Alien Ocean

Charts how revolutions in genomics, bioinformatics, and remote sensing have pressed marine biologists to see the sea as animated by its smallest inhabitants: marine microbes. "Since I first read, and then taught, Helmreich's extraordinary essay on alien kinship and the biopolitics of gene transfer in marine biology and biotechnology in 2003, I have been swimming eagerly in his alien oceans, waiting for this book, eager to feast. A multi-sited and deeply sounded ethnography of ocean microbiologists and their subvisible critters, Alien Ocean dunks the reader in seas of blue-green capital and rampant globalizing viral traders in gene currency. Tangled in sentiment and science, salty microbial webs infuse dreadful and promising figures of aliens and familiars. In this rich study of microbial oceanography we meet the extremeophiles of a mortal earth—an earth better named ocean, where deep-sea dwelling, heat-loving archaea are dredged to tell stories of unlikely kin, extraordinary technology, planktonic globalizers, and Hawaiian indigenous activists. This is a book about networks of loves and disciplines that is hard to put down."—Donna Haraway "This book is as wondrous as the otherworldly creatures whose apperception it recounts, from one of the most innovative cultural anthropologists writing today. Helmreich shows how the water covering the earth demands of scientists a planetary optic haunted always by the figure of that which lies just outside the limits of the imagination—the alien. Deep-sea creatures turn out to be connected to networks of knowledge, economy, politics, and culture that reshape everything from the shifting shorelines of Georgian barrier islands to the postcolonial futures of Hawai'i. Alien Ocean challenges longstanding constructs of causation, system,…