ISBN:
0691164819
,
0691164800
,
140087386X
Language:
English
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (xxii, 300 pages)
Series Statement:
Princeton studies in culture and technology
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als
Keywords:
Life sciences
;
Human biology
;
Ethnology
;
Physical anthropology
Abstract:
List of illustrations -- Sounding life, water, sound -- Chapter 1. What was life? : answers from three limit biologies -- Chapter 2. Life forms : a keyword entry / with Sophia Roosth -- Chapter 3. An archaeology of artifical life, underwater -- Chapter 4. Cetology now : formatting the twenty-first-century whale -- Chapter 5. How like a reef : figuring coral, 1839-2010 -- Chapter 6. Homo microbis : species, race, sex and the human microbiome -- Chapter 7. The signature of life : designing the astrobiological imagination -- Chapter 8. Nature/culture/seawater : theory machines, anthropology, oceanization -- Chapter 9. Time and the tsunami : Indian Ocean, 2004 -- Chapter 10. From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean : planetary icons, indexes, and infrastructures -- Chapter 11. Underwater music : tuning composition to the sounds of science -- Chapter 12. Seashell sound -- Chapter 13. Sound studies meets deaf studies / with Michele Friedner -- Chapter 14. Chimeric sensing -- Life, water, sound resounding
Abstract:
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 nature and culture. 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
Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
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