A Book of Waves

by Stefan Helmreich

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.

Genres: Nonfiction

432 pages, Paperback

Published August 4, 2023

About the author

Stefan Helmreich is professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Alien Ocean and Silicon Second Nature.

Reviews

[Lilith · Rating 2 out of 5]

How would you describe waves to an alien?

[Alexander Jasper · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting project with some gems within, but overall too broad a scope, like the book cant decide what it wants to be. an intriguing structure of braids upon braids of essays, but in my opinion ultimately too disparate to function coherently.

[tea · Rating 4 out of 5]

a book that beautifully romanticizes water and also provides scientific background to explain its behaviors.