Stefan Helmreich
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 96139 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Stefan Helmreich |
| PRENOMES | Stefan |
| SOBRENOME | Helmreich |
| ASSINATURA | HELMREICH S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0859-5881 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 61 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 1805 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 61 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1992 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 16 |
Technoscientific imaging and the territorialization of ocean depth
Once the last unclaimed solid expanse on Earth, the ocean floor has become one of the most contested spaces in contemporary geopolitics. The data-imagery produced by technoscience serves as the ultimate tool for nations asserting sovereignty in this territorial race. This symposium gathers diverse perspectives on the ongoing expansionist drive on the seabed, drawing inspiration from Abissal ——a film-article featuring the Portuguese modern odyssey…
El surgimiento de la etnografía multiespecie
Los antropólogos se han dedicado, al menos desde Franz Boas, a investigar las relaciones entre la naturaleza y la cultura. En los albores del siglo XXI, este perdurable interés se ha visto influido por algunos giros nuevos. Una cohorte emergente de "etnógrafos multiespecie" empezó a hacer hincapié en la subjetividad y la agencia de los organismos cuyas vidas están intricadas con las de los humanos. La etnografía multiespecie surgió en la intersec…
An anthropologist underwater
In this article, I deliver a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's three-person submersible,Alvin.I examine multiple meanings ofimmersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of what I call the "submarine cyborg"-"doing anthropology in sound," as advocated by St…
Climate Transformation, Racial De/Formation, Guyana
Elementary Forms of Elementary Forms
Flipping the Field
The FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP), a seagoing vessel managed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, offers an unusual vantage point on the sea, one useful for reflecting on how the figure of the "field" is made in oceanography—and how it rotates in and out of alignment with attempts to render portions of the sea more lab-like. FLIP works like this: in its horizontal conformation, the vessel travels like an ordin…
Elementary Forms of Elementary Forms
Doing Theory
Doing Theory:Life, Ethics, And Force Stefan Helmreich (bio), Daniela Gandorfer (bio), and Zulaikha Ayub (bio) Introduction: Doing Theory "Theory is about whose lives matter and how." -Stefan Helmreich Daniela Gandorfer and Zulaikha Ayub: In this Matterphorical issue, we want to think about the production of meaning in its inextricability from matter, with meaning understood not as representational (i.e. as a semiotic or symbolic quality or quanti…
Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies
Both sound studies and Deaf studies depend on something of a divide between hearing and seeing. So, while music historian Bruce Johnson makes a critical point when he writes that, "an auditory rather than a predominantly visual approach to the past produces a different cultural history", such a phrasing risks posing the visual and auditory as at odds with one another. In both sound and Deaf studies, a clean division is also often assumed between …
Not a metaphor
This article examines the strategies that Evelyn Fox Keller has employed to analyze the work of metaphor in the language and practice of science, particularly in biology. It offers that the rhetorical device of zeugma – ‘the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense ...' (Merriam-Webster) – is worth leaning upon to further open up the linguistic operations Keller iden…
Emergência Da Etnografia Multiespécies
Antropólog(a)s têm se dedicado, ao menos desde Franz Boas, a investigar as relações entre natureza e cultura. No alvorecer do século XXI, este interesse recorrente vem sendo alterado diante de novas torções. Um conjunto de "etnógrafo(a)s multiespécies" começaram a depositar ênfase inédita na subjetividade e na agência de organismos cujas vidas estão emaranhadas às vidas humanas. A etnografia multiespécies emergiu na interseção de três linhas de i…
Wave Theory ~ Social Theory
This article offers a history of the wave metaphor in social theory, examining how waves became rhetorical forms through which to think about the shape of social change. The wave analytic-"waves of democratization," "waves of immigration," "waves of resistance"-wavers between high theory and popular model, between objectivist sociological explanation and hand-waving sociobabble, between vanguardist predictions of social revolution and conservativ…
Seagoing nightmares
This response to Peters and Steinberg’s ‘The ocean in excess’ tests the power and limits of their framings of ‘the ocean within’, ‘the ocean beyond’, and ‘the ocean imagined’ in thinking through the oceanic weave of transatlantic slave trade history and the recent long and deadly summers of migration in the Mediterranean
Being Material
In 1995, MIT's Nicholas Negroponte predicted that "being digital" would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy materiality persists and even reasserts itself. At the intersection of art, science and technology, "Being Material" revisits Negroponte's prediction by exploring new and unexpecte…
Reading a Wave Buoy
The ocean's properties and processes are now mostly known through distributed sensor networks. Among the most widespread of such networks are those that connect wave-measuring buoys. Buoys have been deployed and consulted by national meteorological organizations, state militaries, multinational corporations, and citizens. This paper zeroes in on the Directional Waverider, the most widely used buoy, manufactured since 1961 in the Netherlands by Da…
Massive movie waves and the anthropic ocean
This article examines representations of ocean waves in disaster and science fiction movies, reading these for what they can indicate about shifting ideological accounts of human-ocean relations. I track the technical conjuring of such on-screen waves - made using everything from scale model wave tanks to computer-generated imagery (CGI) - and explicate how these enable waves' narrative purposes and effects. I argue that towering waves in film ha…
Uma onda de lama
O artigo oferece uma análise antropológica do momento posterior ao desastre da Samarco, ocorrido em novembro de 2015. Exploramos a metáfora da onda de lama para seguir notícias, experiências e representações sobre o deslocamento de rejeitos de mineração, ocorrido a partir de Bento Rodrigues, descendo o rio Doce até atingir o oceano. Baseamo-nos em testemunhos oculares, relatórios científicos, notícias, redes sociais, documentários e, ainda, em um…
Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens
Since the year 2000, artists have increasingly employed tools, methods, and aesthetics associated with scientific practice to produce forms of art that assert themselves as kinds of experimental and empirical knowledge production parallel to and in critical dialogue with science. Anthropologists, intrigued by the work of art in the age of its technoscientific affiliation, have taken notice. This article discusses bio art, eco art, and surveillanc…
Um antropólogo debaixo d'água
Este artigo fornece um relato antropológico em primeira pessoa sobre um mergulho no fundo do mar no submersível da Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) que comporta três pessoas, o Alvin. Analiso múltiplos significados de imersão: afundamento em líquido, absorção em alguma atividade e entrada compreensiva de um antropólogo em um meio cultural. Inteirando-me dos ritmos do que chamo de ciborgue submarino, "fazendo antropologia em som" (FELD …
Périls et promesses de l'abondance microbienne
Au cours des dernières années, la vie microbienne a été très présente dans l'actualité. Épidémies d'Escherichia coli, discussions sur les bienfaits des aliments crus et fermentés, recherches sur des formes de vie capables de vivre dans des environnements extrêmes : le modeste microbe est devenu une figure qui permet de penser les présents et les futurs possibles de la nature, au sens le plus large comme le plus étroit du terme. En partant du cons…
The Genders of Waves
Seeing the sea as a feminine force and flux has a long history in the crosscurrents of Judeo-Christian thought, Enlightenment philosophy, and natural scientific epistemology. This essay examines how ocean waves have been similarly gendered female, and also flips that inquiry, asking how women's collective agency has been figured through wave metaphors, notably in discussions of U.S. feminism. I examine how such depictions of waves have called upo…
Gravity's Reverb
In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representation…
Hokusai's Great Wave Enters the Anthropocene
Hokusai's 1829 woodblock print, "Under the Wave off Kanagawa," is the world's most iconic portrait of ocean waves.It has been reproduced, quoted, and repurposed over the last two centuries in a widening circle of representations of the unruly, powerful sea.Today's reimaginings of this storied Japanese image often remark upon the dangerous, damaged state of the contemporary ocean.Such commentaries sometimes refer directly to the 2011 tsunami and t…
Sounding the Limits of Life
Sounding the Limits of Life
What is life? What is water? What is sound? This book 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, bre…
The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography
Anthropologists have been committed, at least since Franz Boas, to investigating relationships between nature and culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, this enduring interest was inflected with some new twists. An emergent cohort of "multispecies ethnographers" began to place a fresh emphasis on the subjectivity and agency of organisms whose lives are entangled with humans. Multispecies ethnography emerged at the intersection of three interdi…
An anthropologist underwater
In this article, I deliver a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's three-person submersible,Alvin.I examine multiple meanings ofimmersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of what I call the "submarine cyborg"-"doing anthropology in sound," as advocated by St…
The Anthropology of Potentiality in Biomedicine
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, potentiality serves as a central concept in the life sciences and in medical practices. This special issue of Current Anthropology explores how genes, cells, bodies, and populations as well as technologies, disciplines, and research areas become imbued with potential. We suggest that anthropologists of the life sciences and biomedicine should work reflexively with the concept of potentiality and the p…
Nature/Culture/Seawater
Seawater has occupied an ambiguous place in anthropological categories of “nature” and “culture.” Seawater as nature appears as potentiality of form and uncontainable flux; it moves faster than culture—with culture frequently figured through land‐based metaphors—even as culture seeks to channel water's (nature's) flow. Seawater as culture manifests as a medium of pleasure, sustenance, travel, disaster. I argue that, although seawater's qualities …
Species of Biocapital
Several scholars in science studies have lately sought to theorize the contemporary join of capitalism and biotechnology. A variety of terms have been forwarded to name how 'life' in the age of genomics, stem cell research, and reproductive technology has become enmeshed in market dynamics, and no term has become as prominent as biocapital. This article offers a classification of articulations of this concept, arguing that definitions of biocapit…
The perils and promises of microbial abundance
Microbial life has been much in the news. From outbreaks of Escherichia coli to discussions of the benefits of raw and fermented foods to recent reports of life forms capable of living in extreme environments, the modest microbe has become a figure for thinking through the presents and possible futures of nature, writ large as well as small. Noting that dominant representations of microbial life have shifted from an idiom of peril to one of promi…
What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies
How Scientists Think; About ‘Natives’, for Example. A Problem of Taxonomy Among Biologists of Alien Species in Hawaii
This article examines how biologists in Hawaii investigating ‘invasive species’ classify ‘native’ and ‘alien’ organisms, particularly in the epistemologically ambiguous zone of archipelagic waters. Framing analysis in terms of the Sahlins‐Obeyesekere debate, the essay explores how, far from being a straightforward matter of biological definition, such classification presents taxing taxonomic and political questions, especially in Hawaii, where th…
Trees and seas of information
Examining discussions of "lateral gene transfer" in marine biology and biotechnology, I maintain that "natural" bonds between genealogy and classification in biology may be dissolving. I argue that marine microbial biology is good to think about with the rise of new kinships and biopolitics organized less around practices of "sex" than politics of "transfer." I draw on fieldwork among academic and industry marine biologists to explore implication…
Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora
Diaspora 2:2 1992 Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora Stefan Helmreich Stanford University In the literature of traditional anthropology, "community" and "culture" have been privileged units of analysis and have often been considered to be isomorphic with well-defined national or ethnic territories. Recent anthropological attempts to understand constitutions of community and identity in a transnational, postcolonial, and global…
Listening Against Soundscapes
Keywords: commentary, soundscape, anthropology of sound, listening, immersion, transduction
After Culture
Flexible Infections
This article analyzes computer security rhetoric, particularly in the United States, arguing that dominant cultural understandings of immunology, sexuality, legality, citizenship, and capitalism powerfully shape the way computer viruses are construed and combated. Drawing on popular and technical handbooks, articles, and Web sites, as well as on e-mail interviews with security professionals, the author explores how discussions of computer viruses…
Waves
Transcript of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture given on October 22, 2014
The Genders of Waves
Seeing the sea as a feminine force and flux has a long history in the crosscurrents of Judeo-Christian thought, Enlightenment philosophy, and natural scientific epistemology. This essay examines how ocean waves have been similarly gendered female, and also flips that inquiry, asking how women's collective agency has been figured through wave metaphors, notably in discussions of U.S. feminism. I examine how such depictions of waves have called upo…
Life Forms
We deliver a "keyword" account of the term life form as it has been used in natural philosophy and biology over the last two hundred years, beginning with its appearance in German as Lebensform. We argue that life form has, since its earliest enunciations, pointed to a space of possibility within which life might take shape, but that the way that space is imagined and theorized in biology has transformed substantially; life form originated as a t…
Extraterrestrial Relativism
This article explores the emergence of a novel form of relativism, termed "extraterrestrial relativism," within contemporary scientific pursuits focused on extreme environments and extraterrestrial life. Unlike cultural relativism, extraterrestrial relativism centers on the relativity of "nature" itself, both on Earth and potentially beyond. Drawing on ethnographic research among astrobiologists, the author argues that this new relativism arises …
Potential Energy and the Body Electric
Physics tells us that potential energy is the capacity to do work that a body possesses as a result of its position in electric, magnetic, or gravitational fields. Thinking of “potentiality” in an electric idiom and with reference to its place in human biological processes that implicate electric phenomena, such as the pulses of action potentials that animate the heart and brain, can afford novel angles into contemporary biomedical enactments of …
Induction, deduction, abduction, and the logics of race and kinship
Emergência Da Etnografia Multiespécies
Antropólog(a)s têm se dedicado, ao menos desde Franz Boas, a investigar as relações entre natureza e cultura. No alvorecer do século XXI, este interesse recorrente vem sendo alterado diante de novas torções. Um conjunto de "etnógrafo(a)s multiespécies" começaram a depositar ênfase inédita na subjetividade e na agência de organismos cujas vidas estão emaranhadas às vidas humanas. A etnografia multiespécies emergiu na interseção de três linhas de i…
Digitizing 'Development
This article examines a recent use of computer simulation in modeling the ecological dynamics of a rural indigenous community. It takes as its central example anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing's models of irrigation patterns and practices in Bali. Lansing first put together computer simulations of Balinese water temple networks to demonstrate the wisdom of traditional modesof organizing agriculture and to draw attention to the folly of Green Revo…
Gravity's Reverb
In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representation…
The Signature of Life
April 01 2006 The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination Stefan Helmreich Stefan Helmreich Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Stefan Helmreich Online Issn: 1536-0105 Print Issn: 1526-3819 © 2006 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2006 Grey Room (2006) (23): 66–95. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey.2006.1.23.66 Cite Icon Cite Permissions S…
Périls et promesses de l'abondance microbienne
Au cours des dernières années, la vie microbienne a été très présente dans l'actualité. Épidémies d'Escherichia coli, discussions sur les bienfaits des aliments crus et fermentés, recherches sur des formes de vie capables de vivre dans des environnements extrêmes : le modeste microbe est devenu une figure qui permet de penser les présents et les futurs possibles de la nature, au sens le plus large comme le plus étroit du terme. En partant du cons…
Power/Networks
Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora
Diaspora 2:2 1992 Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora Stefan Helmreich Stanford University In the literature of traditional anthropology, "community" and "culture" have been privileged units of analysis and have often been considered to be isomorphic with well-defined national or ethnic territories. Recent anthropological attempts to understand constitutions of community and identity in a transnational, postcolonial, and global…
The spiritual in artificial life
(1997). The spiritual in artificial life: Recombining science and religion in a computational culture medium. Science as Culture: Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 363-395
Recombination, Rationality, Reductionism and Romantic Reactions
The genetic algorithm (GA) is a computational procedure that 'evolves' solutions to optimization problems by generating populations of possible solutions, and then by treating these solutions metaphorically as individuals that can 'mate' and 'compete' to 'survive' and 'reproduce'. In this paper, I explore how culturally specific notions of evolution, population, reproduction, sex/gender, and kinship inflect the ways GAs are assembled and understo…
Making PCR
Making PCR:. Story of Biotechnology. Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. vitt. 190 pp., notes, bibliography
Digitizing 'Development
This article examines a recent use of computer simulation in modeling the ecological dynamics of a rural indigenous community. It takes as its central example anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing's models of irrigation patterns and practices in Bali. Lansing first put together computer simulations of Balinese water temple networks to demonstrate the wisdom of traditional modesof organizing agriculture and to draw attention to the folly of Green Revo…
Flexible Infections
This article analyzes computer security rhetoric, particularly in the United States, arguing that dominant cultural understandings of immunology, sexuality, legality, citizenship, and capitalism powerfully shape the way computer viruses are construed and combated. Drawing on popular and technical handbooks, articles, and Web sites, as well as on e-mail interviews with security professionals, the author explores how discussions of computer viruses…
Power/Networks
Kinship in Hypertext
Artificial Life, Inc
(2001). Artificial Life, Inc.: Darwin and Commodity Fetishism from Santa Fe to Silicon Valley. Science as Culture: Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 483-504
After Culture
Torquing Things Out
In Sorting Things Out, Bowker and Star's meditation on technologies of classification, a central chapter pivots around the contradictions of racial classification in apartheid South Africa. Bowker and Star examine the stubborn refusal of 'race' to fit the desired classification system suborned by its pro-Apartheid designers (p. 196), and they hold that the contradictions constitutive of racial categorization had a particular effect on the raciall…
Spatializing Technoscience
(2003). Spatializing Technoscience: The Anthropology of Science and Technology and the Making of National, Colonial, and Postcolonial Space and Place. Reviews in Anthropology: Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 13-36
Trees and seas of information
Examining discussions of "lateral gene transfer" in marine biology and biotechnology, I maintain that "natural" bonds between genealogy and classification in biology may be dissolving. I argue that marine microbial biology is good to think about with the rise of new kinships and biopolitics organized less around practices of "sex" than politics of "transfer." I draw on fieldwork among academic and industry marine biologists to explore implication…
How Scientists Think; About ‘Natives’, for Example. A Problem of Taxonomy Among Biologists of Alien Species in Hawaii
This article examines how biologists in Hawaii investigating ‘invasive species’ classify ‘native’ and ‘alien’ organisms, particularly in the epistemologically ambiguous zone of archipelagic waters. Framing analysis in terms of the Sahlins‐Obeyesekere debate, the essay explores how, far from being a straightforward matter of biological definition, such classification presents taxing taxonomic and political questions, especially in Hawaii, where th…
Biosecurity
Biosecurity a Response to Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow at 20[5]
The Signature of Life
April 01 2006 The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination Stefan Helmreich Stefan Helmreich Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Stefan Helmreich Online Issn: 1536-0105 Print Issn: 1526-3819 © 2006 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2006 Grey Room (2006) (23): 66–95. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey.2006.1.23.66 Cite Icon Cite Permissions S…
Kath Weston's Gender in Real Time
Blue-green Capital, Biotechnological Circulation and an Oceanic Imaginary
Induction, deduction, abduction, and the logics of race and kinship
Species of Biocapital
Several scholars in science studies have lately sought to theorize the contemporary join of capitalism and biotechnology. A variety of terms have been forwarded to name how 'life' in the age of genomics, stem cell research, and reproductive technology has become enmeshed in market dynamics, and no term has become as prominent as biocapital. This article offers a classification of articulations of this concept, arguing that definitions of biocapit…
Dolly Mixtures
Alien Ocean
Listening Against Soundscapes
Keywords: commentary, soundscape, anthropology of sound, listening, immersion, transduction
Life Forms
We deliver a "keyword" account of the term life form as it has been used in natural philosophy and biology over the last two hundred years, beginning with its appearance in German as Lebensform. We argue that life form has, since its earliest enunciations, pointed to a space of possibility within which life might take shape, but that the way that space is imagined and theorized in biology has transformed substantially; life form originated as a t…
Sociology (31 obras) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (22 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras) · Political science (17 obras) · History (15 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Philosophy (14 obras) · Anthropology (13 obras) · Biology (13 obras) · Computer Science (13 obras)