ABSTRACT This keynote address was delivered by Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), at the Third Annual Meeting of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, in San Diego, April 1977. It was transcribed, edited, and annotated by Phillips Stevens Jr., and first appeared in Volume 4(1) (1977) of The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play Newsletter (pp. 2–8). Bateson spoke without notes but tape-recorded his talk and handed me (Phillips Stevens) the tape for transcription. But an apology is due here. Mr. Bateson was one of those extraordinary people whose mind moves faster than the voice, so I often faced the problem of rendering a half-completed statement (which derived of course from a completed thought) into grammatically correct English. I also had the problem of transcribing Iatmul words with which I was not familiar, and at the time of this transcription, Mr. Bateson had retired for 6 months incommunicado. So I have taken some small liberties with his text. But it is all here. The subsequent footnotes are my own, added to assist the reader. I am grateful to Wendy Sebert and Irene Suhr for their assistance in transcribing a working draft of this paper.