Deborah Bird Roseabout how the world is in communication and how a person like Jes-
sie understands that and becomes part of it. One of the points I made
was that I came to know that Jessie’s country gave her life because I
walked with her and observed the process, and I knew it experien-
tially because it gave me life too. She was a presence in her country, a
known and responsible person who belonged there. I came to under-
stand that Jessie lived an ethic of intersubjective attention in a sen-
tient world where life happens because living things take notice. Tag-
ging along behind her, I did my best to take notice too.
Whole-person deutero-learning required me to learn types of obser-
vation and communication that had formerly been unknown to me. I
had to develop an awareness of several root principles: that the living
world is filled with both human and non-human forms of sentience;
that the world is filled with patterns and communications; that liv-
ing responsibly requires one to take notice and to take care. This was
threshold learning for me; once across those leaps, it was neither rea-
sonable nor possible to go back. Having learned to experience the vivid
and expressive presence of other living things, there was, for me, no
good reason, and probably no way, to return to a duller world.
My experience may constitute more than what is implied by the
term deutero-learning. Bateson developed the term “recursive epis-
temology” later in life, according to his intellectual biographer Peter
Harries-Jones ( 1995 , 9 ). This term expresses more fully the dynamics
of the ethical and epistemological process that concerns me here. Re-
cursion is defined as conditions under which “events continually en-
ter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they
describe” (Harries-Jones 1995 , 3 ). Recursions are iterations and en-
tanglements; they are “rampant” in ecological systems (Harries-Jones
1995 , 183 ) within which human societies are embedded. The concept
of a recursive epistemology connotes the ways of knowing and the
kinds of knowledge that arise in contexts in which self and other are
both knower and known, and to the same degree, and are mutually em-
bedded in encounter, exchange, mutual influences, and collaboration.
In the context of anthropological research, a recursive epistemology
connotes the situated connectivities within which knowledge comes
into being. The anthropologist’s thought is shaped by her teachers as