Han, Lisa Yin. 2024. DEEPWATER ALCHEMY. Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 256 pp. ISBN: 9781517915940

Despite what its cover might suggest, this is not a book entirely focused on deep-sea mining. However, the timing of the publication of Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor could not be more appropriate, given the growing global concern about the impending commercialisation of seabed minerals. Nor is this strictly an anthropological book. Instead, it lies at the intersection of environmental studies, media studies and science and technology studies, incorporating decolonial, feminist and multi-species perspectives. Nevertheless, this beautifully written work is sure to become essential reading for anthropologists interested in oceanic extraction, as it provides insight into the cultural representation of the seafloor.

Media scholar Lisa Yin Han explores how the deep sea has historically been, and continues to be, constructed as an extractive frontier, particularly through ocean engineering — the technological apparatus that enables us to imagine the sea as a “speculative replacement of land” (6). This transformation is encapsulated by the book’s central concept of “alchemy,” referring “the material-discursive becoming of the deep ocean, where power is encoded into naturalizations of human technological feats” (4). One of the book’s key arguments is that mediation — the way in which we come to understand the ocean through infrastructures and media technologies — is an extractive process in itself. As she explains, certain forms of media operation (though not all environmental mediations) “participate in nonreciprocal acts of removal, accumulation, and domination” (15), thereby laying the groundwork for extractive industries.

Each of the five chapters that compose the book explores different manifestations of the entanglement between media, digital technologies, and the petroleum and mining industries. As Han argues, a unifying thread across them is the drive for the “removal of information and material from the seafloor to the surface” (21), fueled by a “thirst to know the unknown” (22).

In Chapter One, the author illustrates how the deep seafloor is mediated as both an archive and a frontier — two sides of the same coin. In fact, resource extraction is not limited to natural materials but also includes cultural and epistemological resources. As she argues, “our mediations of the seafloor as an archive of cultural heritage are far from innocent” (28). Han introduces the concept of the “salvage-extraction dynamic” to emphasize that both archaeological expeditions aimed at recovering and making visible what has been lost, and seabed extraction, are ultimately driven by underlying geopolitical agendas and narratives of national identity. She also highlights how, within this linear and static conception of sedimented history, nonhumans have largely been excluded.

Continuing this historical perspective, Chapter 2 examin