Sounding the Limits of Life : : Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond / / Stefan Helmreich.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Helmreich, Stefan,
• MitwirkendeR: Friedner, Michele,; Helmreich, Stefan,; Roosth, Sophia,
• TeilnehmendeR: Friedner, Michele.; Roosth, Sophia.
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2015]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology ; 7
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (328 p.) :; 29 halftones. 6 line illus.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Illustrations -- Sounding Life, Water, Sound -- CHAPTER 1. ⃝ What Was Life? -- CHAPTER 2. ⃝ Life Forms: -- CHAPTER 3. ⃝▽ An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater -- CHAPTER 4. ⃝▽ Cetology Now Formatting the Twenty-First- Century Whale -- CHAPTER 5. ⃝▽ How Like a Reef -- CHAPTER 6. ⃝ Homo microbis -- CHAPTER 7. ⃝ The Signature of Life -- CHAPTER 8. ▽ Nature/Culture/Seawater -- CHAPTER 9. ▽ Time and the Tsunami -- CHAPTER 10. ▽ From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean -- CHAPTER 11. ▽ ⃞ Underwater Music -- CHAPTER 12. ▽ ⃞ Seashell Sound -- CHAPTER 13. ⃞ Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies -- CHAPTER 14. ⃞ Chimeric Sensing -- Life, Water, Sound Resounding -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index