Drawing on ethnographic work among oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry aquatic, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet and its future.

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

Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, and Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World.