In A Book of Waves Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves’ materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. For researchers and their publics, the meanings of waves also reflect visions of the ocean as an environmental infrastructure fundamental to trade, travel, warfare, humanitarian rescue, recreation, and managing sea level rise. Interleaving ethnographic chapters with reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, cosmology, and more, Helmreich demonstrates how waves mark out the wakes and breaks of social histories and futures.

What is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how contemporary scientists--biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers--are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual. Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"--as investigating, fathoming, listening--to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis. Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.

"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"

In A Book of Waves Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves’ materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. For researchers and their publics, the meanings of waves also reflect visions of the ocean as an environmental infrastructure fundamental to trade, travel, warfare, humanitarian rescue, recreation, and managing sea level rise. Interleaving ethnographic chapters with reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, cosmology, and more, Helmreich demonstrates how waves mark out the wakes and breaks of social histories and futures.

"Helmreich's analysis--extensive, imaginative, rigorous, and insightful--promises to establish him as "the cultural authority on A-Life. . . . He shows that, in the age of complexity, science simultaneously disenchants and re-enchants the world. . . . The book is written in a personal and engaging style . . . so full of ideas and interesting asides [that] Helmreich takes on the persona of a smart and well-informed tour guide of the A-Life world [with] an enviable ability to take very complex ideas and discuss them comprehensibly without simplifying them."--Hugh Gusterson, author of "Nuclear Rites