ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

In Silico

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