Description
Book SynopsisWhat 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.
Trade Review"Winner of the 2016 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts"
"This collection is extremely impressive. The notes and bibliography read like a veritable state-of-the-art of the field; the author has read and imbibed everything and everyone and is in firm command of his disciplinary landscape. Helmreich has been a leader among anthropologists in applying to science a new kind of methodologically sophisticated ethnography."
---Oren Harman, European LegacyTable of ContentsList of Illustrations vii Sounding Life, Water, Sound ix CHAPTER 1 What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies 1 CHAPTER 2 Life Forms: A Keyword Entry (with Sophia Roosth) 19 CHAPTER 3 An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater 35 CHAPTER 4 Cetology Now: Formatting the Twenty-First-Century Whale 44 CHAPTER 5 How Like a Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839-2010 48 CHAPTER 6 Homo microbis: Species, Race, Sex, and the Human Microbiome 62 CHAPTER 7 The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination 73 CHAPTER 8 Nature/Culture/Seawater: Theory Machines, Anthropology, Oceanization 94 CHAPTER 9 Time and the Tsunami: Indian Ocean, 2004 106 CHAPTER 10 From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures 116 CHAPTER 11 Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science 137 CHAPTER 12 Seashell Sound 155 CHAPTER 13 Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies (with Michele Friedner) 164 CHAPTER 14 Chimeric Sensing 173 Life, Water, Sound Resounding 183 Acknowledgments 189 Notes 195 Index 283
