Gregory Bateson developed the concept of schismogenesis in the 1930s in reference to certain forms of social behavior between groups of the Iatmul people of the Sepik River in New Guinea.
Bateson first used the term in a publication in 1935,[1][2] but elaborated on the concept in his classic 1936 ethnography Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View (reissued with a new epilogue in 1958).
For the most part, these groups of people belonged to different patrilineages who not only did not regularly renew their marriage alliances, but also interacted through the mode he called schismogenesis.
176–177).Bateson understood the symmetrical form of schismogenic behavior among Iatmul men – somewhat analogously to Émile Durkheim's concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity (see functionalism) – as a competitive relationship between categorical equals (e.g., rivalry).
The crux of the matter for Bateson was that, left unchecked, either form of schismogenesis would cause Iatmul society simply to break apart.
[8] In the latter case, Harrison and Loring compare conflict schismogenesis to the Tragedy of the Commons, arguing that it is a similar kind of escalation of behavior also caused by the failure of social institutions to ensure equity in fisheries-management outcomes.
Steven Feld (1994, p. 265-271), apparently in response to R. Murray Schafer's schizophonia and borrowing the term from Bateson, employs schismogenesis to name the recombination and recontextualization of sounds split from their sources.
There is documented usage of schismogenesis techniques by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS, an institutional precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)), against Japanese-held territories in the Pacific during World War II.
[9][dead link][10][need quotation to verify] U.S. military academics have identified how China and Russia have pursued social-media strategies of schismogenesis against the U.S. and other Western liberal democracies in an attempt to polarize civil society across the political spectrum to damage policy-making processes and to weaken state/military power.
[12][need quotation to verify] The concept of schismogenesis has relevance to the numerous schisms which have occurred within religious thought and practice.