
"Do buy and read Nora Bateson's beautiful new book. It takes us through a great circle of poetry, science, ecology, dreams, economics, politics, childrearing. Birthing the future. The prose is juicy and delectable, and brings us face to face with the most complex global questions. Intimate, complex, open-ended." Stephen Nachmanovitch
"This is a wonderful text, beautifully written and enriched with deep insights. So, I’ll have to accustom my tongue to Symmathesy, which of course will require some serious symmathesizing."

Jesper Hoffmeyer, emeritus professor at the University of Copenhagen Institute of Biology, President of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, author of  Biosemiotics and Signs of Meaning in the Universe.
"Small Arcs of Larger Circles is a marvellous meditation of moving words making new pathways manifest in a lush and densely interconnected forest of ideas and experiences. Poetry, philosophy, and memoir merge in ecological thinking at its best."

​Professor Evan Thompson, University of British Columbia, author of Waking, Dreaming, Being and Mind in Life.
"Nora provides a multifaceted invitation—one that avoids dichotomies—to see the complexity of our world. Because “we are more than one plus one,” she says that mutual learning is the basis to understand and mitigate the injurious patterns that are in opposition to nature. Her writing makes this very difficult task comprehensible due to her poetic, honest, and empathic style. She also seamlessly blends a three-generational legacy of evolving thoughts on this topic from her grandfather William, Gregory, and her own personal journey. Her many profound and interrelated chapters flow with narratives of her evolving contexts. They bring you through questions that ask: What it is that “holds anything together” within an order that “we are within and that is within us”? She covers interdisciplinary examples and encourages us to be “flexible and alive in relation to one another and the outside world.”
Dr Kenneth Silvestri, Psychotherapist ​
writing in Journal of Systemic Therapies, Vol 36, No. 2
Read the full review
What can one say about this book? It almost defies words, because she uses language to go beyond language itself. Hers is the finger pointing at the moon. It's a beautiful mix of poetry and imagination, as well as the rigorous inquiry of science. Nora Bateson continues and extends the legacy of her father, Gregory Bateson. This is a book that keeps on giving. Fresh. Lively. Full of love for the real complexities of life. Keep this book by your bed. Give it to someone you love.
​Robert Althouse on amazon.com

REVIEWS of Small Arcs of Larger Circles
(See also INTERVIEWS with Nora here)
​​

Nora Bateson

From a review by Davd Lorimer in Network Review - Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network

"Readers of this Review will probably be most familiar with the work of Gregory Bateson, but may not be
aware that his father William was professor of biology at Cambridge and coined the term genetics in 1906. ... Interestingly, it turns out that the phrase ‘the evolution is in the context’ comes from William, even though it is often attributed to Gregory.

This book is a rich feast with poetry, short reflections and more extended pieces introducing the terms
transcontextuality and symmathesy. It is a corrective to the excessive emphasis on individualism in the
West: ‘”I” carries the suggestion that I am somehow individual, independent, when interdependence is the law’ - even within our own bodies containing over 10 trillion organisms and without which we cannot live.

Transcontextuality reminds us that an understanding of living organisms requires more than one context of study if we are to understand their vitality. Perception of the world of things makes them separate, which means that we can assign some form of agency. However, ‘when the larger intertwined contexts are in focus, agency is diffused.’ This turns out to be a crucial point, as Nora explains in an essay on leadership within the paradox of agency. For her, there is no such thing as an isolated individual and we consequently require a new understanding of leadership based on interdependency, since leadership itself is the product of many contexts. Whatever happens within a system is an expression of the patterns of that entire system, which means there is no blame and everyone is responsible...

... institutions have their own ecology or totality of patterns of interrelationship that require ‘contextual rehabilitation’ so that the overarching discourse becomes one of interconnection, interdependency, and interaction through relationship. This point could not be more important as we are still operating within a mental silo of separate nation-states each pursuing their own interests. Whether we know it or not, we are in a mutual process of learning our way into the future where we will inevitably receive feedback on our efforts and hopefully enhance our capacity for creative and adaptive improvisation in the interests of the planet as a whole. This seminal book will give you a new relational lens on life."

Read the full review


From a review by Rex Weyler on the Greenpeace website

"How does real, enduring change actually occur in a complex social and biological environment?

In 2017, as a core text for incoming students, the Harvard Innovation Lab selected a book that asks exactly this question: Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns, by Nora Bateson. The book offers a refreshing, promising discussion of social change strategy.

Bateson resists the temptation to leap to “solutions,” or devise a road-map for change. There is no list of ten easy things you can do. Rather, Bateson sets out to rethink how we think. The book seeks a language that more authentically reflects the ecologies – mental, social, and biological – that we are attempting to change.

...In this book, Bateson sets out to discover a language that discards the linear, mechanistic ways of thinking that have led to societies that condone injustice and ravage Earth’s ecosystems. She rejects common deterministic explanations for a language that reflects living systems and brings “both rigor and imagination into the inquiry.”

Bateson believes the typical explanations of “systems theory” still employ the language of mechanistic science, treating a “system” as a “sum of parts” that have “functions” like the circuits or gears of a machine. However, in a living ecosystem, in a forest or in the ocean, the “parts” are alive, interconnected, co-evolving, and mutually learning new ways to interact in changing contexts. In an ecosystem, interaction is not “hard wired” but is dynamic and contextual.  

Warm Data Labs
[Nora Bateson's ] larger goal is to apply mutual learning in living systems to effective responses to economic injustice, gender inequality, ecological destruction, and other challenges facing our modern world.

...Bateson convenes diverse groups of citizens from around the world, and works on specific issues – such as carbon emissions, education, healthcare – with what she calls “Warm Data Labs.”  Warm data, Bateson explains, is information about relationships. Traditional data, numbers, tend to get decontextualized and manipulated to argue one bias against another. The warm data exercise avoids binary positions, such as right-left politics, or science versus mysticism.

A typical warm data session will address a concern, such as “carbon emissions,” from all conceivable contexts. Some participants approach the subject from the perspective of atmospheric “science.” Others may choose economics, social justice, law, health, education, and so forth.

There are no “experts,” delivering lectures, and no audience. Everyone participates, selects a contextual group, and the discourse begins. Participants may leave their group and join another at any time. Participants may take notes, and in some cases, the notes are left with the group, so there is a running log of the “economics” discussion, and another log of the “science” group. Meanwhile, participants move among these “mutual learning contexts.”

The labs may continue for a day, or several days. To conclude, individuals report from personal or collective notes. The emerging ideas or data are, as Bateson says, “trans-contextual” not absolute, but a reflection of various contexts, each one influenced by other contexts.  
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From a review by Pille Bunnell in Cybernetics and Human Knowing, Vol. 24, No.1, 2017

"This is a book for the adventuresome, prepared to travel, relying on their own resources.

It is a little book, but it is dense conceptually. The chapters are both independent Arcs and parts of the whole, which indeed does circle around. If I were to name an orientation for this circling, it would be something like a desire for a more fluid and dimensional way of doing things such that ethical behavior can more readily be realized in any relationship, including our relation with the biosphere.
The book is realized in various forms ranging from essays, to poems, from
conference presentations to personal reflections, including an email to a friend. The
style of writing varies, not only between chapters, but often within a chapter. One
needs to be nimble to follow the shifts, much like travelling through a highly varied
landscape with attention ranging from delight at distant views, concerns about safety
of river crossings, to investigations of odd scratches on a tree or delight in a frail
flower nestled among rocks. The landscape includes wetlands with floating islands
that can be connected through making leaps, or trusting to metaphoric bridges.
Sometimes the shift from a solid ground to mid air happens in midsentence; so one
must be alert.

So how is a reader to navigate this book? If a well laid path is expected throughout, a reader will be frustrated as that is not to be found. Perhaps it is helpful to approach the book as an art form dealing with how we understand our world through a multitude of different cognitive and metacognitive approaches, often in synchrony with each other. In this sense the book is poetic...."

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From a review by Sylwyn Guilbaud in International Journal of Play

"This is a book of thoughts, presented in a delicious variety of forms; stories, poems, papers, letters, critiques, memories, all interspersed with illustrative block prints by Nora’s husband Mats Qwarfordt. Throughout Nora nudges the reader, using words and pauses, to edge our awareness a subtle few degrees, in such a way that one feels that sense of familiar truth at the same time as the falling into place of new...

...There is no way to avoid a comparison of sorts, when a daughter of a great and much interpreted thinker and author, thinks and writes herself. When the subject matter is a continuum, such comparison is bound to be all the more pointed. This inheritance, the passing on of Batesonian thinking, forms, in one way or another a large part of the books subject matter. This book addresses similarly to Steps to an ecology of mind a breadth of interconnected issues of grave concern. One of the most striking chapters is Parts and Wholes, Hope and Horror. The horror being Nora’s discovery of the appropriation of systems thinking, her father’s work and that of Margaret Mead among others, by a neo-Nazis website. The disturbance given by that chapter is similar in a stomach dropping way, to From Versailles to Cybernetics (Bateson, 200, pp.477-485)
 
...The essential challenge with which Batesonian thinking addresses world and reader is as present in this text as it is in Steps. However whereas Steps, in its flexibility, became understood by many and divergent disciplines and sectors, from cyberneticists to play theorists, to ecologists; Small Arcs, with its naked uncertainty, disallows the reader from any assumption of correct interpretation, keeping this thinking outside the grasp of Commodification. To be a step closer to free from the close down, atrophy of rightness is a beautifully fitting reflection of that which is contained in this book, and that which preceded it. This is an achievement of which the Gregory who Nora describes, would doubtless have been very proud.
 
For those, who, as I do spend time thinking of, about, through, and in play, this text is an inspiring reminder of the integrity of play to discovery and full hearted embracing of new patterns of being and encountering, as expressed by Jung. For those ‘play thinkers’ who have not as yet read Gregory Bateson’s work, this book may cause you to do so, and may frame your reading in a wonderful way."

Read the full review here (limited access)