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

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextSeries: Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology ; 7Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2015]Copyright date: ©2016Description: 1 online resource (328 p.) : 29 halftones. 6 line illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691164816
  • 9781400873869
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 599.9 23
LOC classification:
  • GN60 .H38 2017
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
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
Summary: 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.

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

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http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

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.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)