2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 265284

COLLOQUIA

Waves
An anthropology of scientific things

Transcript of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture

given on October 22, 2014

Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute

of Technology

The Hau-Morgan Lectures Initiative

A Hau and University of Rochester Collaboration

I am honored to deliver the 2014 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, and I wish to begin
by invoking one of Morgans earliest writings, an 1841 essay on geology [SLIDE 2],*
in which can be discerned stirrings of what would become Morgans life-long inter-
est in how organic agentswhether human or nonhuman (recall his book on the
American beaver)work with territory as a kind of living ancestral material (see
Feeley-Harnik 1999). Morgan inaugurated this interest, intriguingly, in the sea, of-
fering a meditation on the biogeology of coral reefs. Morgan wondered at how the
coral animalcules of which reefs were constituted kept their skeletal armatures
ever elevated above the water, a matter that is today of live ecological concern, as
reefs disappear beneath rising seawater and waves [SLIDE 3]. Waves, slippery sorts

* To access slides referenced throughout this work, please download the file from the supple-
mentary files section in the table of contents, or directly from here: http://haujournal.
org/Helmreich_Waves_Slideshow_LHM_Lecture.pdf. Ed.

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Stefan Helmreich.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.016
 Stefan Helmreich 266

of nonhumans, are the subject of my lecture today, entities that, I will claim, mate-
rialize forms of territory, property, relationality, and agency, all preoccupations of
Morgans and of contemporary anthropology.
***
How many waves are there in the ocean? In February of this year, at a beachside
restaurant in Newcastle, Australia, Melbourne-based, Russian-born wave scientist
Alexander Babanin ran me through an ink-and-paper calculation: take the mean
wavelength of the dominant sort of wind-forced wave in the sea: 100 meters. Mul-
tiply that by the width of the average crest (also 100 meters) and get 104 square
meters, the area of the average wave. Now, divide the expanse of the world ocean,
1016 meters square, by that wave area and get 1012: a trillion waves. There, within
earshot of Newcastles surfing beach, Babanin gave me a mathematical reckoning of
what Leonardo Da Vinci once called the numberless waves of the sea.
Why would one want to tally the waves in the ocean? For scientists at the First
International Australasian Conference on Wave Science (where I met Babanin),
such accounting may aid in apprehending global wave weather and in projecting
long-term wave climate. I had come to the workshop to learn the particulars by
listening in on forty or so oceanographers, mathematicians, and meteorologists
discussing wave modeling. I had discovered, in previous anthropological work
among microbial oceanographers [SLIDE 4], that the global state of the sea can
often be illumined through measures of its smallest, composing parts (Helmreich
2009). At this conference, organized by New Zealanders and Australians and play-
fully named Kiwi-Oz Waves, or KOZWaves [SLIDE 5]),I learned that many scien-
tists interpret water waves (evanescent entities known through buoy and satellite
measures as well as through computational models) as signs, as indices, of climate
change, and, perhaps, humanly modulated climate futures.
Why do I take waves and wave scientists as subjects of study for my newest an-
thropological research? Two reasons.
First, while waves have a manifest materiality to them, they are also only appre-
hensible through abstractions [SLIDE 6], whether these are deployed by scientists,
fisherpeople, surfers, or others; as such, waves are good to think withand against
recent calls in social theory to attend to materiality [SLIDE 7: a minibibliography of
iconic books on the new materialisms, the call, in recent humanities to attend to the
extra- or prediscursive material world in literary and cultural accounts; youll see
underlining these books something of a snapshot from the Zeitgeist, a 2013 Rice
University Humanities Research Center call for postdoc applications on this topic].
Such materiality is, I think, too often posed, particularly in post-poststructuralism,
as some really real outside signification. But the materiality of the world should not,
I think, be separated from the formalisms we use to describe it [SLIDE 8: images of
recent books on formalism, mostly in cultural studies of literature, art, and math,
again underlined by a recent humanities center postdoc call for applications, this one
at Rutgers, from 2012]. And, here, just to be clear, is a formalism describing canonical
water wave motion [SLIDE 9]. To carry this closer to home, let me pepper in formal-
isms from anthropology [SLIDE 10], diagrams that might fascinate someone like Tim
Ingold, whose 2007 book Lines [SLIDE 11] reads the traces and threads that make up
kinship diagrams, rings of exchange and communication, and other anthropological

2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 265284

267 Waves

abstractions (and I love the wavy profile, lower right, of Bourdieus rendering of the
seasonal calendar of the Kablye, which he offers, in fact, as a warning against the haz-
ards of formalism, though he himself never really steers fully clear of these).
The founding premise of my research is that the materiality of waves cannot be
separated from the formalisms describing them [SLIDE 12]. The waves in which I
am interested are scientific things, entities at once material and measured, concrete
and conceptual, and, to borrow phrasing from the historian of science Hans Jrg
Rheinberger (1997), epistemic and technical. As an anthropologist of science
someone curious about how authoritative accounts of nature are assembled in prac-
tice and discourse, in labs, at conferences, in scientific papers, in public cultureI
wish to know how scientific formalisms (such as the wave, species, or life)
operate to identify and even create new entities in the world. More particularly, I
am curious about how people employ such hybrid onto-epistemo-forms as waves
to think across domains [SLIDE 13]. My wider project asks after wave phenomena
and models as described by cosmologists, cardiologists, artists, oceanographers,
surfers, economists, social theorists (see, e.g., Helmreich 2013). I am interested in
the analogies and disanalogies conjured across such zones as the watery, the acous-
tic, and the socialbelieving, with Marilyn Strathern, that culture, consists in the
way people draw analogies between different domains of their worlds (1992: 47).
A second reason to study waves is to extend and query contemporary anthro-
pological conversations about the nonhuman [SLIDE 14, a visual bibliography],
conversations that have so far treated multispecies collectives (including insects,
fungi, trees, microbes) as well as, quite recently, water, air, oil, light, mud, and rocks.
Waves, as amalgams of the physical, formal, abstract, and agentive, are enticing
objects with which to puzzle through what several scholars are starting to call an
anthropology beyond/beside humans.
Tonight, I will speak about ocean waves and climate futures [SLIDE 15]. To best ap-
preciate that future, we might first ask: do ocean waves have a history? The question may
sound odd: surely waves are simple facts of nature, timeless matters of the substance of
the sea. As historian of oceanography Helen Rozwadowski writes, most glimpses out
to sea reveal endless waves reaching to the horizon rather than any lasting evidence of
human presence (2010: 162). Waves may have diverse manifestations in marine and
maritime lore [SLIDE 16], a variety of effects on political economic enterprise, and a
range of meanings for surfers, artists, or mathematicians. But as formal and material
entities, the common wisdom might go: there they are, more or less well captured by
the scientific apparatusesincreasingly computational and Internetworkedcrafted
to measure and model them. For some wave scientists, however, not only are scientific
modes of representing waves transforming (increasing in power, fidelity) but the pat-
terns and shapes of waves themselves are also transmuting, as storm tracks shift closer
to the poles, as the global distribution of significant wave heights begins to wobble,
and (the claim is controversial) as rogue waves (waves uncharacteristically and unex-
pectedly larger than those immediately around them) grow in number.
In what follows, I report on debates among ocean wave scientists about whether
Earths wavescape might be transforming in synchrony with the political, econom-
ic, and social scene of the Anthropocene [SLIDE 17], that name ecologist Eugene
Stoermer and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen proposed in 2000 to designate
the contemporary geological epoch, dating to the Industrial Revolution, during

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 Stefan Helmreich 268

which human activity began to have global effects, effects now layered into a geo-
logical record marked with evidence of coal extraction, atomic testing, ocean plas-
tification, and accompanying species extinction. Whether and how waves might
be comprehended as elements in this world, primarily in association with global
warming, is an open question. For wave scientists, waves materialize as eventsof-
ten, populations of eventsthat may be predicted and, perhaps, managed. Waves,
for these researchers, I argue, are textsmedia that might be read for something of
the planets future state (I note that will not speak here about tsunamis, hugely im-
portant in recent times. I followfor nowmy wave scientist interlocutors, who
differentiate between wind-waves, predictable, connected to climate, and therefore
to things anthropogenic, and tsunamis, detectable, but not predictable. Ive written
elsewhere about the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 [Helmreich 2006]).
Donna Haraway (2014) has lately suggested that the Anthropocene might better
be named the Capitalocene, since so many recent geophysical transformations have
followed from capital-intensive extraction of fossil fuels. She has also proposed that
the collateral messoceanic dead zones filled with mucilage communities, new
populations of jellies and slimehas muddied bright lines between evolutionary
pasts and futures. Stealing a page from horror fantasist H. P. Lovecraft, Haraway
suggests that eco-theory might take as its mascot Chthulu, the tentacled monster
of Lovecrafts repressed, abject, but potent Earth (see Lovecraft 1928). She suggests
that we could call our epoch the Chthulucene, a heterochronic time in which the
boundary between the ancient and the contemporary is mucked up [SLIDE 18].1

1. If industrial humanitys signature can now be read in the geological record, the fortunes
of the Anthropocene as an increasingly hot keyword in anthropology might be chart-
ed by a look at the 2014 program of the meetings of the American Anthropological As-
sociation, which, as John Hartigan (2014) has pointed out, saw scores of appearances,
up from zero in 2013.
In querying the attraction of the Anthropocene to scholars in critical natu-
ral and social science as well as in the humanities and arts, Haraway has lately been
joined by several others committed to pointing out the not-so-hidden universal-
ism, Eurocentrism, human exceptionalism, andat timesandrocentrism often
animating the notion of the Anthropocene (see, e.g., Garrard, Handwerk, and Wilke
2014; Sloterdijk 2014). Look also to economist Kate Raworths October 16, 2014
tweet about the absence of women scientists on the Anthropocene Working Group:
The Anthropocene is bad enough. Spare us a Manthropocene https://twitter.com/
KateRaworth/status/522993208650108930; consult http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/
workinggroups/anthropocene/ for more about the Working Group. For a critical femi-
nist rethinking of how the contemporary geo-historical era might be imagined, see
the program of the Anthropocene Feminism conference, held April 1012, 2014 at
the Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:
http://c21uwm.com/anthropocene/conference-videos/). For a history-of-science-in-
spired science fiction piece that locates the causes of anthropogenic climate change in
capitalism, in faulty systems of governance, and in genres of scientific method insuf-
ficiently tuned to social complexity, see Oreskes and Conway 2014. For a reading of the
relation between climate change and the racialized geography of the United States that
suggests that still more specificity is called for in framing the politics of recent climate
history, see Smith 2014. And see Parikkas notion of the Anthrobscene, explained in
footnote 6.

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269 Waves

Now, wave scientists are not so apt to fold science fictional or mythical figures into
their work, but they do read their principal texts, waves, with a fantastical many-eyed,
many-armed figure over their shoulder: namely, the human, at risk at individual,
community, regional, and global scales and at the same scales in short-sighted denial.
Waves, for wave scientists, have an anthropology inside them, an account of humanity.
I wish to sketch this anthropology, drawing out how the figure of humanity suf-
fuses wave science. I will proceed as follows: a first section will offer a history of
wave research, demonstrating how sociopolitical imperatives have long saturated
knowledge in this natural science. In a second part, I will deliver a report on a wave
conference I attended in Banff, Canada. That will be followed by a third section,
returning to the wave workshop I attended in Australia, in which I compare wave
science in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, asking whether there might
be for oceanography, as Jean and John Comaroff (2011) have suggested for social
analysis, something like a theory from the south [SLIDE 19]. If the Comaroffs
contend that Northern (i.e., European and American) frames of social analysis
(the economy, nation, progress) misapprehend the motivating forces of the
world today (which they say appear most sharply in the global South, with Africa
their court of appeal), I detect, among some oceanographers, a claim that thinking
from southern oceanswith their greater proportion of seawater and icemight
be needed to upend the northern assumptions built into many wave models and to
account for intensified ocean storms, massive coral and mangrove depletion, and
sea-ice breakup: southern-sea processes with planetary effects.
A word on method: My ethnography comes from scientific conferences [SLIDE
20], sites that, as an anthropologist of science, I have learned to turn to in order to dis-
cern what count as settled questions and live debates in scientific fields. Conferences
are, to borrow a term from Victor Turner (1957), social dramas, moments when a
community makes explicit to itself historical rivalries, present puzzles, possible fu-
tures. As I continue fieldwork, I intend to join wave scientists on their ships, in their
labs, and at their computers. I am happy to entertain questions about such plans later
on, though, as youll hear as I sum up, after my third part, my questions will be more
about the relation between natural and cultural history, and, using the work of Dipesh
Chakrabarty (2012), about relations among history, science, and anthropology.
So: to history.

A compressed history of wave science

How have waves in the sea come to be modeled in a systematic way, for weather,
ship design, coastal management [SLIDE 21]? The first oceanographic accounts of
waves arrive from nineteenth-century imperatives in Europe and the United States
to know the sea as a site for the extension of land-based activities: shipping, colo-
nial travel, warfare, and communication, including networked undersea cables of
the kind Nicole Starosielski writes of in her forthcoming book, The undersea net-
work.2 Well before computers and networked buoy systems, even into the twentieth

2. Oceanographic science in general was bound up with American expansionist and

British imperial enterprise. For a classic history, see Schlee 1973. For a more recent

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 Stefan Helmreich 270

century, wave information was often gathered in the midst of the sea itself, as in
these photos from the 1940s, of Willard Bascom measuring waves with a ruler
[SLIDE 22]. Bascom wrote of one big wave: While balancing under this incipient
waterfall, I would estimate the height of the wave that was about to come crashing
down, add one third of that... to the trough depth, call the answer into a micro-
phone, and duck (1988: 9). World War II was a turning point. Bascom works here
on a duck boat, the sort of amphibious military craft that landed allied troops at
Normandy on June 3, 1944 (D-Day) and for which many wave models were devel-
oped. Walter Munk and colleagues at Scripps Oceanographic in San Diego [SLIDE
23] edged wave science into the realm of big science, working more abstractly, from
data gathered at local beaches, international wave-reporting stations, and (this was
new) views from airplanes (see Sverdrup and Munk 1943; Schlee 1973). Represen-
tations of waves from on high, argues feminist theorist Tara Rodgers (2009), were
in the nineteenth-century commentaries of scientists such as John Tyndall and
Hermann von Helmholtz often coupled with rhetorics of using calculation to tame
a feminized fluxinto order. An objectifying Gods eye view is part of the twentieth-
century tale, but more is in motion, too. Bascoms outdoorsy being-in-the-wave
masculinity also roils into repertoires for gendering the sea.
After World War II, wave science continued as a large-scale institutional activ-
ity. Military research during the detonation of nuclear weapons in the south Pa-
cific [SLIDE 24] generated waves we could nominate as Anthropocenic, human-
generated shock waves that travel faster than their medium, water, can carry them
(see Rainger 2004). Coastal infrastructure called for new developments in wave
science, as did offshore oil drilling [SLIDE 25], that practice sociologist Jackie Orr
(2013) has described as the release of a viscous inhuman intelligence, an emissary,
perhaps, of the Chthulucene. Wave science came into maturity with sociopolitical
economic imperatives, and in the United States, was keyed to projects of mass so-
ciety: military, urban, coastal.
A key inflection point came in 1961, with the invention of the wave power spec-
trum [SLIDE 26] (see Irvine 2002). In this mathematical model, waves are known
not as individuals but as collections of superimposed waves, little and big, with
different origins. A wave might be made up of forces churned up by a hurricane
a week ago, as well as by fresh energy from wind-swept ripples. Waves are rendered
not as wavy side views of undulating water [SLIDE 23], but as collisions of bell
curves. Oceanographers come to speak of wave systems, and the sea becomes
statistical (and so, what political scientist Philip Steinberg [2001] has analyzed as
a European model of the ocean as a great void or blank space between nations
continues, with wave scienceas it had begun with wind charts in the nineteenth
centuryto acquire a surface texture).
As waves become statistical, they begin to look like their contemporaneous so-
cial world, newly conceptualized, as Sarah Igo (2008) writes in The averaged Ameri-
can, as an aggregate of probabilistic social phenomena (birth rates, income levels,
more). No surprise that Elias Canetti in his Crowds and power [SLIDE 27] makes

history of science account, see Reidy and Rozwadoski 2014. On tides, see Reidy 2008.
On currents, see Mills 2009. For a more detailed history of ocean wave science, see
Helmreich, forthcoming.

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271 Waves

a link between the sea and the social: The sea is multiple, it moves, and it is dense
and cohesive. Its multiplicity lies in its waves.... The dense coherence of the waves
is something which men [sic] in a crowd know well ([1960] 1984: 80).
Let me bring you up to speed on how wave scientists nowadays understand
the formation of ocean waves: it begins with the sun heating the Earth, driving
air pressure changes. This creates wind [SLIDE 28], initiating waves, transferring
energy from air to sea. Persistent wind across an area of water,a fetch of windsea,
generates waves with a predictable range of heights. Out from under the influence
of wind, waves are called swells, packets of energy that continue to travel, and
move in groups, sets, trains. Significant wave height, the average of the tallest 1/3 of
waves in an area, is picked out through wave spectra. Like many scientific things,
waves are empirical and conceptual. No surprise, though, that such epistemic hy-
brids once made scientists nervous, even founding figure Walter Munk: Inasmuch
as these termsfetches, finite durationsare really great idealizations of the
wind field over the sea, to try and write spectra for given fetches and finite dura-
tions is to endow these meteorological notions with more claim to reality than they
deserve (quoted in Irvine 2002: 380). So, while waves are material, they are also
abstractions that take form depending on how oscillation is conceived, observed,
modeled. For real world ocean waves, that depends on infrastructure, networks of
buoys, satellites, computer models.
In the 2010s, waves are largely measured by buoys, created, owned, and operated
by a collage of governments, companies, and other agencies [SLIDE 29: map from
US National Data Buoy Center; SLIDE 30: page for buoy closest to Rochester, on
Lake Ontario; SLIDE 31 webcam for buoy off Santa Barbara; SLIDE 32: wave buoy
data on a phone]. The data buoys gather are telemetered to computers that host
models predicting swells and surges, models such as WAVEWATCH III, operated by
the US National Weather Service [SLIDE 33]. There are other models, too, created,
owned, or consulted by meteorological organizations, shipping companies, coastal
infrastructure planners, fishers, boaters, surfers. What portrait of the world waves-
cape is conjured through this mosaic? How would one start to answer this question?

Dangerous sea states

I started in the Canadian Rockies, at an October 2013 conference in Banff, Alberta:
the 13th International Workshop on Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting, Danger-
ous Sea States [SLIDE 34]. There were eightyish participants, mostly from the
United States, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ja-
pan, though a handful from such places as Mexico and Malaysia. Oceanographers,
mathematicians, oil industry people, government meteorologists, all met to con-
sider how to model and manage hazardous wave activity, particularly the kind on
the rise with climate change, including storm surges consequent upon hurricanes.
The workshop began, organizers observed, on the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy,
which brought so much devastation to New York and New Jersey.
The workshop was inaugurated with a talk entitled, Are wave measurements
actually ground truth? [SLIDE 35]. Val Swail, Manager of the Climate Data and
Analysis Section, Environment Canada, inventoried buoys measuring waves in the

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 Stefan Helmreich 272

worlds oceans [SLIDE 36]. Looking at this dizzying array of devices, Swail advised
his audience, with a good-humored world-weariness, You need to define what a
wave is before you can measure it. Is your device measuring whitecaps, foam, green
water, blue water? And in which direction are you measuring? Given that a typi-
cal buoy costs around $60,000, its worth some thought! One person joked that the
Directional Waverider [SLIDE 37], outfitted with an accelerometer to measure
the changing speed of waves, doesnt always track which way is up, so that if you
gave it a lateral push, it might tell you youve got a 30 meter wave! Swails question,
How to ground truth the ground truth about waves [SLIDE 36] was a lovely
mixed metaphor, a phrasing that makes clear what practitioners are after: a point
in the ocean that stays still [SLIDE 38]. Computer models of wave dynamics as-
sume a stationary sea, and a lot of work goes into factoring out the pitch, yaw, and
roll of buoys so wave data can be delivered as oscillation against a fixed baseline.
As historian of computing Paul Edwards argues in A vast machine, his history of
climate modeling, data are never an abstraction, never just out there.... Data
remain a human creation, and they are always material. Every interface between
one data process and anothercollecting, recording, transmitting, receiving, cor-
recting, storinghas a cost in time, effort, and potential error: data friction (2010:
109). As media theorist Lisa Gitelman (2013) has it raw data is an oxymoron.
These are matters empirical and epistemic, as the next speaker made clear. Elz-
bieta Bitner-Gregersen, working for Extreme Seas, a European university consor-
tium dedicated to ship safety design,said there were two kinds of uncertainty in
wave measurements: physical and epistemic [SLIDE 39]. Epistemic includes data,
statistical, model, and climatic uncertainty. Waves, I was beginning to see, flicker,
for these scientists, between reality and representation.3 Waves are mash-ups, amal-
gams of watery events, instrumented captures of those events, and mathemati-
cal portraits of those events, often described statistically rather than singularly.
Obviously you cannot simulate every wave in the ocean, one researcher advised
me. If, as Alexander Babanin put it in Australia, Wind generated waves are the
most complicated objects in the universeprobably more complex than objects
in astrophysics,4 waves are also complex social objects, nonhumans at once amor-
phous, approximated, parameterized, computerized. Mathematical representations
of waves in equations [SLIDE 40] are concretized in how buoys are built, in how
models incorporate data. Waves are physical and cultural objects.
Once waves-as-data are collected (transmitted from buoys, which have their
own Internet Protocol addresses) they are fed into computer models like WAVE-
WATCH III [SLIDE 41], a platform for forecasting futures and hindcasting pasts.
Wave data can also be rematerialized in real and simulated water tanks [SLIDE 42],
suggesting that waves are media (and I might mention the fantastic work of Eva

3. For a literary evocation of this doubleness, read Italo Calvinos Reading a wave, a seg-
ment within a chapter of his final novel, Mr. Palomar (1983), in which the title charac-
ter attempts to see and describe and kidnap into language the exact nature of a single
wave (Heaney 1985).
4. Babanin is the author of a key text on ocean waves, Breaking and dissipation of ocean
surface waves, from 2011. Other books upon which I depended in putting together this
lecture include Janssen 2004; Holthuijsen 2007; Parker 2010; and Zirker 2013.

2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 265284

273 Waves

Hayward [2010] and Melody Jue [2014], who have theorized waterin aquaria, in
art installationsas a media technology). But waves-as-data dont just get piped
into models. Buoys are political objects, inside jurisdictions. In the United States,
waves have been officially considered part of the weather since 1973, when the UN
ratified the Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which tasked national meteo-
rological rather than oceanographic agencies with wave measurement. If you want
to get US data about waves, consult the National Weather Service, not the National
Ocean Service (though neither will do you much good if theres a government shut-
down, as there was before Banff, which meant US waves were . . . closed). One
conferee told me it was a nightmare to get wave data out of the European Union:
Europe is the worst in that respect because theyll make some of the data available
but theyll keep the rest because they think it has some commercial value, and so,
well, were not gonna give this away because we can sell this instead, to shipping
companies, for example. Waves also have legal lives; one speaker reported, that for
the World Meteorological Organization only windsea and two swells are regulated
in ship reports [SLIDE 43: an image of layered wave spectrum analyses over a map
of the Pacific, picking out only the legally necessary aspects of waves]. So: waves are
phenomenological-technical-mathematical-political-legal objects. Sometimes they
are carried into legal grey areas, as when pirates pillage buoys for parts [SLIDE 44].
Computerized wave models go back to the 1960s. Built on millions of lines of
FORTRAN, such programs are similar to the General Circulation models upon
which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) depends. They run
on an armada of supercomputers [SLIDE 45], which need huge amounts of air
conditioning, contributing, wave scientists wryly emphasized to me, to the very
carbon profile they are tasked with tracking.5 As computationally intensive as they
are, wave models often demand more data points than there are buoys. When that
is so, models can conjure proxy data pointsvirtual buoys created by interpolating
between known data points. Such simulated ghost buoysmaking waves in the
cloud (that is, in remote computer network servers)speed up prediction. One
speaker explained how her team models storm surges: We have developed 1500
possible, simulated, storms. When theres a storm coming, we look through our
catalog of possible storms and find a matchor develop a stochastic, statistical
predictionwhich we can do quickly since it only takes a second to run a scenario.
Real data can take 2000 hours to process.
Virtual waves make some people uneasy. Two buoy developers, who started out
as fishermen, grumbled to me at the storm talk, Thats not data. Thats made up.
One ship designer made it clear he didnt care about waves as such, only about
whether his ships had hulls that would resonate dangerously with certain wave-
lengths [SLIDE 46].

5. In that sense, these computers and their virtual waves may be part of what Jussi Parikka
(2014) calls the Anthrobscenethe toxic material accompaniment of contemporary
computational, tablet, and smartphone media culture, which, far from ushering the
contemporary world into a paperless ecotopian sublime, fills the world with toxins
consequent on producing, consuming, and discarding the devices that permit (some)
people to make global assessments at all.

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 Stefan Helmreich 274

The figure of humanityindividual, corporate, regional, globalsaturates this

science. That became visceral as news streamed into the conference of St. Jude, an
extratropical cyclone that arrived in northern Europe on 27 October and killed sev-
enteen. Just hours into the workshop, a presenter showed the days headline from
The mail. England was being lashed by 25ft waves. [SLIDE 47] Participants from
the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts were gratified their
models seemed to be predicting the path, though were upset about people heading
out to the waves anyway. We cant save everyone! one participant exclaimed at a
picture of a kite surfer. Everyone moaned at the story of a 14-year old swept out to
sea. Talk of probability becomes talk of risk when human elements are introduced,
one speaker remarked.
Such attention to individual humans contrasted with talks about populations
of coastal dwellers. Conversation turned to storm surges, what one speaker called
the stupid big brothers of waves. It was here that differences between nation-
states differently positioned geopoliticallyin the global North and the global
Southemerged as a topic. UK scientist Matt Lewis spoke about the World Meteo-
rological Organizations Coastal Inundation Forecasting Demonstration Project,
aimed at improving forecasts for such places as Bangladesh, a low-lying country
with a history of storm surges that have killed hundreds of thousands of people.
He commented that it is hard to get data into a model for such settings because
they are data poor [SLIDE 48], not dotted with measurement instruments. More,
surge models imported from elsewhere dont work; the mangrove forests and dense
coastal villages of Bangladesh are not written into off-the-shelf models. Facts-on-
the-ground vary, and change.
Open-ocean and hemispheric dynamics dont stay still either. I found a dra-
matic, global picture on a conference poster [SLIDE 49, 50]. Lured in by lustrously
colored maps of world seas, I found Portuguese oceanographer Alvaro Semedo
explaining future wave climate. He had taken global data about significant wave
heights from the present, defined as 19591990, and then, assuming a steady in-
crease of CO2 into the atmospherethe IPCCs anthropogenic scenarioprojected
significant wave heights into the future, 20692100. Prognosis? Climate change
will generate larger significant wave heights in the southern oceans [red], which
will correlate with more extreme weatherstorms, droughtsand with an acceler-
ated breaking-up, by wave action, of Antarctic ice. An Australian wave scientist,
animatedly joining in, remarked that Homo sapiens were driving the planet toward
disaster: heat waves in Australia, floods in south Asia, collapsing agricultural in-
frastructure in Africa, waves, he said, of climate refugees; it was impossible, he
complained, to get politicians to think geophysically: Politicians dont understand
physics, and physics doesnt recognize politicians. Yes, another scientist chimed
in, thats the thing: weather and waves dont recognize borders!
Suddenly, I was an anthropologist in the Anthropocene, with human agents and
destinations for thinking about global climate,with climate a process at once natural
and historical. Literary theorist Ian Baucom, extending historian Dipesh Chakrab-
artys noted division of history into two kinds[SLIDE 51] History 1 (normative,
secular, Enlightenment history, as told by the West) and History 2 (subaltern, post-
colonial, sometimes supernatural accounts)has proposed that climate change
might require a new history: History 3, naturalhistorical (Baucom 2014; and see

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275 Waves

Chakrabarty 2000, 2012. Consult, too, the argument made by Bruno Latour [2014]
that the frame of the Anthropocene demands not only history but also geostory).
Baucom has also called for History 4C, keyed to the temperature rise projected for
the next century. Maybe Semedos image [SLIDE 50] is one visual aid for that. Talk-
ing about things Anthropocenic with the scientists gathered around this poster (my
being an anthropologist now an authorizing rather than a what-are-you-doing-
here? identity) saw me chatting with them about how north Atlantic hopes for
wave energy might founder if wave heights decreased, how coastal infrastructures
might drown, how shipping routes might go haywire. Soon we were all Anthropo-
cenically indignant.
I asked about a claim I heard about rogue waves, statistically unexpected waves,
defined as twice the significant wave height of their surrounds. Elzbieta Bitner-
Gregersen of Extreme Seas had argued that bigger storms in southern oceans might
lead to increases in rogue waves [SLIDE 52]. My interlocutors were divided on that
claim, though all believed such waves existed. Whereas, once upon a time, rogue
waves were considered mythical, conjured by credulous mariners, they are now
accepted as real, though their rate of incidence is unknown. In 1995 came the first
measured instance, at a North Sea Norwegian gas pipeline-monitoring platform,
the Draupner [SLIDE 53]. In a field that treats waves as statistics, this one was given
an individual name: the Draupner wave (though in this image its being played by
1829 Japanese woodblock print, Great Wave off Kanagawa, which seems to be the
go-to clip art for large waves). What causes such waves? They may emerge from
the superimposition of waves in crossing seas, [SLIDE 54] from wave-current in-
teractions (Africas Cape of Good Hope is notorious), or from resonance events in
which one wave sucks energy from another, a process described using the nonlin-
ear Schrdinger equation, from quantum mechanics. Bitner-Gregersen said, we
can expect that in some ocean areas, where the wind severity increases, and we get
more crossing seas, we will see more rogue waves.
Here, rogue waves become more than epistemologically novel; they become
ontologically new, amplified. They appear, too, as characters in an Anthropo-
cene drama, nonhuman actors created by global humanitys geophysical agency.
Chakrabarty suggests that the Anthropocene doubles the figure of the human, plac-
ing embodied humans alongside the Human, capital H, a scaled-up actor with in-
human capacities, such as the initiation of global warming. Rogue waves, then, are
specters, materializations of the inhuman human. They are not like those breaking
waves that were, for early Christians, a sign of Gods beneficence. St. Basil [SLIDE
55] wrote that at the moment when the sea meets the land, it withdraws out of
respect, bowing its waves, as if to worship the Lord who has appointed its limits
(quoted in Corbin 1995: 2627). Thats a History 2 wave, supernatural. Neither are
such waves emissaries of unrepentant modernity, as for Nietzsche ([1887] 1974)
in The gay science [SLIDE 56]: How greedily this wave approaches, as if it were
after something! How it crawls with terrifying haste into the inmost nooks of this
labyrinthine cliff!But already another wave is approaching, still more greedily and
savagely than the first, and its soul, too, seems to be full of secrets and the lust to dig
up treasures (247). These waves are not, either, like the wave of Octavio Pazs 1949
short story My life with the wave [SLIDE 57], a wave the protagonist takes home,
a tempestuous seductresses that might be tamed in a mermasculine heterosexual

2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 265284

 Stefan Helmreich 276

conquest. No, rogue waves [SLIDE 58] are of our historical moment;like the rogue
states of which their name must remind us, they are just large and unpredictable
enough to disturb institutional business as usual. They are part of human worlds,
never accessible outside cultural meaning, no matter what new materialists say. The
possibility that they emerge most strongly in the South gets me to my next episode.

Wave theory from the South

I return in this final third of this lecture to where I began, at Kiwi-Oz Waves: the
First Australasian wave conference [SLIDE 59]. I was drawn here by the words first
and Australasian. Now, I certainly did not expect a shot-across-the-bow postcolo-
nial, subaltern studies take-down of northern hemispheric presumptions embed-
ded in computational wave models, a call for wave modeling to be turned upside
down, like a counterideological south-up map [SLIDE 60]. And, anyway, Australia,
that is to say,Euro-Australia, is hardly a distinct science community,especially at
this workshop since, in spite of the conference name, no one, with the exception of
one postdoctoral fellow from Iran, had any academic base in Asia. With scholars
from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, this was a cross-equatorial eddy
from the North.
Still, there was a keen sense that southern ocean dynamics were underrepre-
sented. One European model had been found to underestimate wave heights by 20
percent in the southern hemisphere (see Janssen 2000). Just after the workshop, Na-
ture climate change [SLIDE 61] published on mis-estimations of southern ocean sea
surface temperatures in most climate models, the result of assuming too-lowcloud
cover over southern seas (Wang et al. 2014), a topic at another conference, where
one might indeed get wave theory from the South: The International Conference
on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography [SLIDE 62].
What other elements make a difference in modeling waves in the southern
hemisphere? An Australian meteorologist rattled off to me four major distinctions
between southern and northern hemispheres [SLIDE 63]. First, there is more solar
radiation hitting the sea in the south than the north; this part of the Earth is closer
to the sun most of the time. Second, theres a lot more ocean, uninterrupted, in
the south, which means the proportion of the ocean suffused by swellswaves no
longer driven by windis much higher. Third, theres less particulate plant matter
in the near-sea atmosphere because theres less land. Fourth, there is a larger area
of ice in southern oceans. This meteorologist put it bluntly: Northern hemispheric
assumptions are built right in to the models, including of waves. That makes them
challenging to use in the southern hemisphere.
But Northern hemispheric assumptions are hard to tease out; southern oceans
are less heavily instrumented than northern ones. One conferee recounted a visit to
Miami, If youre in the northern hemisphere, and they tell you that the wave front
will come in at 4:30, it will come in at 4:30. If youre in Australia and they say it will
come in at 4:30, it might come in tomorrow. Theres a geopolitical reason; among
the larger coastal nations that might manage such systemsIndia, South Africa,
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Indonesiathere has not been a highly state-funded capi-
talized maritime infrastructure. Even Australia is ringed by only twenty-five buoys

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277 Waves

(the United States monitors 200, which, most complain, is still too few). Satellite
data can sometimes, though not always, substitute.
Jean and John Comaroff write, of that zone known these days as the global
South, that its geographies have been treated in social theory as a place of paro-
chial wisdom, of antiquarian traditions, of exotic ways and means, and, above
all, of unprocessed data... reservoirs of raw fact (2011: 1). One might say that,
in oceanography, the southern hemisphere has been similarly construed, a zone of
unprocessed data, though much of the data hasnt been gathered yet! What kind
of data to collectabout open-ocean wave action, about the wave-agitated breakup
of Antarctican ice, about storm surges in low-lying south Asian countriesis an
ongoing, political question.
What happens when models from one sea are transposed from one sea to
another? Practitioners worry a good deal about such regional tuning. But the
boundary between fundamentals and tuning is not laser clear. Sometimes tuning
means incorporating regional measures, sometimes tweaking algebraic parameters
to yield the right values:fudging, some uncharitably say. Several talks featured ex-
tensive detail on such tuning. At one point, smiling to a couple of scientists who
told me that hearing such talks was for them like having a drill held to your head,
I stepped out to the Newcastle Art Museum, a block away, which turned out to have
an exhibit of paintings and sculptures of waves [SLIDE 64]. When I showed post-
cards of these works to one scientisthed been too busy to squeeze a museum into
his dayhe judged them as he would a wave model hastily tuned: that painting
is missing the whole water column, this is just the surface feature. He had unkind
words for the sculpture: Its like its done by a child. Waves do not break like that.
What was true of the art was also true of science: when you represent what a wave
is, you can only do it partially.
Let me give an example of partiality in tuning a model, an example not from
south of the equator, though from a country south of dominant centers of wave
modeling: Iran (Saket 2014). An Iranian scientist described the challenges of char-
acterizing a part of the Gulf of Oman known as the Chabahar zone [SLIDE 65].
Iran wants to harness waves here for electricity but needs more information. Unlike
the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman has poor buoy coverage. This scientist worked
with data he could get, plugging this into a model of wave action called SWAN
(Simulating Waves Nearshore); he didnt use WAVEWATCH not only because it is
better for open ocean, but also because trade embargoes prevent it being exported
from the United States to Iran. He needed a recipe for simulated wind, and bor-
rowed from a European model. It didnt work. What happened? Babanin helped
me figure it out: Wave models traditionally are validated by means of observa-
tions and thats always through some geographically linked observations. Satellites
are global, but buoys are definitely regional, so if there is anything in your region
and you tune your model to perform well in this region, then if you take it to an-
other region where certain things are different, it can have biases. In this Gulf of
Oman case, average wind-speeds from the North Sea, to which European models
tuned, were different from Gulf wind-speeds. This was a natural-scientific iteration
of what Chakrabarty names as the logic of universal knowledge, which, for social
sciences, have often claimed First in Europe, then elsewhere, with Europe, now, not
so much a full-blown ideological referent but a set of tiny technical details.

2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 265284

 Stefan Helmreich 278

The most striking southern hemispheric angle on wave science came in talks on
Antarctica [SLIDE 66]. Not only is there less ice in the Antarctic than a few decades
ago, its character has changed. Storm waves have fractured pack ice, breaking it into
tiny ice floes. More than one speaker told harrowing stories of standing on floes, at-
taching wave-measuring accelerometers [see upper left image on SLIDE 66], when
things got cracky. These scientists routed their sense of the global through bod-
ied experience. One commented that fieldwork on ice made global processes more
real to him, visceral. A few used their bodies to mime wave action, reminding
me of science studies scholar Natasha Myers observations of molecular biologists
who use gestural motion to get a feel for how proteins fold (2008). The relay
between inhuman and human is scaled through sensory substance and sentiment.
Accelerating ice-melt will affect everything from ocean circulation to coastal
upwellings of nutrients. New modeling tools are called for. As one scientist put it,
If you take parameters from the Northern Ocean, they dont necessarily apply to
the Southern Ocean. Who cares about the Southern Ocean, except us? But people
will start caring if it affects global climate! Funding for wave modeling in Antarctic
settings is on the rise, and scientists in Australia are well positioned to access the
continent, which place anthropologist Jessica OReilly (forthcoming) in Techno-
cratic wilderness observes has been reinvented many times as a site of extreme
futures. The wave theory from the South emerging at this conference was just one
among many. If you saw the New York Times earlier this year, you could think of a
wave theory from the South as one focusing on storm surges in countries open to
southern hemisphere cyclones, like Bangladesh or the Philippines [SLIDE 67]. As I
continue this project, I seek to tune to the multiplicity of possible waves that could
be the subject of such theory.

The last wave

On my way back to Boston, I traveled through Sydney, and at the citys Maritime
Museum saw an exhibit aboutNorthern aboriginalmaps of sea country, bark paint-
ings created in the 1990s as legal documents to shore up Yonglu claims to sea space
(see Buku-Larrgay Mulka Centre 1999), like this one [SLIDE 68], which maps
water... in country around the mouth of the Baraitja River. Territories of differ-
ent clan moieties are marked with distinct designs. Although one might see in these
lines something like waves, something else hit me. At the exhibits entrance was a
cultural warning for Aboriginal museumgoers, cautioning that names of deceased
artists were recorded next to some paintings; Aboriginal prohibitions against nam-
ing the recently dead, the warning urged, might make the exhibit upsetting.
An anthropologist schooled in Aboriginal studies might ask how models of
humanness as relational multispecies personhood weave into watery images such
as this (see, e.g., Rose 2012). Alternatively, one might, with Elizabeth Povinelli
(2002), point to these as tactical representations in an Aboriginal politics of rec-
ognition. As an anthropologist of science, this painting prompted me rather to
consider how models of humanness were folded into the models Id heard about
in Newcastle. On beyond the fact that the wave conference had at its center
Chakrabartys doubled human (embodied humans at risk, capital H humanity to

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279 Waves

blame)the workshop was, like the bark painting exhibit, crowded with the names
of the deceased: Laplace, Kelvin, Bernoulli, Euler, Fourier, those eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century mathematicians whose names are remembered in the equa-
tions of wave science [SLIDE 69].
What is a wave? I said before that waves are phenomenological-instrument-
data-model hybrids, butat least for waves described by equationsa wave is also
a trace of a social history,a trace, perhaps, of History 1, the Enlightenment his-
toricism contemporaneous with the calculus. Perhaps, however, such waves also,
given the religious struggles of many European mathematicians, contain echoes of
History 2; ideas about infinitesimals, when first developed, were controversial for
the Catholic church, which feared that indivisibles placed paradoxes at the heart
of Gods creation, confusing matter with its measure (Alexander 2014). Kelvin,
a contemporary of Morgans, was an old-earth creationist, and his numbers gave
him twenty million years as the age of the planet. The waves of wave science have
people, biographies, inside them. And not all are hermetically sealed European
stories. When it comes to knowledge about ocean waves, we know such figures
as Captain Cook were in dialogue with navigators from other traditions (Mack
2011); the Polynesian navigator Tupaia is one example [SLIDE 70:this is Tupaias
Pacific map, using wind and current to mark distance. I felt it incumbent upon me
to at least gesture toward another Oceanic mapping traditionMarshallese wave
navigation stick charts used to plan navigation around Micronesia; these are late
nineteenth-century examples]. As the Comaroffs write, modernity was, almost
from the start, a north-south collaborationindeed, a world-historical produc-
tionalbeit a sharply asymmetrical one. . . . It has always been a composite of
multiple signification, materializations, and temporalities (2011: 6). I asked at the
outset of this paper if waves had a history, and I hope I persuaded you that they
also have an anthropology; they are artifacts that materialize territories, properties,
relations, agencies.
Ill close in Sydney, with another wave, The last wave, a 1977 film [SLIDE 71]
directed by Peter Weir, about a white lawyer contracted to defend four Aboriginal
men in Australian court. As the lawyer is drawn into the world of his clients, he is
haunted by visions of, and perhaps even sees, its not clear (it might be an appari-
tion from the Dreamtime), a tremendous wave coming to wipe out Australia. The
wave symbolizes the power of the sea to destroy human enterprise, but also the
crashing disaster of colonial dispossession and the return to the colonial power of
the repressed, perhaps Chakrabartys History 3 carrying a communication to His-
tory 1 about its disavowed but always turbulently present, History 2s. Wave science
today is similarly multiple, emergent from a multitude of histories and agencies,
norths and souths, natures and cultures, nonhumans and humans. In the Anthro-
pocene, wave science is anthropology by other means.

Acknowledgments
I thank Daniel Reichman, Bob Foster, and Eleana Kim for inviting me to deliver
the 2014 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture. My gratitude goes, too, to their colleagues
in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rochester, who extended

2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 265284

 Stefan Helmreich 280

such a wonderful welcome to me. I also extend thanks to my external faculty inter-
locutors, Mike Fortun, Anand Pandian, and Nicole Starosielski, who during their
time in Rochester offered incisive commentary on my Lecture as well as on the ad-
ditional texts I provided for the Lecture event. The University of Rochesters Daniel
Reichman, of Anthropology, and Holly Watkins, of Music, also provided invaluable
commentary. Five graduate student Morgan scholarsBritt Dahlberg, Vincent Ial-
enti, Nicole Labruto, Amy Leia McLachlan, and Patrick Nasonwere an essential
part of the conversation. University of Rochester archivist Melissa Mead invited
me to look at Morgans Essay on Geology, for which I am grateful. Anthropol-
ogy Department manager Rose Marie Ferreri made all things infrastructural work
smoothly. I also thank Nigel Rothfels for inviting me to speak at the Center for 21st
Century Studies (C21) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where, in April
2014, I developed an earlier version of this argument. For reading and listening
to a range of drafts from then to now, I thank my colleagues in MIT Anthropol-
ogy: Michael M. J. Fischer, Jean Jackson, Erica Caple James, Graham Jones, Heather
Paxson, and Christine Walley. Ben Wurgaft and Maria Vidart-Delgado also offered
useful thoughts, as did John Gillis, Sophia Roosth, and Nick Seaver. For helping me
put together some of the history I recount here, I thank Peter Brueggeman, archivist
at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Finally, I must thank
the scientists who taught me about wave science in Banff, Canada and in Newcastle,
Australia, particularly Alexander Babanin, Andrew Cox, Alison Kohout, Michael
Meylan, Russel Morison, Alvaro Semedo, Val Swail, and Hendrik Tolman.

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 Stefan Helmreich 284

Stefan Helmreich is Elting E. Morison Professor and Head of Anthropology at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research examines the works and lives
of scientists (biologists, oceanographers, acousticians) thinking through the limits
of such categories as life, water, and sound. He is the author of Alien ocean:
Anthropological voyages in microbial seas (University of California Press, 2009),
winner of the 2010 Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society,
the 2010 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from Society for Cultural Anthropology, and
the 2012 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science.
An earlier book, Silicon second nature: Culturing artificial life in a digital world
(University of California Press, 1998) won the 2000 Diana Forsythe Book Prize
from the American Anthropological Association. Sounding the limits of life: Essays
in the anthropology of biology and beyond is forthcoming in 2015 with Princeton
University Press.
 Stefan Helmreich
 Professor and Elting E. Morison Chair
 Department of Anthropology
 Room E53-335Q
 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 77 Massachusetts Avenue
 Cambridge, MA 02142 USA
 sgh2@mit.edu

2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 265284