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Sounding the Limits of Life

Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond
  • With contributions by: , and
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2015

About this book

What 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. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual.

Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"—as investigating, fathoming, listening—to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis.

Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.

Author / Editor information

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

Reviews

"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 Legacy --- "Winner of the 2016 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts"

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  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
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  • Publicly Available

    CONTENTS

    v
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    List of Illustrations

    vii
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    Sounding Life, Water, Sound

    ix
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    CHAPTER 1. ⃝ What Was Life?

    1
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    CHAPTER 2. ⃝ Life Forms:

    19
    Stefan Helmreich and Sophia Roosth
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    CHAPTER 3. ⃝▽ An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater

    35
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    CHAPTER 4. ⃝▽ Cetology Now Formatting the Twenty-First- Century Whale

    44
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    CHAPTER 5. ⃝▽ How Like a Reef

    48
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    CHAPTER 6. ⃝ Homo microbis

    62
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    CHAPTER 7. ⃝ The Signature of Life

    73
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    CHAPTER 8. ▽ Nature/Culture/Seawater

    94
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    CHAPTER 9. ▽ Time and the Tsunami

    106
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    CHAPTER 10. ▽ From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean

    116
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    CHAPTER 11. ▽ ⃞ Underwater Music

    137
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    CHAPTER 12. ▽ ⃞ Seashell Sound

    155
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    CHAPTER 13. ⃞ Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies

    164
    Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich
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    CHAPTER 14. ⃞ Chimeric Sensing

    173
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    Life, Water, Sound Resounding

    183
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    Acknowledgments

    189
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    Notes

    195
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    Index

    283
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 29, 2015
eBook ISBN:
9781400873869
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873869
eBook ISBN: 9781400873869
Keywords for this book
Biology; Scientist; Technology; Artificial life; Astrobiology; Seawater; Organism; Biologist; Sound studies; Writing; Vibration; Coral reef; Microorganism; Timbre; Tsunami; Deaf studies; Donna Haraway; Theory; Science studies; Seashell; Oceanography; Darwinism; Ecology; Lecture; Soundscape; Narrative; Marine biology; Biotechnology; Dorion Sagan; Analogy; Digital organism; Listening; Synthetic biology; Science; Bacteria; Deaf culture; Charles Darwin; Cochlear implant; Modernity; Google Earth; Oxford University Press; Social theory; Archaeology; Oxford English Dictionary; Cultural anthropology; Evelyn Fox Keller; Handbook; Reverberation; Deep sea; Sarah Franklin; Colonialism; Hydrophone; Vitalism; Ethnography; Life; American Anthropological Association; Cetology; Explanation; Social science; Underwater; Cambridge University Press; Global warming; Karl Sims; Princeton University Press; Routledge; Hannah Landecker; Genomics; Measurement; Extraterrestrial life; Carl Sagan
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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