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"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"--

"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"--

This article offers a history of the wave metaphor in social theory, examining how waves became rhetorical forms through which to think about the shape of social change. The wave analytic—"waves of democratization," "waves of immigration," "waves of resistance"—wavers between high theory and popular model, between objectivist sociological explanation and hand-waving sociobabble, between vanguardist predictions of social revolution and conservative prognoses of political inevitability, between accountings of formal change and claims about material transubstantiation. The article examines usages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that techniques of inscription—graphical, numerical, diagrammatic—have produced formal claims about rising and falling tendencies in the social body. It argues, too, that in such deployments, waves are either (1) overpowering forces of social structuration or (2) signs of the animating effects of world-transforming collective social agencies. The "wave" thus generates questions—and uncertainties—about the relation of structure to agency.

The ocean's properties and processes are now mostly known through distributed sensor networks. Among the most widespread of such networks are those that connect wave-measuring buoys. Buoys have been deployed and consulted by national meteorological organizations, state militaries, multinational corporations, and citizens. This paper zeroes in on the Directional Waverider, the most widely used buoy, manufactured since 1961 in the Netherlands by Datawell. I am interested in this buoy's material qualities and networks of use, its life within legal frameworks, and its media ecology. Staging my account against the metaphysical Italian author Italo Calvino's "Reading a Wave," I explore what it means to "read" a sensing technology.

This paper suggests that today's twin scientific interests in the extreme and extraterrestrial ground a novel kind of relativism, which I call extraterrestrial relativism, a relativism about "nature" over culture—and, more, about Earthly, even cosmic, nature. I develop the concept of extraterrestrial relativism using ethnographic work I conducted among astrobiologists and I suggest that this genre of relativism can be brought into a newly inaugurated conversation on "comparative relativisms" in anthropology.

ABSTRACT  Seawater has occupied an ambiguous place in anthropological categories of "nature" and "culture." Seawater as nature appears as potentiality of form and uncontainable flux; it moves faster than culture—with culture frequently figured through land‐based metaphors—even as culture seeks to channel water's (nature's) flow. Seawater as culture manifests as a medium of pleasure, sustenance, travel, disaster. I argue that, although seawater's qualities in early anthropology were portrayed impressionistically, today technical, scientific descriptions of water's form prevail. For example, processes of globalization—which may also be called "oceanization"—are often described as "currents,""flows," and "circulations." Examining sea‐set ethnography, maritime anthropologies, and contemporary social theory, I propose that seawater has operated as a "theory machine" for generating insights about human cultural organization. I develop this argument with ethnography from the Sargasso Sea and in the Sea Islands. I conclude with a critique of appeals to water's form in social theory.

This essay considers seawater as a substance and symbol in anthropological and social theory. Seawater has occupied an ambiguous place with respect to anthropological categories of nature and culture. Seawater as nature appears as potentiality of form and uncontainable flux; it moves faster than culture — with culture frequently figured through land-based metaphors — even as culture seeks to channel water/nature's flow. Seawater as culture manifests as a medium of pleasure, sustenance, travel, disaster. I track these associations historically, arguing that while the qualities of seawater in early anthropology were portrayed impressionistically, today it is technical and scientific descriptions of the form of water that have become prevalent in figuring social, political, and economic forces. For example, processes of globalization — which I suggest may also be called "oceanization" — are often described in terms of currents, flows, circulations. Examining canonical sea-set ethnography, maritime anthropologies , and contemporary social theory, I argue that seawater has operated as a "theory machine" for generating insights about human cultural organization. I develop this argument using ethnographic materials drawn from fieldwork among oceanographers working in the Sargasso Sea and in the Sea Islands. I conclude with a critique of appeals to the form of water in social theory.