Sounding the Limits of Life bookcover

Sounding the Limits of Life

Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond

Sophia Roosth 

(Contribution by)

Michele Friedner 

(Contribution by)
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
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Description

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.

Product Details

PublisherPrinceton University Press
Publish DateOctober 27, 2015
Pages328
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9780691164816
Dimensions8.9 X 6.0 X 0.9 inches | 0.8 pounds

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

"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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