Cultural anthropologist Stephan Helmreich’s steady outflow of brilliant ideas in part is testimony to his deep knowledge of theoretical whims, allowing him to uncannily release fresh work just when people seem to tire of the latest fad. Like when everybody is tired of understanding or anticipating 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 scientists’ subjectivities, 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. Beautifully 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 writing that deals with scientific concepts and material forces that “rescript worlds and futures” (304).

To collect data for his ethnography, Helmreich follows waves around the globe, a little like the white surfers in the “Endless Summer,” the 1966 American surf documentary that “glorified the virtue of exploration and glossed over the viewpoints of the local population it portrayed” (Hough-Snee and Sotelo Eastman 2017:98). Only Helmreich turns the gaze back at scientists, funding bodies, and surfers, finding alluring examples of waves at conferences, in archives and laboratories. In particular, wave simulation centers capture his attention as they produce avatars of waves that variously act as reminders or harbingers of looming disaster. Readers learn to ponder waves like wave scientists, the main figures of the book. They hold significant knowledge, since waves govern maritime traffic, erode port infrastructure, or produce good surf. Waves carry code for geomorphological movement and chemical propagation. 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 written, but that carries substance, that is, meaning, announcements, and subject (matter). Over time, 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, participant observation. Most often, he is “studying across” at conferences, on research vessels, and at wave simulation centers. The diversity of his methods is in line with his message: there is a multiplicity of waves. Despite six meaty chapters, the perspective of scientists predominates. In the following, I will outline the chapters, while trying to spotlight moments where non-scientific perspectives on waves glimpse through.

In Chapter 1, Helmreich explains how waves became an object of study in Europe. Studying human attempts at understanding and domesticating waves led him to the Netherlands, a nation “that sits, one third of it, below sea level” (31). The Dutch have a long tradition of monitoring waves. The Dutch Waterloopkundig Laboratorium, established in 1927, allowed scientists to artificially generate wave flumes and observe their effects on miniature models of ports. Visiting this lab, a monument to modern wave modeling, Helmreich reflects on dreams of “doubling, shrinking, and taming the wildness of water” (35). But complex mathematical and computational wave models seem unfit to capture the complicated behaviour of waves. They are animate entities. While this animacy sneaks into wave models, it also requires bracketing coastal dynamics, “keep[ing] nonwatery infrastructure in stable focus” (54). The lab’s waves allow Helmreich to trace out a process of enculturation reaching deep into the fabric of Dutch nationalist identity. He rightly points to the imperial character of this wave knowledge, since Dutch hydro-expertise is now marketed all around the world, especially in flood-stricken countries of Asia. Here, Dutch wave knowledge and alleged cohabitation with water legitimizes international marketization of flood control. As such, the chapter makes interesting links between dreams of governing the sea and dreams of forming society. Universalizing wave knowledge, by introducing a standardized measurement of wave propagation to diagnosticate “surf similarity” across oceans, provides legitimacy and access to resources. Basins rebuilt to scale in Delft enact potential flooding scenarios, but this enactment not just anticipates domestic risks – it also generates profits in far-flung places. Helmreich catchily suggests seeing artificial waves as “zombies,” uncanny doubles that are resurrected from the dead only to be crushed again. A surplus population in the army of the postcolonial master. The chapter certainly helps familiarize waves, but other than learning about scientists and their gadgets, we don’t get acquainted with the Dutch – what is their relation with historical killer waves; are they haunted by monstrous waves? Do they themselves con