MIT Anthropology
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Faculty Bio MANDUHAI BUYANDELGER | MICHAEL M.J. FISCHER | STEFAN HELMREICH | JAMES HOWE
JEAN JACKSON | ERICA JAMES | GRAHAM JONES | HEATHER PAXSON | SUSAN S. SILBEY
ARTHUR STEINBERG | CHRISTINE WALLEY
 
STEFAN HELMREICH | Publications

BOOKS

2009   Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas . Berkeley: University of California Press. Winner 2010 American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize and  2010 Gregory Bateson Book Prize, Society for Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropological Association.    
2000
   Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, Updated with a New Preface. Berkeley: University of California Press (hardcover edition 1998). Winner 2001 Diana Forsythe Book Prize, Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing, American Anthropological Association.

ARTICLES IN REFEREED JOURNALS

forthcoming   Extraterrestrial Relativism. In “Extreme: Limits and Horizons of the Once and Future Cosmos,” Debbora Battaglia, David Valentine, and Valerie Olson, eds., special issue of Anthropological Quarterly.
in press   Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies (with Michele Friedner). The Senses & Society 7(1).
in press   From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures. In “Image as Action, Image in Action,” special issue of Social Research 78(4).
2011   What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies. Critical Inquiry 37(4):671-696.
2011   Nature/Culture/Seawater. American Anthropologist 113(1):132-144.
2010   Human Nature at Sea. Anthropology Now 2(3):49-60.
2010   The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography (with S. Eben Kirksey) Cultural Anthropology 25(4):545-575.
2010   Life Forms: A Keyword Entry (with Sophia Roosth). Representations 112:27-53.
2008   Species of Biocapital. Science as Culture 17(4): 463-478.
2007   An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography. American Ethnologist 34(4): 621-641.
2007   Blue-Green Capital, Biotechnological Circulation and an Oceanic Imaginary: A Critique of Biopolitical Economy. BioSocieties 2(3): 287-302.
2007   "Life is a Verb": Inflections of Artificial Life in Cultural Context. Artificial Life 12(2): 189-201.
2006   "The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination." Grey Room 23(4):66-95.
2005   "How Scientists Think; About 'Natives,' for Example. A Problem of Taxonomy among Biologists of Alien Species in Hawaii," The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Incorporating MAN. 11(1):107-127.
2003   "A Tale of Three Seas: From Fishing through Aquaculture to Marine Biotechnology in the Life History Narrative of a Marine Biologist". Maritime Studies 2(2): 73-94.
2003   "Trees and Seas of Information: Alien Kinship and the Biopolitics of Gene Transfer in Marine Biology and Biotechnology." American Ethnologist 30 (3):341-359.
2001   “After Culture: Reflections on the Apparition of Anthropology in Artificial Life, a Science of Simulation.” Cultural Anthropology 16(4): 613-628.
2001   “Artificial Life, Inc.: Darwin and Commodity Fetishism from Santa Fe to Silicon Valley.” Science as Culture 10(4): 483-504.
2000   “Flexible Infections: Computer Viruses, Human Bodies, Nation-States, Evolutionary Capitalism.” Science, Technology, and Human Values 25(4): 471-490.
2000   “Power/Networks: A Rejoinder to Lansing.” Critique of Anthropology 20(3): 319-327.
1999   “Digitizing “Development”: Balinese Water Temples, Complexity, and the Politics of Simulation.” Critique of Anthropology 19(3): 249-266.
1998   “Recombination, Rationality, Reductionism, and Romantic Reactions: Culture, Computers, and the Genetic Algorithm.” Social Studies of Science 28(1): 39-71.
1997   “The Spiritual in Artificial Life: Recombining Science and Religion in a Computational Culture Medium.” Science as Culture 6(3): 363-395.
1995   “Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and Alternatives to Computationalism and Objectivism.” Stanford Humanities Review 4(2): 320-323.
1992
   “Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy’s Concept of Diaspora.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 2(2): 243-249. Reprinted in Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology, Volume 3. Roland Robertson and Kathleen E. White, eds. London: Routledge, 2003.
     

OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Chapters in Edited Volumes

2011   Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science. In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch, eds. Pp. 151-175. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2009   Intimate Sensing. In Simulation and Its Discontents . Sherry Turkle, ed. Pp. 129-150. Cambridge: MIT Press.
2007   The SX-70 Camera. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Sherry Turkle, ed. Cambridge: MIT Press.
2007   An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater. In Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, Jessica Riskin, ed. Pp 321-333. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2005   (with Heather Paxson) "Sex on the Brain: A Natural History of Rape and the Dubious Doctrines of Evolutionary Psychology." In Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthrpologists Talk Back. Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman, eds. Pp. 180-205. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reprinted in  Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory , third edition . Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy, eds. Pp. 565-583. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
2004   "The Word for World is Computer: Simulating Second Natures in Artificial Life." In Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on the Sciences of Complexity. Norton Wise, ed. Pp. 275-300. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2003   “Life@Sea: Networking Marine Biodiversity into Biotech Futures.” In Remaking Life and Death: Towards an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, eds. Pp. 227-259. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
2001   “Kinship in Hypertext: Transubstantiating Fatherhood and Information Flow in Artificial Life.” In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. Pp. 116-143. Durham: Duke University Press.
1998   “Replicating Reproduction in Artificial Life: or, the Essence of Life in the Age of Virtual Electronic Reproduction.” In Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation. Sarah Franklin and Helena Ragoné, eds. Pp. 207-234. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
1992   “The Historical and Epistemological Ground of von Neumann’s Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata and Theory of Games.” In Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life. Francisco Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Pp. 385-391. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Book Reviews and Commentaries

2011   Comment on “Biosemiosis, Technocognition, and Sociogenesis: Selection and Significance in a Multiverse of Sieving and Serendipity,” by Paul Kockelman. Current Anthropology 52(5):731-732.
2011   From Polavision to Gaga Glasses. Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art about Lady Gaga, http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/2011/02/from-polavision-to-gaga-glasses.html
2011   Bear Story: Poaching Jake Metcalf, in “Poaching at the Multispecies Salon,“compiled by Eben Kirksey, Craig Schuetze, and Nick Shapiro. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 99/100: 152-153.
2011   The Inner Sleeve: The Voyager Interstellar Record. The Wire 324:77.
2010   Listening Against Soundscapes. Anthropology News 51:10.
2010   Waves. Insights , Vol 3. Published by Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, United Kingdom: http://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/insights/volume3/article18/
2010   Reply to Dame Gillian Beer's “Late Darwin and the Problem of the Human.” On the Human , a project of National Humanities Center, http://onthehuman.org/
2009   Review of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation , by Michael Fortun. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 52(3): 477-479.
2009   Submarine Sound. The Wire 302: 30-31.
2008   Review of Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy , by Sarah Franklin. American Ethnologist 35(4): 4005-4009.
2007   Induction, Deduction, Adbuction, and the Logics of Race and Kinship: Commentary on Stephan Palmie's "Genomics, Divination, 'Racecraft.'" American Ethnologist 34(2): 228-230.
2006   Kath Weston's Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age. Kath Weston Interviewed by Stefan Helmreich. Body and Society 12(3): 103-121.
2006   Time and the Tsunami. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (Special issue on "Water: Resources & Discourses," edited by Justin M. Scott Coe and W. Scott Howard) 6(3).
2006   Review of Genetic Nature/Culture , edited by Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath and Susan Lindee. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 129(2):318-319.
2005   "Biosecurity: A Reply to Nicolas Langlitz." Anthropology Today 21 (5):20.
2005   Cetology Now: A Sketch for the Twenty-First Century. Melville Society Extracts 129:10-12.
2005   Comment on "Biosecurity: Proposal for an Anthropology of the Contemporary," by Stephen Collier, Andrew Lakoff, and Paul Rabinow. Anthropology Today 21(2):21.
2004   Review of Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living, by Richard Doyle. Space and Culture 7(3):349-352.
2003   The Sound of OneTree Cloning. In OneTrees: The FAQs - A Bioinformatic Instrument by Natalie Jeremijenko.
2003   "Torquing Things Out: Race and Classification in Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star's Sorting Things Out: Classifications and Its Consequences." Science, Technology, and Human Values 28(3): 435-440.
2003   “Spatializing Technoscience”, a review article on: Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society by Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, by Daniel Miller and Don Slater, and Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana, by Peter Redfield. Reviews in Anthropology 32(1): 13-36.
2002   Comment on For Whom the Cell Tolls: Debates about Biomedicine by Gísli Pálsson and Kristín E. Hardardóttir. Current Anthropology 43(2): 289-290.
 2000   Effacing Race, letters, Village Voice, 10 October, page 6.
1999   Review of “Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology”, by Paul Rabinow. American Ethnologist 26(3): 783-784.

Foreign Language Articles

2009   Menschliches Leben auf See (Human Nature at Sea). Bios und Zoë: Die menschliche Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Human Nature in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility), Martin Weiss, ed. Pp. 136-151. Edition-Suhrkamp. (German translation by Martin Weiss).
2005   "El Espacio de la Ciencia, del Genoma Humano al Oceano." Ciencias: Revista de Difusion de la Facultad de Ciencias de la UNAM 78: 18-24. (Spanish translation by Ana Alvarez).
2000   “La Vida Artificial.” Desacatos: Revista de la Antropología Social 5:109-116 (Spanish translation by Gisèle Pérez-Moreno).
1999   “Virtuellement Dieu.” Les Cahiers de Science et Vie 53:70-76 (French translation by magazine personnel).

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