A Book of Waves

by Stefan Helmreich

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478020417
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/04/2023
Series:	The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, and Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World.

Table of Contents

Foreword / Daniel R. Reichman and Robert J. Foster  ix
Preliminary. Forward and Back  xiii
Preface. Wave Clutter  xv
Introduction. Significant Waves  1
1. From the Waterwolf to the Sand Motor: Domesticating Waves in the Netherlands  31
Set One
First Wave: The Genders of Waves  71
Second Wave: Venice Hologram  79
Third Wave: Wave Navigation, Sea of Islands  83
2. Flipping the Ship: Oriented Knowledge, Media, and Waves in the Field, Scripps Institution of Oceanography  91
Set Two
First Wave: Being the Wave  141
Second Wave: Radio Ocean  148
Third Wave: Gravitational Waves, Sounded  154
3. Waves to Order and Disorder: Making and Breaking Scale Models inside and outside the Lab, from Oregon to Japan  159
Set Three
First Wave: Massive Movie Waves  192
Second Wave: Hokusai Now  203
Third Wave: Blood, Waves  208
4. World Wide Waves, In Silico: Computer Memory, Ocean Memory, and Version Control in the Global Data Stack  211
Set Four
First Wave: Middle Passages  242
Second Wave: Wave Power  250
Third Wave: Wave Theory ~ Social Theory  257
5. Wave Theory, Southern Theory: Disorienting Planetary Oceanic Futures, Indian Ocean  269
Postface. The Ends of Waves  301
Acknowledgments  305
Notes  311
References  339
Index  389

What People are Saying About This

The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time - Hugh Raffles

“Stefan Helmreich again shows why he is widely regarded as one of the most consistently innovative, erudite, and challenging anthropologists at work today. A Book of Waves is a model of expansive transdisciplinary practice, deeply grounded in anthropological theory and methods yet gliding frictionlessly across sites, concepts, and received boundaries. The book is a constant surprise, a mind-opening recalibration of the ways we assemble nature, science, ethnography, and the arts.”

Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater - Melody Jue

“Refreshing as sea spray, A Book of Waves guides us through a vertiginous churn of tsunamis, soundings, breakers, and buoys. This future classic in the ocean humanities and anthropology of science expertly models how to study the emergence of scientific phenomena—waves—through meticulous ethnographic attention to their many cultural figurations, conditions of objectivity, and the urgent political crosscurrents of coastal and climate precarity. Prepare to flip your perspective, again and again.”

Media Hot and Cold - Nicole Starosielski

“However you are grounded—in discipline, in environment, in theory—this book will move you.”

Editorial Reviews

"An interesting overview of how natural ocean waves permeate society in many, often unrecognized ways from the standpoint of scientists who study them. This book encompasses historical and scientific perspectives on, sociological and anthropological insights into, and engineering and military challenges of humans’ connections with waves. The ethnographic approach blends scientific knowledge with insights from scientists studying waves. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals."—N. W. Hinman, Choice

"A Book of Waves promises to be of interest to a diverse set of scholars. Most immediately, the book will be useful for scholars teaching or researching topics in the history and anthropology of physical sciences, the history of science and its relationship to American and other empire, colonialism and postcolonialism, and their reckoning with histories of militarism in the Pacific and elsewhere. As it plays with the form of a monograph, the book will be interesting for those hoping to similarly experiment with the form of nonfiction narrative. . . . Thinking and building a livable world that reconciles history and science’s imbrication in it, with hopes for more just futures, is hard work that tacitly demands much from the already overburdened, but  A Book of Waves is an exemplary case of how scholarship can help us to get to where we’re going."—Jonathan Galka, H-Environment

"Helmreich pushes the boundaries of ethnographic wit and writing, illuminating the waves of wave science—its technoscientific histories, its modes of making knowledge, its ripples into mainstream culture—to rescript how we do and write ethnography in times of turbulent motion."—Lasse Bech, Ethnos

"A Book of Waves is a vast collection of surprising stories that waves tell. . . . It offers contributions to the burgeoning studies of oceans, seas, and waters in anthropology and other fields. It also offers an important model for anthropologists tackling environmental issues and the variegated stories inscribed within them."—Ignacio Farías, American Ethnologist

"Anyone interested in wordplay will find the book stimulating. Those interested in the interaction of scientific knowledge, how it is obtained, and how it is used and misused in coping with the joint promise and threat of near-shore waves will find much to ponder."—Carl Wunsch, IEEE Technology and Science Magazine

From the Publisher

"Anyone interested in wordplay will find the book stimulating. Those interested in the interaction of scientific knowledge, how it is obtained, and how it is used and misused in coping with the joint promise and threat of near-shore waves will find much to ponder."

IEEE Technology and Science Magazine - Carl Wunsch

"Helmreich pushes the boundaries of ethnographic wit and writing, illuminating the waves of wave science—its technoscientific histories, its modes of making knowledge, its ripples into mainstream culture—to rescript how we do and write ethnography in times of turbulent motion."

Ethnos - Lasse Bech

"An interesting overview of how natural ocean waves permeate society in many, often unrecognized ways from the standpoint of scientists who study them. This book encompasses historical and scientific perspectives on, sociological and anthropological insights into, and engineering and military challenges of humans’ connections with waves. The ethnographic approach blends scientific knowledge with insights from scientists studying waves. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals."

Choice - N. W. Hinman

"A Book of Waves promises to be of interest to a diverse set of scholars. Most immediately, the book will be useful for scholars teaching or researching topics in the history and anthropology of physical sciences, the history of science and its relationship to American and other empire, colonialism and postcolonialism, and their reckoning with histories of militarism in the Pacific and elsewhere. As it plays with the form of a monograph, the book will be interesting for those hoping to similarly experiment with the form of nonfiction narrative. . . . Thinking and building a livable world that reconciles history and science’s imbrication in it, with hopes for more just futures, is hard work that tacitly demands much from the already overburdened, but  A Book of Waves is an exemplary case of how scholarship can help us to get to where we’re going."

H-Environment - Jonathan Galka

"A Book of Waves is a vast collection of surprising stories that waves tell. . . . It offers contributions to the burgeoning studies of oceans, seas, and waters in anthropology and other fields. It also offers an important model for anthropologists tackling environmental issues and the variegated stories inscribed within them."

Ignacio Faríasn Ethnologist