Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, author of ‘Composing a Life,’ dies

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.

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, cross-cultural understanding and public policy.

She was also fully aware of growing up in the shadow of her parents, especially of her mother, who was often called the most prominent anthropologist of the 20th century. Mead was already internationally known for her studies of life in Samoa and New Guinea before her daughter, her only child, was born.

Gregory Bateson, Mead’s third husband, was a British-born scholar whose interests included communications, psychiatry and ecology.

In a 1984 memoir, “With a Daughter’s Eye,” Bateson described the opportunities and pitfalls of a childhood with two formidable, well-known parents. The intellectual ferment was exciting, if sometimes chaotic.

Mead and Gregory Bateson separated when their daughter was about 8 and later divorced.

Bateson lived with Mead in Greenwich Village, but with her mother frequently away for her work, she grew up surrounded by a large network of friends.

In her teens, Bateson lived for a year in Israel, where she became fluent in Hebrew. The experience helped define her life as she traveled widely and quickly absorbed languages and cultures.er,”

In “Composing a Life,” Bateson described how she and four other women managed to organize their lives amid conflicting social, professional and familial demands. “Having to pay attention to more than one thing at a time,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1991.

Mary Catherine Bateson was born Dec. 8, 1939, in New York. She received a doctorate in linguistics and Middle Eastern languages from Harvard in 1963.

Survivors include her husband of 60 years, J. Barkev Kassarjian, a retired management professor.