Description:

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.

About Stefan Helmreich
Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies how scientists in oceanography, biology, acoustics and computer science define and theorize their objects of study, particularly as these objects — waves, life, sound, code — reach their conceptual limits. His most recent book, A Book of Waves (Duke University Press, 2023), details how scientists at sea and in the lab monitor and model ocean waves, seeking to capture in technical language these forces of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. The book includes reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist and queer theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history and cosmology. Helmreich’s previous ethnography, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009), is a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea and oceans outside national sovereignty.