"Since I first read, and then taught, Helmreich's extraordinary
essay on alien kinship and the biopolitics of gene transfer in
marine biology and biotechnology in 2003, I have been swimming
eagerly in his alien oceans, waiting for this book, eager to feast.
A multi-sited and deeply sounded ethnography of ocean
microbiologists and their subvisible critters, "Alien Ocean" dunks
the reader in seas of blue-green capital and rampant globalizing
viral traders in gene currency. Tangled in sentiment and science,
salty microbial webs infuse dreadful and promising figures of
aliens and familiars. In this rich study of microbial oceanography
we meet the extremeophiles of a mortal earth--an earth better named
ocean, where deep-sea dwelling, heat-loving archaea are dredged to
tell stories of unlikely kin, extraordinary technology, planktonic
globalizers, and Hawaiian indigenous activists. This is a book
about networks of loves and disciplines that is hard to put
down."--Donna Haraway
"This book is as wondrous as the otherworldly creatures whose
apperception it recounts, from one of the most innovative cultural
anthropologists writing today. Helmreich shows how the water
covering the earth demands of scientists a planetary optic haunted
always by the figure of that which lies just outside the limits of
the imagination--the alien. Deep-sea creatures turn out to be
connected to networks of knowledge, economy, politics, and culture
that reshape everything from the shifting shorelines of Georgian
barrier islands to the postcolonial futures of Hawai'i. "Alien
Ocean" challenges longstanding constructs of causation, system, and
replication that are the foundation of scientific knowledge
itself."--BillMaurer, University of California, Irvine
"Taking us from laboratory workbenches to the cramped confines of
the Alvin submarine, Helmreich immerses readers in his ethnographic
account of a scientific field, marine microbiology, concerned with
questions of fundamental importance--what is life? what is a
planet? is there a difference? Alien Ocean--inviting and
challenging in its empirical and theoretical scope, in its humor
and serious play, in its deft handling of scientific material--will
set a new standard for the anthropology of science."--Mike Fortun,
author of "Promising Genomics: Iceland and DeCODE Genetics in a
World of Speculation"
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