Microsoft Word - A Book of waves_discussion-2 (1).docx


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Review of “Helmreich, Stefan. 2023. A Book of Waves. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. 

Durham: Duke University Press.” 

 

Cultural anthropologist Stephan Helmreich’s steady ouMlow of brilliant ideas in part is 

tesOmony to his deep knowledge of theoreOcal whims, allowing him to uncannily release 

fresh work just when people seem to Ore of the latest fad. Like when everybody is Ored of 

understanding or anOcipaOng the next turn in anthropology, Helmreich offers the “oceanic 

churn!” “A Book of Waves,” the third monograph by Helmreich, shows how to think with 

waves. Helmreich first learned to read waves as a bodysurfer. As an ethnographer of science, 

he set out to study them in depth. The result is a thorough reading of waves and how they 

“convolve” ocean scienOsts’ subjecOviOes, markets, and planetary crises. The book is the 

result of his Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester, which were 

presented about ten years ago. BeauOfully designed and typeset, it situates itself 

somewhere between science and technology studies, infrastructure studies, and new 

materialism, introducing us to a mode of thinking and wriOng that deals with scienOfic 

concepts and material forces that “rescript worlds and futures” (304).  

 

To collect data for his ethnography, Helmreich follows waves around the globe, a liXle like 

the white surfers in the “Endless Summer,” the 1966 American surf documentary that 

“glorified the virtue of exploraOon and glossed over the viewpoints of the local populaOon it 

portrayed” (Hough-Snee and Sotelo Eastman 2017:98). Only Helmreich turns the gaze back 

at scienOsts, funding bodies, and surfers, finding alluring examples of waves at conferences, 

in archives and laboratories. In parOcular, wave simulaOon centers capture his aXenOon as 

they produce avatars of waves that variously act as reminders or harbingers of looming 

disaster. Readers learn to ponder waves like wave scienOsts, the main figures of the book. 

They hold significant knowledge, since waves govern mariOme traffic, erode port 

infrastructure, or produce good surf. Waves carry code for geomorphological movement and 

chemical propagaOon. Knowing waves thus translates into specific forms of power: military, 

territorial, and ecological. The book might want to teach readers how to become wave-

literate themselves, to read something that is not wriXen, but that carries substance, that is, 



meaning, announcements, and subject (maXer). Over Ome, we begin to understand that the 

wave is much more than a natural or material phenomenon. It is a cultural phenomenon, or 

as Helmreich puts it, a kind of media. If we were wave-literate, we’d see that human kind is 

enmeshed with the wave and it is breaking.  

 

To understand waves as media, Helmreich mobilizes a plethora of methods: visual analysis, 

studying media and video material, interviews, parOcipant observaOon. Most oeen, he is 

“studying across” at conferences, on research vessels, and at wave simulaOon centers. The 

diversity of his methods is in line with his message: there is a mulOplicity of waves. Despite 

six meaty chapters, the perspecOve of scienOsts predominates. In the following, I will outline 

the chapters, while trying to spotlight moments where non-scienOfic perspecOves on waves 

glimpse through.  

 

In chapter 1, Helmreich explains how waves became an object of study in Europe. Studying 

human aXempts at understanding and domesOcaOng waves led him to the Netherlands, a 

naOon “that sits, one third of it, below sea level” (31). The Dutch have a long tradiOon of 

monitoring waves. The Dutch Waterloopkundig Laboratorium, established in 1927, allowed 

scienOsts to arOficially generate wave flumes and observe their effects on miniature models 

of ports. VisiOng this lab, a monument to modern wave modeling, Helmreich reflects on 

dreams of “doubling, shrinking, and taming the wildness of water” (35). But complex 

mathemaOcal and computaOonal wave models seem unfit to capture the complicated 

behaviour of waves. They are animate enOOes. While this animacy sneaks into wave models, 

it also requires brackeOng coastal dynamics, “keep[ing] nonwatery infrastructure in stable 

focus” (54). The lab’s waves allow Helmreich to trace out a process of enculturaOon reaching 

deep into the fabric of Dutch naOonalist idenOty. He rightly points to the imperial character 

of this wave knowledge, since Dutch hydro-experOse is now marketed all around the world, 

especially in flood-stricken countries of Asia. Here, Dutch wave knowledge and alleged 

cohabitaOon with water legiOmizes internaOonal markeOzaOon of flood control. As such, the 

chapter makes interesOng links between dreams of governing the sea and dreams of forming 

society. Universalizing wave knowledge, by introducing a standardized measurement of wave 

propagaOon to diagnosOcate “surf similarity” across oceans, provides legiOmacy and access 

to resources. Basins rebuilt to scale in Dele enact potenOal flooding scenarios, but this 



enactment not just anOcipates domesOc risks – it also generates profits in far-flung places. 

Helmreich catchily suggests seeing arOficial waves as “zombies,” uncanny doubles that are 

resurrected from the dead only to be crushed again. A surplus populaOon in the army of the 

postcolonial master. The chapter certainly helps familiarize waves, but other than learning 

about scienOsts and their gadgets, we don’t get acquainted with the Dutch – what is their 

relaOon with historical killer waves; are they haunted by monstrous waves? Do they 

themselves consider waves as infrastructure, a compelling idea that Helmreich pitches at the 

end of the chapter, where the Sand Motor enrolls seawater to engineer sand deposits to 

shore up Dutch claims to cohabiOng with the North Sea? Early on in the book, waves that 

oscillate between immaterial media and material impose their ambivalence on the clarity of 

the argument.  

 

Aeer being introduced to a formalist knowledge of waves that tries to understand their 

varied semioOc and cultural roles in rather abstract terms, we board the FLIP, another 

astounding and swimming lab. Aboard this futurisOc vessel, researchers find themselves 

amidst real waves, or “moving ecologies” (58). Reading them means commanding an array 

of instruments, such as buoys and a fleet of underwater vehicles and planes. “Flipping the 

ship” is not about the ship stripping business in the Afrasian Sea, but researchers’ changing 

orientaOons to their work which requires recalibraOng the demands of wave science to 

personal ambiOons, values, and one’s career. Given the problemaOc provenance of funding 

for FLIP (the military-industrial complex), Helmreich acknowledges the necessity to navigate 

one’s career and poliOcs (100) around such quesOonable support. Just what this orientaOon 

exactly means for his own research remains a mystery, which feels like a wonderous 

oversight given the author’s long-term employment with MIT, an insOtuOon infamous for 

raking in hundreds of millions in research contracts with military and corporate actors. In 

this chapter, Helmreich also pays aXenOon to the gendered nature of this labour as well as 

its imperial origins, seizing the moment to lay bare the origins of his own infatuaOon with 

waves. Looking back, Helmreich tenderly describes them as “shimmering promises, 

hyperreal translaOons of the virtual (the perfect wave) into the actual” – “as invitaOons to 

self-actualizaOon across an open future” (99). His obsession with and romanOcizaOon of 

waves stands in contracts with treaOng them as infrastructure, which is something US 

insOtuOons commonly do. Their imperial projects relied and conOnue to rely on beneficial 



environmental condiOons for, say, military invasions or expanding the reach of diplomacy. 

Today, scienOsts also turn to waves as composite infrastructures of bacterial spread to 

understand the health of the sea and “possible ocean futures.” I liked the contradictory role 

of waves for actualizing and prevenOng certain futures. Waves can be conduits to personal 

utopia and collecOve dystopia.  

 

OperaOng wave-making infrastructure to transpose hydrological models onto reality forms 

the empirical backbone of the third chapter. Here, another open-air lab is allowing “textbook 

wave guys” (which is how one civil engineer refers to himself, p. 174) to make waves come 

alive – this Ome eerie simulaOons of tsunamis. Helmreich convincingly shows how simulaOng 

waves means claiming a specific knowledge of places. Through reverse engineering, 

engineers want to approximate the potenOal destrucOveness of tsunamis for coastal Oregon, 

a region threatened by the consequence of large earthquakes that might cause the sea floor 

to displace massive quanOOes of water. Lab engineers pracOce a “back-and-forth between 

such models and the world,” not that different from anthropologists trying to ground theory 

in the vagaries of everyday life. “Thinking at different scales, in other words, makes 

similariOes and differences slide in and out of view.” Once again, readers might wonder what 

locals do with this knowledge? We get glimpses of this through a shop owner’s prepped 

emergency pack and restaurant names. Just how this spike in awareness is turned into 

profits remains unexplored. How significant are tsunami scenarios for elecOons, home-

making, and coastal life, in general? How does one live with the massive seawalls that are 

being constructed in Japan, Indonesia, and, perhaps soon, in the Pacific US? What is perhaps 

missing from the bigger picture presented in this book, then, is captured by an interlocutor 

portrayed in the next chapter, when they talk about the “coastal side of things, […] where 

what you might call the anthropological aspects actually start to drive the research…” (219).  

 

How computaOonally modeled waves help ‘stand watch’ in a world in and consOtuted of flux 

is discussed in the following chapter. Based on hanging out with employees of WAVEWATCH, 

“the world’s most widely used simulaOon and predicOon plaMorm for ocean waves” that can 

accommodate high-speed numerical analysis of recent ocean monitoring and make 

predicOons, Helmreich shows how wave forecasOng requires re-mediaOng and re-formalizing 

waves. RemediaOon and re-formalizaOon interlace human and technological renderings of 



waves while leading to rather abstract representaOons. It is abstracOng waves from their 

temporal and spaOal context that makes them interchangeable and comparable. The work 

ethos of the company is parOcularly interesOng: they want to keep soeware accessible and 

universally available so that it can recruit people in “communiOes of pracOce” (217). 

Helmreich accurately calls this community a “wave polity,” a realm of sovereignty 

constructed from traded knowledge, predicOon, and a shared ethics of accessible 

technology. Of course, computaOonal knowledge of waves doesn’t neatly map onto reality. 

As the previous chapter showed, nearshore currents produce highly specific, idiosyncraOc 

waves. On page 228, the sediments and pollutants-carrying river allows Helmreich to remind 

us that water is always “convolved with the material world” and escapes full raOonalizaOon. 

These excesses and disturbances of models are what fascinates wave scienOsts, it doesn’t 

frustrate them. It also fascinates a growing community of ciOzen scienOsts whose 

involvement in observing the sea introduces an embodied and localized knowledge of 

waves. Of course, excess water can mean doom for millions of coastal dwellers living in 

chronically flooded downstream areas, who closely monitor the specific dynamics of shore 

waters. This is what the next chapter tries to take up.  

 

Here, Helmreich describes how wave scienOsts working in the Southern Hemisphere paddle 

against biases and trends in a discipline dominated by Western physical oceanographers. 

Helmreich is curious whether there might be proponents for a Southern penchant in wave 

theory, which means thinking futures from waves in neglected oceans. In addiOon to being 

less mixed up with human endeavours or centralized, capitalist mariOme infrastructure 

(273), wave heights and other biological specificiOes of the Southern Hemisphere oceans 

also make them stand out. Anthropology has certainly played a role in differenOaOng 

Southern from Northern seas in the global climate imaginary, as they predominantly 

documented threats to insular lives and tsunami recovery in this region of the planet. The 

Southern oceans were, then, both a proxy for empire and for theorizaOon. Aware of the 

legacies of colonizaOon, struggles for independence, and internaOonal development efforts, 

Helmreich presents wave effects in the Bay of Bengal as “vital enOOes through which to 

query and reorient wave theory” (285). Today, waves write stories that tell global tales of 

climaOc upheaval as much as they conjure the “planetary,” as Helmreich convincingly argues, 

since waves condense geological as well as global forces to the extent that “waves – rising 



surging, rolling – can now be read as materializaOons of climate changes in liXoral Asia” 

(280). Importantly, they materialize as swells of trash and polluOon that lasOngly transform 

nearshore habitats into sickened ecologies, ailing from “churning, confused Ome” that 

harbours chronic risk and disease. And yet, chalking waves off to climate change is a 

misreading, as Helmreich points out, drawing heavily on Camelia Dewan’s (2021) work on 

hydrological intervenOons into the Bengal Delta.  

 

Water literacy is a skill that ethnographic work can help develop, as this book shows. A Book 

of Waves teems with materialist understandings of animacy and agency. And yet, the literacy 

that this book develops doesn’t sufficiently center the material side of things. If these 

brackish, sluggish, chimeric enOOes constantly exceed nomenclatures, computaOonal 

possibiliOes, and formula, how does their behavior also quesOon baseline noOons of 

materiality, of both water, ground, and waves? Instead, we are lee with waves as harbingers 

or messengers – in other words, remediated media. But how significant is a book about 

“significant” waves when it skirts quesOons about material outcomes?  

 

Bibliography 
Dewan, Camelia. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and 

Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Culture, Place, and Nature. SeaXle: University of 
Washington Press. 

Hough-Snee, Dexter Zavalza, and Alexander Sotelo Eastman, eds. 2017. The Cri9cal Surf 
Studies Reader. Durham: Duke University Press. 

 

Lukas Ley is an environmental and urban anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for 
Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, where he leads a DFG-funded Emmy Noether 
research group on the infrastructural lives of sand in the Indian Ocean World. Ley’s first 
book, “Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang” was 
awarded the Social Science Prize by the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies and 
received an Honorable Mention for the Benda Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. 
 

/© 2024 Lukas Ley