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.
Foreword / Daniel R. Reichman and Robert J. Foster ix
Preliminary. Forward and Back xiii
Preface. Wave Clutter xv
Introduction. Significant Waves 1
1. From the Waterwolf to the Sand Motor: Domesticating Waves in the Netherlands 31
Set One
First Wave: The Genders of Waves 71
Second Wave: Venice Hologram 79
Third Wave: Wave Navigation, Sea of Islands 83
2. Flipping the Ship: Oriented Knowledge, Media, and Waves in the Field, Scripps Institution of Oceanography 91
Set Two
First Wave: Being the Wave 141
Second Wave: Radio Ocean 148
Third Wave: Gravitational Waves, Sounded 154
3. Waves to Order and Disorder: Making and Breaking Scale Models inside and outside the Lab, from Oregon to Japan 159
Set Three
First Wave: Massive Movie Waves 192
Second Wave: Hokusai Now 203
Third Wave: Blood, Waves 208
4. World Wide Waves, In Silico: Computer Memory, Ocean Memory, and Version Control in the Global Data Stack 211
Set Four
First Wave: Middle Passages 242
Second Wave: Wave Power 250
Third Wave: Wave Theory ~ Social Theory 257
5. Wave Theory, Southern Theory: Disorienting Planetary Oceanic Futures, Indian Ocean 269
Postface. The Ends of Waves 301
Acknowledgments 305
Notes 311
References 339
Index 389
