Helmreich an Anthropologist Underwater

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STEFAN HELMREICHMassachusetts Institute of Technology

An anthropologist underwater:Immersive soundscapes, submarine cyborgs, andtransductive ethnography

A B S T R A C T

In this article, I deliver a rst-personanthropological report on a dive to the seaoor inthe Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutionsthree-person submersible, Alvin. I examine multiplemeanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, anabsorption in activity, and the all-encompassingentry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium.Tuning in to the rhythms of what I call thesubmarine cyborgdoing anthropology in sound,as advocated by Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis(2004)I show how interior and exteriorsoundscapes create a sense of immersion, and Iargue that a transductive ethnography can make

explicit the technical structures and social practicesof sounding, hearing, and listening that support thissense of sonic presence. [ anthropology of science,anthropology of sound, soundscapes, immersion,cyborgs]

Iam preparing to sink into thesea, probably therst anthropologist to

join the research submersible Alvin on a dive to the ocean oor. Thethree-person sub sits like a massive, oblong washing machine on thestern of the research vessel Atlantis, where a thick rope temporarily tethers it to an enormous metal A-frame rising from the ships fantail.

Clamberingdownasteepladderintothesubmarine,IndpilotBruceStrick-rottalreadyadjusting Alvins array of knobs, buttons,and computer screens.Geologist John Delaney is next to descend; deliveringa foul-mouthed oath,he wedges his tall frame into a nook on the port side of the sub. As we arelowered into the waters of the northeastern Pacic on this cloudy June day in 2004, wet-suited escort swimmers survey the exterior of our capsule tomake sure we do not go down gurgling. They snorkel past our individualfour-inch-thick acrylic view ports, each window just wide enough to t thefeatures of a face.

In what I initially imagine to be an idle pun, graduate students on Atlantis have joked that I will now truly immerse myself in the cultureof deep-sea oceanographers, seeing their preferred medium with my ownanthropological eyes. As we begin our hour-long descent, my attention is,indeed, captured by such traditional icons of the deep as the evanescent jellies that ash past my window. But I am also fascinated by the soundsthat accompany and enable our descent. The snug seven-foot-diameterinterior of our titanium sphere is awash in the metallic and mufedpings of distant sonar devices, the echoes of telephone voices from the Atlantis, and the quiet pop music that percolates from Alvins stereo soundsystem. These bleep-blooping, burbling, and babbling sounds do, in fact,contribute, I nd, to a feeling of immersion. Submerging into the oceanalmost seamlessly merges with a sense of submerging into soundandinto a distinctively watery soundscape.

The easyimage comes tome of Alvin asa ball of culturesubmergedin thedomainof nature. Afterall, submarinesettingsoften take to anextreme thedisplacement of thenatural environment bya technologicalone (Williams1990:4). As the noted vent biologist Cindy Van Dover suggests, in a more

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST , Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 621641, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article contentthrough the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website,http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.4.621.


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American Ethnologist Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007

sensational turn of phrase, descending the water columnin a submarine is an unnatural act (1996:16). But naturaland cultural dynamics develop dense interrelations as well,feeding back into one another in Alvins immersion. The as-semblage of thesub andits encapsulatedscientists is clearly

a cyborg, a combination of theorganic andtechnicalkept intune and on track through the self-correcting dynamics of visual, audio, andtactilefeedback. Positioned in thesub,ourbodiesare threaded into a media ecologyof communicationand control, networked into a semiotic order that extends,modulates, andconditions our senses. As an anthropologiston Alvin, I am anxiousaboutmy role in this circuit.Recalling an iconoclasticone-linerdelivered byChrisKelty(2003), an-other ethnographer of the hypertechnological, I ask myself,What would Margaret Mead do? Delaney unsuspectingly offers a possible answer, scripting me into the informaticloop, wisecracking that my research will constitute a re-cursive study of ourselves studying. Mead, as readers may

recall, was not only fascinated by sex in Samoa and tranceand dance in Bali but was also a fan of feedback systems. Inanarticle entitledCyberneticsof Cybernetics(Mead1968),she called for anthropologists to become familiar with thevocabulary of information theory, to take seriously the pos-sibilities and effects of systems thinking and doing. 1

Inthisarticle,Itakeupthatcharge,payingspecialatten-tion to therole of sound in constituting theexperience of cy-berneticandculturalimmersion.IfollowStevenFeldsrecentcall for doing anthropology in sound (Feld and Brenneis2004)which, for the setting that concerns me here, entailsattending to the sounds of science (Mody 2005), placing sound studies at the center of investigations of technosci-entic practice (Pinch andBijsterveld 2004). 2 In asking afterthe sounds that oat in and out of submariners conscious-ness, however, I am less interested in the self-referentiallooping of a cybernetics of cybernetics than I am con-cernedwith the technical transformationsof sound andsig-nal that support cybernetic sensibility and consciousnessin the rst place. I am curious about the cognitive, affec-tive, and social effects of transducingthat is, converting,transmutingsound from the medium of water into thatof air, and about what an anthropology of such transducedsensing can make explicit about the conditions that permitimmersion (and, I maintain, that create senses of presenceas such), whether people speak of immersing themselvesin water, sound, or the medium of culture. The Oxford En- glish Dictionary (OED) denes transduce as follows:To alterthephysicalnature ormediumof (a signal); to convert varia-tionsin(amedium)intocorrespondingvariationsinanothermedium.

Such alterations and conversions are about the simul-taneous structuring of matter and meaning. I counterpose,then, to the recursive recipes of reexive ethnography thepossibilitiesof a transductive ethnographyan inquirymo-tivated notbythe visual rhetoric of individual self-reection

andself-correctingperspectivalism,but one animatedbyanauditorilyinspiredattentiontothemodulatingrelationsthatproduce insides and outsides, subjects and objects, sensa-tion andsensedata. Rather than seeing from a point of view,then, I suggest tuning in to surroundings and to circum-

stances that allow resonance, reverberation, echosenses,in brief, of presence and distance, at scales ranging from in-dividual to collective. Using my dive in Alvin as a narrativevehicle, I meditate less on what I saw in the teensy patch of ocean oorI visited (mostly passing apparitions of esh androck) and more on what we in the sub (and sometimes, by extension,we in theshipsub system) heardandlistened to.

In operating the concept of transduction, I developand rene for anthropological purposes an exposition of-fered by historian of sound Jonathan Sterne, who arguesin The Audible Past (2003) that mechanisms of transduc-tion, built into such technologies as the telephone and ra-dio, have been read back into the very nature of hearing;

transduction is now imagined as a universal infrastructurefor a range of cultures of hearing (see, e.g., Arehart 2005). Isuggest that hearing cultures (cf. Erlmann 2004)or, better,listening to social andcultural practicescan be sharpenedby sounding out concretions of this infrastructure, pressing us as ethnographers toward discernments of material andsemiotic relationships often washed out of attention by theall-encompassing idiom of immersion.

Inadapting transductionfor theanthropologyof sound,I hope to illustrate how novel ethnographic results mightfollow from attending to the ways soundscapes are fash-ioned and to how hearing and listening are conceived andexperienced. At various points during my dive narrative, Iag other ethnographies of sound I think zero in on trans-ductive dynamicsor that might benet from doing so. Ialso identify a loose constellation of anthropological schol-arship that explicitly works with the notion of transduction(to anticipate: Fischer 2007; Myers 2006; Silverstein 2003)and that in some instances takes transduction beyond therealm of the auditory to consider a range of other sensory relays and transformations of matter and meaning. Draw-ing on phenomenological and philosophical treatments of transduction as a process of constituting, structuring, andmodifyingspatialandlogicalrelations(DeleuzeandGuattari1987; Mackenzie 2002; Simondon 1992), I conclude thatsuch ethnographies of transduction press toward consider-ing ethnography as transduction.

Soundscapes

The Alvin dive I have joined will employ a high-resolutionimaging sonar system called Imagenex to map portionsof the Mothra Hydrothermal Vent Field, a seabed region of black smokers on the Endeavour Segment, a narrow sub-marine volcano situated on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, theedge of a major tectonic plate that sits some 200 nautical

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An anthropologist underwater American Ethnologist

miles off the Pacic Northwest coast and about 2,000 me-ters down. I have talked my way into Alvin as part of ethno-graphic research into how oceanographers imagine andencounter such abyssal ecologies as hydrothermal vents(see Helmreich 2003). Chief scientist Deborah Kelley, of the

School of Oceanography at the University of Washington inSeattle, learned through colleagues about my project on theanthropology of contemporary marine biology, and when aberth opened up on Atlantis for this National Science Foun-dation (NSF)funded trip, sheinvited me along.My dive willbea standardeight-or-sohourslong.I have been able tosignon largely because no groundbreaking research is slated forthis routine excursion,Dive#4020an indication of thesafeandsteadyrhythminto which Alvin dives have settled sincetheWoodsHoleOceanographicInstitutioninMassachusettsbegan operating the sub in 1964. 3

As we drop down to the ocean oor, amidst a wash of submarinesounds, somequestionssurface: How did thedo-

main that JacquesCousteau (with Dumas1953)once namedthe silent world become so sonorous? How did the underwater realm, this zone to which humans cannot have ex-tended, unmediated access (without drowning, that is), be-come imaginable and accessible as a space of sound? Whatkinds of technical work have been necessary to bring thiseldinto audibilityfor human ears? Andwhat have been thecultural effectsfor people in submarines, for exampleof suchwork? Learning theanswersrequiresdipping intosomesubmarine history, tuning into the technical specics of un-derwater listening,consideringcyberneticnetworks ofcom-munication and control, and querying the multiple modesthroughwhichpeople imagineimmersion: as a descent intoliquid,as anabsorption ofmind andbodyin some activity orinterest (such as music), andin a meaning of relevance toanthropologistsas the all-encompassing entry of a personinto an unfamiliar cultural milieu.

Key to thinking through how the sensation of auditory immersion is produced is the concept of a soundscape.Ecologically minded musician R. Murray Schafer advancedthe term in 1977 to call attention to his worry that natu-ral sonic environments were being polluted by industrialnoise.Historian Emily Thompson, in a more formal register,denes the soundscape as an auditory or aural landscape. . . simultaneously a physical environment anda wayof per-ceiving that environment; it is both a world and a cultureconstructed to make sense of that world (2002:1). A sound-scape includes what Feld calls an acoustemology, a sonic way of knowing and being (Feld and Brenneis 2004:462; seealso Feld 1996). 4

There are, of course, many genres of such knowing andbeing, diverse meanings of the auditory (Mody 2005:193),and, although it may seem to go without saying, three-dimensional space has been central to the conceptiontheacoustemologyof the soundscape (Schafers compositionof soundwalks, in which sonic landscapes are experiencedvia movement through space, makes spatiality explicit). In

Village Bells (1998), a lush history of sound in 19th-century rural France,Alain Corbin argues that the ringingandrever-beration of church bells served to dene the auditory cir-cumference of village communities, rooting people in localterritoriesbyplacingtheminasoundscapethatsymbolically

reinforced theirsocialproximity to town centers. In Sound-ing the Makassar Strait, Charles Zerner describes how Mandar shermen off the southwestern coast of Indone-sias island of Sulawesi employ spells and callsprayers,exhortations, and instrumental performances (2003:62)to summon ying sh into oating traps they fasten totheir small outrigger sailboats. The soundscape that sh-ers create across this stretch of watermade of their whis-pered speech, shouted songs to spirit guardians, and Ko-ranic recitationsresponds to and demarcates local mar-itime territories. Thompsons The Soundscape of Modernity (2002) tells yet another tale of space and sound; in the early 20th century, she reports, the rise of electroacoustic devices

redescribed sounds as signals, which allowed for the mea-surement and standardization of soundscapes. In that ma-chine age, thespatialization of sound came ideally to be dic-tated not by the acoustics of places (like concert halls) butby techniques of sound reproduction, aimed at making di-verse placesfrom public auditoriums to private homesall sound the same.

Corbin, Zerner, and Thompson describe sounds orga-nized and perceived through air. But what about soundunderwater? Technologically constructed transductive ap-paratuses are essential for the submarine medium to berendered into a soundscape for humans. I attempt below to map out the phenomenologies that result from attend-ing toas well as from forgettingsuch transductions. Inaid of that inquiry, I develop the gure of the submarinecyborgthe cyborg in a deep-sea soundscapeto make ex-plicit the material transformations across media that haveto unfold for the seemingly seamless transfer of informa-tion in cybernetic systems to be accomplished. I argue thata transductive ethnography provides tools for making au-dible the conditions that produce what many people havecome to think of asthe self-evidentexperienceof wateryandauditory immersion.

Let me return to my ethnographic setting, inside thesub, from which seat I will spin stories of sounding, sound-scaping, listening, hearing, not listening, immersion, andtransduction.

Sounding

We are well into our descent, some 400 meters down. PilotBruce switches off Alvins exterior lights to save power, leav-ing theoutside inkblack. Thephone rings.Kelley on Atlantis has a question for John about a grant proposal. Her voice,soaked with echo like a track on a Jamaican dub recording,bounces around the sub as she and Delaney agree about ane-mail she will send.

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We continue to soundin the sense of diving into andalsoinvestigating,fathomingthedeep.Suchsoundingem-ploys devices, like sonar ( so und na vigation and r anging),that, in a confusing pun, capture andtransmit sound ( sound as fathoming has its etymological moorings in the Old En-

glish sund, sea, whereas sound as vibration reaches back to Old English swinn, melody). With the interior lightsdimmed, a cycle of blips and bleeps captures my atten-tion. Bruce identies these for me as a 9-kilohertz track-ing pulse sent out from Alvin to Atlantis every three sec-onds, a 9.5-kilohertz response from the ship, and a steady metronome of pings from transponders dispatched to theseaoor by Atlantis in advance of Alvin dives. Transpondersare spheres about the size of beach ballsthat, anchored andoating about 180 meters off the seaoor, transmit sonicsignals that help the sub to continually locate itself in threedimensions using triangulation. Bruce tells me he thinks of transponder pings as background noise.But they are notex-

actly the meaningless patter that journalist Victoria Kaharl, who descended in Alvin in 1989, rendered in her dive nar-rative as occasional interruptions of Wa WA wawa WAWA wowowowo WOWOwawa WAWA (1990:335336) and POP weewee wo WOP ka POP weewee wo(1990:337). For Bruce,the noises secure a sense that the sub is somewhere ratherthan nowhere, supported in a web of sound rather than lostin a featureless void. Even though he jokes that the prattleof pings can be an acoustic will-o-the-wisp a thing that deludes or misleads by means of fugitive appearances(OED) for Bruce, these echoes are the warp and weft of areassuring soundscape (without them, itd be tooquiet, heoffers). Far from being noise as irrelevant or superuousinformation (OED), transponder pings constitute noise asthe hum of a world, as what musician Aden Evens calls animplicated reserve of sense (2005:142).

InTheSoundsofScience:ListeningtoLaboratoryPrac-tice, Cyrus Mody writes that labs are full of sounds andnoises, wanted and unwanted, many of which are coordi-natedwith thebodily work ofmovingthroughspace, looking at specimens, and manipulating instruments (2005:176). And so it is here in the oceanographic eld, too; work in Alvin iscoordinatedbyandthroughsound,evenifwearenotalwaysfullytunedin toquitehow. Indeed,our task this after-noonto map a tinyswathof the seaoor makes use of a sys-tem that translates sonic soundings (which we do not hear)into computer-generated topographic images. Alvin movesthrough andcreatesa multiplicityof soundscapes, atvariousfrequencies and levels of accessibility to submariners ears.

Transducing a submarine soundscapefor humans

How have underwater soundscapes come into audibility for humans? Devices that permit listening across differentmediafrom water over into air environments (like the in-side of the sub)are key. Alvin, maintained at one atmo-

sphere of pressure in its interior (i.e., at everyday, sea-levelpressure), can only deliver to passengers a sense of an exte-rior soundscape because of such transducers. 5 What mightbe less obvious is why the underwater realm is not a sound-scape for people unless such prosthetic technologies are

made available to our naked ears.Consider a skin diver. The sensation of oating in athree-dimensional net of sound is not immediately avail-able to people swimming submerged in water. This is inpart because it is nearly impossible for humans to use un-derwater acoustic vibration to locate themselves in space.For one thing, sound waves travel four times faster in waterthan in air. For another, human eardrums are too similar indensity to water to provide the resistance that can interruptmanyunderwatervibrationssothattheymightbetranslatedinto tympanicmovementsoundin theears;lots of vibra-tionspassrightthroughourbodies.Forhumans,underwatersound is largely registered bybones in theskull, which allow

enough resistance impedance, to use the technical termforvibrational motion to be renderedinto resonances in thebody. Moreover, conduction of sound bybone directly to theinner ear confounds any difference in signals received by left and right ears, making it impossible to compose whataudiophiles call a stereo image. Unaided human ears per-ceive underwater sound as omniphonic: coming from alldirections at once (and, indeed, because of sounds seem-ingly instantaneous arrival, often as emanating from withinones own body). In this (transductively phrased) framing,the underwater world is not immediately a soundscape forhumans because it does not have the textured spatiality of a landscape; one might, rather, think of it as a zone of sonicimmanence and intensity: a soundstate.

A couple of acoustemologies can be imagined that cor-respond to this phenomenology. One acoustemology mighthave the auditor feeling the immediate compressing powerof an alien medium, perhaps experiencing a shock akin tothat felt by 18th-century European cure seekers who trav-eled to the seashore to be suddenly immersed in cold water. Another acoustemology might posit a oneness, a sensory communion, with the medium, what Don Ihde in his Au-ditory Imagination calls a dissolution of self-presence(2003:62). Such a sensibility might regard the immediacy of sound as a sign that one is merging with the elementalforcesaphraseCorbin(1988:164)usestodescribethesen-sationdesired by those Romantic poets whosought throughswimming to achieve sublime union with the sea.

Neither of these two acoustemologies opens out intothe dimensional topography of a soundscape. It takes tech-nical and cultural translation to carve a soundscape for hu-mans out of the subaqueous milieu, to endow submarinespace with sonic distance and depth, to create immersivespace. Equipmentmustrstbe constructedthat cancapturesubmarine vibrations in the audio registerhydrophones,for example, like the ones manufactured by the Interna-tional Transducer Corporation in Santa Barbara, California,

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devices that can get hold of underwater vibrations, usually using a microphone fashioned of ceramic or another ma-terial sufciently denser than water to allow propagating waves to be impeded (see International Transducer Corpo-ration n.d.). Oncesound hasbeenreceivedby a hydrophone,

signalsmustthenbetransportedintoanairymediumforap-prehensionbyhumanears. Suchsoundcan berendered intostereo using devices that transform signals arriving at sep-arate underwater receivers into binaurally centered im-pressions in headphones or from speakers, translating cap-tured submarine sound into spatial relations dimensionally meaningful to hearing humans (H ohler 2003). 6

With hydrophones and speakers, even such items assubmerged bells might be assessed for their underwaterreverberation: In 1901, the Submarine Signal Company of Boston sought robust methods for submarine communi-cation, imagining a network of underwater bells whosesonorous gongs would carry through the water at great dis-

tances(Schlee 1973:246).Thecompany, seeking an alterna-tive to foghorns andresponding to growing densitiesof shiptrafc, built receivers to capture the resulting resonancesforlistenersonboardships,although itmustbe said that thesys-tem envisioned never came into focus; plans to use bells tosend Morsecode were swamped bythe turbulent, scattering character of the submarine medium.

Bringing underwater sound into human-occupied airpockets like Alvin requires and entails transduction. In-deed, the possibility of imagining oneself immersed in asubmarine soundscape depends on transductionas, in-deed, in its own way, does the sense of feeling omniphoni-cally at one with a soundstate summoned forth by a skull-enveloping uid. 7 The ear itself, it is crucial to note, hasfor the last century or so been understood as a transduc-ing device, translating vibrations in air into corresponding motions in the eardrum (Sterne 2003), a description that,as I have already suggested, folds an engineering formula-tion into scienticunderstandings of thesense of hearingassuch. 8 If, as Thompson suggests, the soundscape of moder-nity is patterned by sounds increasingly the result of tech-nological mediation (2002:2), underwater soundscapes donot exist at all for humans without such mediation all the way downor, more exactly, all the way across (and, in thecase of Alvin s pinging sonarscape, without rst becoming sounded scapeswhich, because sonar sounding dependson knowing the speed of sound in water, demonstrates thatsubs use sound to map time into space [Evens 2005:54]).

From listening to hearing

And so, transponder signals must be transduced to createthe echoing sounds carried to listeners cocooned insidethe sub. Bruces joke about the will-o-the-wisp characterof these sounds speaks to the sometimes misleading na-ture of the aqueous vibrational eld. Turbulence and re-

fracting motions of water can produce uctuating ampli-tudes, frequency-smearing effects, and blobs of rever-beration that make directionality difcult to discern, evenonce soundsare convertedacross media (Urick 1983).Water waveswhich form and even crash underwater, where liq-

uid layers of different temperatures meetcan also changethe contours of vibration, introducing such complexities asDoppler effects, even for submarine auditors staying still.

Closer listening cannot really help when these factorspile up on one another, as they sometimes do. But none of us in Alvin, not even the pilot, really needs to listen to thesoundsofsonarclosely.Thesedays,onboardcomputerspro-cesstransponderandothersonarsignals.Noonenowwearsheadphones and a rapt, faraway look, attentive in ambienthush. For all that modern oceanography relies so much onacoustic techniques, it is the machines which do the listen-ing(Hamilton-Paterson1992:21).On Alvin, soundhas beensotransposed(oftenintovisualdata)formorethanaquarter

of a century. 9 In the early 1980s, when computers were rstinstalled in Alvin, they were divided into three kinds, collec-tors, listeners, and nodes, whichin sequencegathered,sorted, and displayed data and allowed a human interface(Stetten 1984). Listeners were not strictly or only dedicatedtosoundprocessingbutweresonamedbecauseoftheirgen-eralinterpretative,sortingfunctions;theywereprogrammedto make data presentable,worthyof attention. The word lis-tening is crucial. Listening has been associated with active,oftenhighlytechnical,effortstointerpretordiscernauditory sensation, whereas hearing has been imagined as passive,a letting of sounds wash over the ear (Carter 2004; Sterne2003). 10 Listening, by this denition, is work. If listening tosonar on Alvin has been delegated to machines, the resultis that we passengers now hear in a much more diffuse, lessdisciplined way than people may have in earlier days. Thesonichabitus(FeldandBrenneis2004:468)animatingsub-mariners sensibilities has been transformed.

Tobesure, Alvin pilotsmustremainattentivetorhythmsof the sub. Bruce, after all, is able to describe sonar soundsoncehisattentionisdirectedtothem.ButIgatherhefocusesmost of his technical listening on the sounds of the vehiclesengines and thrusters, over which he has more control. It was incumbent on earlier generations of submarine pilotsto be attentive auditors of sonar, and it was through suchclose listening that thecracklingof crustaceans,snappingof shrimp, andsinging of whaleswererst disclosed, providing a portrait of soundscapes already in existence for underwa-ter creatures with the means to hear themsoundscapeslikely altered by such sounds as Alvin s transponder pitter-patter, to say nothing of the racket created by large-scalesonar surveys (on the Alvin dive I joined, animal sounds were nearly absent; in another ecologywarmer, closer toshorethe soundscape may have been quite different, withmore organic components). 11 Scientists no longer think thedeep is a quiet, meditative space, a silent world; as Delaney

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tells me, The ocean is wired for sound ( Alvins depth rat-ing, not incidentally, was originally guided by U.S. Navy specications for a vehicle that could inspect seaoor ar-raysofsound-capturing,submarine-detectinghydrophones[Oreskes2003]). 12 When it comes to the routine work of subs

like Alvin, however, humans no longer need to listen closely to such sound. 13

This is not to say that sound inside subs is no longeras present as it was back in the era of, say, WWII, whensonar headphones were standard equipment. But sound isnow heard differently. At the risk of repeating myself, if itis made audible at all, sound is heard rather than listenedto or for. One result of this shift is that sound from out-side Alvin becomes a just-out-of-consciousness buoy forpassengers perception of oating presence. Because wedo not need to work at the boundary between self andsoundthat is, because we do not have to be actively awareof transducingthe boundary becomes imperceptible, in-

audible; we become immersed, absorbed. Mody suggeststhat the boundary between desirable sound andunwantednoise is very much a constructed, contingent, and histor-ically variable one (2005:177). So, too, with the boundary between sound listened to and heard, between meaningfulsound and background hums. The building of this bound-ary into machinic andbodilytechniques contours howpeo-ple perceive their relation to spaces, places, and their ownembodiment.

To amplify this point, let me offer an example fromanother anthropology of sound concerned with listening inthemaking of sense andsensibility, reception andpresence.In The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition inContemporary Egypt (2001), Charles Hirschkind arguesthat listening to recorded Islamic sermons often helpedthe men in Cairo with whom he worked acquire modes of pious comportment. Audition is a practice through whichthe perceptual capacities of the subject are honed and,thus, through which the world those capacities inhabitis brought into being, rendered perceptible (Hirschkind2001:624). This making of capacities can be construed asa transductive operation, a making, perhaps, of capaci-tances that permit a seamless ow between believers andreligious messagesan interpretation made explicit in anIslamic digest Hirschkind quotes, which explains why someauditors of cassette sermons have difculties being fully receptive: The Quran is effective in itself, an article in thedigest suggests, just as the electrical current. If the Quranis present [to your ears], and you have lost its effect, thenit is you yourself that you must blame. Maybe the con-ductive element is defective (Hirschkind 2001:627). This writer is worried about transductiona worry Hirschkindsinterlocutors phrase in terms of the hearinglistening dyad: The men I worked with often made a distinctionbetween the verb commonly used for hearing, sam, andtwo other terms that suggest a more deliberate act: an .sat,

meaning to incline ones ear toward or pay close attention,and a .sgh a, to be silent in order to listen (2001:633). A moral physiology,arguesHirschkind, is acquired through. . . listening exercises (2001:628)that is, through working at the boundaries that permit new worlds of experience

to materialize, that smooth transductions to capacitatepresence in an ethical soundscape (Hirschkind 2006).

. . . And back to listening (to music, e.g.)

It is not all hushed, ambient techno in the world of Alvin.There is a more familiar, interior, air-pocketed soundscape,too. As we continue our descent, a quiet classic rock sound-track accompanies us from Bruces MP3 player, pluggedinto the sub. Sociologist Chandra Mukerji, in her analysisof videotapes from Alvin dives, suggests that music func-tions as a social and psychological means for normalizing theprocessofworkinginasmallsphereonthedarkseaoor

(1989:71). This contention in mind, it might come as no sur-prise that the North Americans who are the overwhelming majority of users of Alvin often compare it to a car. Play-ing music in automobiles, as Michael Bull writes in Sound-scapes of the Car (2003), often serves to sever drivers fromtheoutside world,creatinga private,interior space. 14 Such asevering operates to some extentin Alvin, keeping our senseof identity bathed in familiar melodies that shieldus againstthe alien world outside. This musical soundscape creates asense of absorption in the interior space of the sub, but be-cause it mingleswith the transduced soundscape of theout-side, the effect isto feel atonceinsidea bubble and porously immersed in a wider world.

According to Sterne, the dominant phenomenology of Western science and religion holds that hearing isconcerned with interiors, vision is concerned with sur-faces. . . hearing tends toward subjectivity, vision tends to- wardobjectivity . . . hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, vision is a sense that removes us from it (2003:15).The sounds of Alvin echoing from outside, trickling frominsidereinforce the notion that we are in an interior spacethat is itself both sonically andwetly immersed.The variouspings and pongs create an echoing sense of being in a land-scape that extends beyond the connes of the sphere, per-haps one reason few people become claustrophobic in thetight space of Alvin. The music gentlybouncing off thewallsof the sphere reinforces this sense of immersion. Music, of course, has often itself been imagined as immersive. DavidToop writes in Ocean of Sound that the image of bathing in sound is a recurrent theme of the past hundred years:Debussys Images and Ravels Jeux deau ripple around thelistener; ArnoldSchoenbergs The Changing Chord-Summer Morning By a Lake-Colours wraps us in ickering subma-rine light;Gyorgy Ligetis Atmospheres envelops us in steam(1995:271). 15 Alvin divers may not favor such modernistcompositions, but they do go for soundscapy music: Pink

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Floyds 1973 Dark Side of the Moon album is a perennial fa-vorite on dives. 16

When we arrive at the seaoor, Bruce turns on the subsexterior lights, illuminating the rocky landscape around us.Spider crabs crawl lugubriously over brown boulders. The

300 atmospheres weighing on the sub outside are impossi-ble to imagine from inside our tight titanium bubble. Wescrabble around for words, metaphors, associations. Thedesert. National parks. Outer space. 17 My notepad scribblesaredisappointing encounterswith clich es about other plan-ets, although the sheer fact of living through a sci- fan-tasy reminds me that the boundary between science ctionandsocial reality is an optical illusion (Haraway1991a:149).Noneof this iscoming togetheras a narrative, even if itlookslike one on this page. After all, the erasure of the bound-ary between ethnographic science ction and social reality is also an illusion, and perhaps a partly auditory one. My use of the ethnographic present tense in this article has its

own potentially immersive effects for you, reader, reading aloud or to yourself, and my calling attention to this devicehere means to direct your awareness to how ethnographicexperience is always transduced into ethnographic text. Iuse transduced instead of translated here in resonance withthework of Michael Silverstein,who,in his intervention intolinguistic anthropology, Translation, Transduction, Trans-formation, urges readers to imagine the work of rendering meaning from one milieu into another as akin to transduc-tion:

Weshould think seriously of theunderlying metaphorof theenergy transducer that I invoke, such asa hydroelec-

tric generator. Here, one form of organizedenergy [e.g.,the gravitationally aided downstream and downwardlinear rush of water against turbine blades] is asymmet-rically converted into another kind of energy [electric-ity] at an energetic transduction site. . . . much of whatgoes intoconnectingan actual source-languageexpres-sion to a target-languageone is like such a transductionof energy. [2003:8384, rst set of brackets in original,second set of brackets mine]

For Silverstein, translations unfold within and across con-gurations of cultural semiosis (2003:91), and mean-ing is nearly always transducedand sometimes radically transformedin such transfers. 18 Just so with this text andits receptionby variouspossiblereadersor auditors.And justso with the transduced sounds and signals in Alvin.

Weapproacha complex of hydrothermalvent chimneyscalledFaultyTowers,afterthe British televisionsitcom,andJohn tells me, What youre going to see is what you see onthe poster in the Atlantis dining room. This reference tothe composite photograph displayed in the mess hall of theship gives me a template against which to judge my vision.I ddle with one of the digital cameras provided in the sub.Delaney instructs me to look out the window, Right now,

if I were you, Id be focusing exclusively on looking. Nevermind the photography. Ive got thousands of pictures. Justll your eyes. Right. In this cyborg setting, we can play withthe prosthetics that modulate and channel our sensing. Wecan also ddle with the ratios between different senses. I

take a picture at Faulty Towers despite Delaneys scoldof ash whistling by a hydrothermal black smoker. It turns outblurry.

Yet another soundscape weaves through the sub, that of the fugitive speech of passengers. Not all speech is evanes-cent here, however, for each passenger is provided with acassette player to make verbal notes about the trip. Delaney narrates some impressions into his tape recorder. I ask, If youre doing all this tape recording, does that mean youspendalotoftimebackonlandlisteningtoyourownvoice?Most scientists are very chatty with their machines, noteach other, he replies. Yeah, their auxiliary brains, addsBruce. Or their externalized memories. After all, recording

automatic speechallows for later listening, permitting Alvindivers to be focusing exclusively on looking; even so, theexteriorization of our inner voices contributes to the notionthat sound is immediate, unmediated, ephemeral, a eeting signof reality itself.So, although JamesClifford famously ar-guedthat, once cultures are no longer pregured visuallyas objects, theaters, textsit becomes possible to think of acultural poetics that is an interplay of voices, of positionedutterances (1986:12), this rhetorical gambit leavesopen the work of comprehending how voices are imagined as signsof presenceand positionin the rst place. 19 With Alvinstape players, the voice as a sign of presence is secured as akind of back formation from the recording itself (cf. Kittler1999).

And so, Alvin is a recording studio. Maybe this is notsurprising. After all, a previous chief engineer for Alvin hadsubstantial audio experience: Jim Akens . . . joinedthe Alvingroupin 1977 aftera decadein therock-and-rollbusiness;hebuilt state-of-the-art sound systems for Joan Baez, Jeff Beck,Sonny Rollins, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell (Kaharl 1990:273).By the 1970s, recording studios had become places that were standardized; they had become sites of signal rout-ing, monitoring, and controlled feedback (Poynor 1986;Th eberge2004:770)controlandcommunicationssystems,like Alvin.

Submarine cyborgs

The sub, then, can be protably thought of as a cyborg. Cy-borg namesanentitythatexiststhroughtheongoingmainte-nanceof itsequilibriumand boundaries(theandroidplayedby Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator series and therobot-handed Luke Skywalker of the Star Wars saga repre-sent some of the more famous Hollywood cyborgs. People with pacemakersor internal debrillators aremoreeveryday examples. But cyborgs need not be material compounds of

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esh and machine; anything that can be described in termsof information dynamics can be considered a cyborg). Theboundariesof cyborgs are subject to shifting andexpanding as they are networked to other feedback dynamics acrossscales and contexts (e.g., the coordination of submarines

with surface ships, which describes a bigger cybernetic sys-tem than the sub alone). The frame of the cyborg can tuneanalytical attention to how ows of communication are ar-ticulated to maintain and modulate the integrity of self-regulating entities, at various scales.

Although the cyborg is an imaginative and materialproduct of scientic and technological work, it began a ca-reer as a productive gure in social theory, when DonnaHaraway, inA CyborgManifesto (1991a), directedher read-ers eyes across the landscapes of simulation and informa-tionsciencesexploring, forexample, howtelepresencehassubstituted computer visualization for human vision andhow genetic engineering has depended on seeing DNA as a

code to be rewritten. Haraway found an unexpected, ironic,utopian promise in the gures of cyborgs initially createdto automate warfare or de-skill workers; cyberneticsopenedup possibilities for recoding our human bodies and selves,for short-circuiting the idea that a durable nature dictatedourdestinies. Somewherein cyborgbodiesmight whir a lib-eratory consciousness. 20

Cyborgs have primarily been imagined in a visual, eventextual, registeras made of inscribedsurfaces,of informa-tion and codes; writing, writesHaraway, is pre-eminently the technologyof cyborgs(1991a:176).Cyborgs, she argues,have been organized by surfaces and boundaries, whereasthe sheerly organic has been imagined as constituted by depth, integrity (1991a:161). Cybernetics has been a be-haviorist science, insisting that the interior state of entitiesdoes not matter to accounts of their equilibration (Edwards1996). So, for all the attention to signal and noise that hasanimated cybernetic thinking about fusions of esh and in-formation, such qualities have been rendered as readablequantitiesas measurements legible as lists of numbers orpatterns on graphs. Alvin as cyborg, however, draws atten-tion to sonic dimensions of cyborg embodiment. As a sub-marine cyborg, Alvin can be used as a model for sounding the interiors of cybernetic entities, for calling into audibility the transductions that unfold at and create the boundariesof such entities. 21

Directional sound is the key currencythe carrier of feedback signalsfor submarine cyborgs. Submarines slidinto cybernetic waters beginning in 1941, when oceanogra-phersatWoods Hole publisheda reportfor theNavyentitledSound Transmission in Sea Water (Iselin and Ewing 1941), which suggested ways military submarine pilots might ne-tune their deadly games of underwater hide and seek. 22 By this time, echo-ranging systems had been constructed thatcould transmit high frequencies, producing a sharp beamof sound analogous to the cone of light from a searchlight,

rather than a hazy glow of sound (Schlee 1973:285). Direc-tional sound made questions of feedback and equilibrationcentral to submarine warfare (even though,for institutionalreasons, these questions were organized more under therubric of operations research than cybernetics [Fortun and

Schweber 1993]). Italso demandednewconsiderationof theproperties of water.The speed of sound in water varies with temperature,

andtemperature with depth,so that,mostofthe time,soundtraveling obliquely through seawater does not move in astraight line but is bent like light through a prism. Subma-rine pilots confronting enemy vessels unequipped with lo-cal temperature proles could re on them with crippling accuracy andthen,predicting how thebeams of their adver-saries targeting echo-rangers wouldrefract through the wa-ter column, take evasive action by hiding in sonic shadow zones. 23 In the idiom of Norbert Wiener (1961), founderof cybernetics, they enacted a Manichean practice, using

feedback oppositionally, to outsmart an enemy. The result was that pilots saw their adversary, as themselves, as consti-tutively oppositional, a vision that embedded in the cyborg bodiesof submarines andsubmarinerswhat historianPeterGalison (1994) calls an ontology of the enemy. And it wasa vision; Galison writes that the cybernetic philosophy waspremised on theopacity of theother (1994:256). This opac-ity, this inscrutability, was preserved and reinforced in thepractice of sound ranging, which was, after all, premised onbouncing signals off exteriors, not penetrating interiors. 24

The interior of the sub is a space many imagine as theprovince of helpless humans, dependent on machines evenas they control them. Van Dover, who became the rst sci-entist to pilot Alvin (and the rst woman, after a line of 48men), expresses some of the cybernetic intimacy that pilotsoften develop with the submersible: When the sub was ondeck, I would work inside her and, with my eyes shut, reachouttotouchaspeciconeofthehundredsoftoggleswitchesto learn their locations by heart (1996:2425). 25 Passengerscan only feel a fragment of this almost erotic connection. Atone step of remove, passengers like Delaney and me, listedon the sub roster as observers, make up what might bethought of as a cyborg manifest.

What might the gure of the submarine cyborg helpone to understand about the exterior and interior soundsof Alvin the incidental noises heard, the sounds no longerlistened to, the resonances merely sensedas immersive sur-round? Science ction author Samuel Delany, who enti-tled his analysis of Haraways manifesto Reading at Work(1996), drew attention to the labor of interpretation. Trans-posing Delany into another key, I have meant so far to ex-plore the meanings of sounding, listening, and hearing at work (and, with the subs stereo, listening at play). In thesubs interior, our sense of immersion, of intimacy, of a feel-ing for the cyborg, is accentuated by our subliminal andsubjective sense of the sounds that surround us, sounds we

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are no longer encouraged to comprehend, let alone experi-ence, as transduced. WhatHillel Schwartz (2003)names theindefensible earthat organ imagined as always vulnera-ble, always on (an account that, he points out, conateshearing and listening)has becomea channel people think

they cannot turn off and that opens into their innermostselves. But, as Sterne argues, modern audio technologiesthemselves have been bound up in reconstructing acous-tic space as a private, interior phenomenon belonging to asingle individual (2003:138). The sense of Alvin as a pri-vate, interior spacebelonging, to be sure, to three closely squashed individualsis accentuated and enabled by thisacoustemology.

By directing an ethnographic ear to the sounds of sub-marine cyborgs, I mean to make explicit how the idea of immersion depends on the fashioning of sensing as itself imperceptible (the goal, in fact, of early cyborg theoreti-cians Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, who coined the

term cyborg, dening it as an organizational complex func-tioning asan integratedhomeostatic system unconsciously[1995:3031]). Here, I second an argument advanced by Joseph Dumit, who suggests that the very invisibility of our sensorium to us, its apparently silent, straightforward,and reliable functioning, is precisely what we need to betrained to doubt (2006:188; and historicize; consult Crary 1990 on 19th-century fashionings of vision as a transpar-ent tool of empiricism). We need, too, to examine how suchfunctioning can be secreted within the very technologies with which cyborg circuits are formed. 26 As Sterne sug-gests, If media do, indeed, extend our senses, they do soas crystallized versions and elaborations of peoples priorpracticesor techniquesof using their senses (2003:92).It is the crystallization and forgetting of such practices thatpermits the identication, for example, of absorption inmusic with immersion; such crystallization allows Toop toconclude Ocean of Sound with this cybernetically inectedcontention: Musicuid, quick, ethereal, outreaching,time-based, erotic and mathematical, immersive and in-tangible, rational and unconscious, ambient and solidhas anticipated the aether talk of the information ocean(1995:280). The muting of the transductions behind suchphenomenology permits submariners like John, Bruce, andme to feel immersed.

In asking that anthropologists and other analysts of so-cial worlds attend to sounding, listening, and hearing at work, I mean to suggest that we begin to l isten to or for that which we usually only hear. If, as Bishop Berkeley notes,sounds are as close to us as our thoughts then by listening we may be able to perceive the relationship between subjectand object, inside and outside, and the public and privatealtogether differently (Bull and Back 2003:5). Moreover, Iam asking for a particular kind of listening, what Jim Drob-nik calls listening awry (2004:11, drawing on Zizek 1991),bending our ears to sounds just out of usual consciousness.

We might engage in what James Hamilton-Paterson, in hisbook The Great Deep (1992), calls sensing the obliquea strategy he illustrates most vividly when he reports onsnorkeling amidst coral reefs at night, not looking, as mostpeople would do, but listening.

All of the above, I should note, assumes a clean func-tioning of audition; it might be productive to think aboutmoments when hearingand listeningbreakdown, when theputatively transductive operationof hearing encounterscri-sis. For ears, this might come with tinnitus, vertigo, or ear-aches. In Alvin, it maycomewith a changein cabin pressure.Bruce tellsme that the oxygen in the sub is lower in concen-tration than wemightbe usedto. He says, Ilike to keep theO2 at 18%. If its higher, it becomes a re hazard and peoplegetgiddy. If its lower, people come up tired. Theconditionsthat permit transduction are material conditions that mustbe maintained. 27 Transductive ethnographymight nd use-ful conditions of attention in discomfort, from unwelcome

ringings and buzzings in the ear.

We are merging with our data

Two thousand feet down in Alvin, at 10:00 a.m. Pacic Stan-dard Time15:00 GMT, I note, trying to imagine thechimesof Londons BigBenDelaney andStrickrott beginmapping segments of the Mothra Hydrothermal Vent Field, build-ing on charts made by University of Washington geologists.Bruce, having recovered from a disoriented instant whilereading sonar, now murmurs, I see, said the blind man. As if on cue, Ray Charles issues from Bruces MP3 player.Ourtask is to run lines up and down and back and forth along a dened area of the vent eld, an activity Bruce refers toas mowing the grass. If our vertical arrival at the sea oor was saturated with the imagery of immersing ourselves inan alien medium, this horizontal motion takes us across a wilderness to be tamed.

In most narrations of Alvin dives,such movement is de-scribed as a kind of frontiering. As Van Dover puts it, Deep-sea research . . . remains . . . a frontier science. The seaooris the largest and least known wilderness on our planet(1996:4). NewYorkTimes journalistWilliamBroadwhoalsodived with Delaneyextends the U.S. character of such im-agery, offering that the midocean ridges are like seams ona baseball, the mid-Atlantic ridge is like the Rocky Moun-tains, and the Juan de Fuca ridge is akin to the gentle hillsof the Appalachians (1997:104). Before I embarked on my dive, one scientist on Atlantis prepared me: It makes youfeel insignicant, being down there. If they were all visible,above water, these places would be national parks. The na-tionalparkparticularlyin itswest-of-the-Rockiesguiseisacommonimage;Kaharlreportsin WaterBaby thattheotherobserver on her dive said, This looks like Bryce Canyon, in-credible (1990:340). Bruces summary of our days work asmowing the grass domesticates such similes, casting us as

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doing the mundane work of keeping the space known andcultured, maintaining it as a sort of U.S. subdivision.

Then again, careful scrutiny of our coordinates revealsthat we are, in fact, in Canada. Or, to be exact, Canadian waters.

In otherwords, we are not in a simply immersive space;rather, this is a zone in which our work is rigidly structured,even surveilled. Our submarine cyborg must move withincircuits already congured by governance. As part of cruiseplanning, Kelley had to get clearance from the CanadianNavyandStateDepartmenttodeploy Alvin intheseseas,partof a marine protected area. The science party had to work within a circumscribed zone, a circle with a ve-nautical-mile radius centered at 4800 N and 129 06 W. A variety of legal and state transductions are necessary to submerge inthis space.

As Delaney and I look at Alvin s position displayed onone of the subs computer screen maps, we pinpoint the po-

sition of the vehicle relative to mapped and unmapped por-tions of the seaoor. Several minutes into our mowing of the underwater lawn, Delaney delivers what, to me, is anastounding announcement as he watches the icon of Alvinmove toward the already charted area of Mothra. Eyes xedon the computer screen he intones, We are merging withour data. This idea of becoming one with the data, of themap becoming the territoryof culture folding into natureinacyberneticone-to-onemappingspeakstotheintimacy Delaney feels with this terrain. Merge derives from the Latinmergere, to dip or plunge, the same root for immersion .

A couple of days later, at a science meeting on Atlantis,Delaney enacts his sense of merging corporeally. As he re-views the topography of Mothra, he directs a postdoctheperson who painstakingly created the nal graphicto panand tilt a three-dimensional computerized map, projectedon a video screen. He moves his body like a conductor andeven says, Music please, embodying the orchestrating, di-recting relation of professor to postdoc so characteristic of the natural sciences. In this synaesthetic dance, his body fuses with the map; he merges with the data.

One can interpret this relay of motion and energy asa more general, less auditory, genre of transduction (butnote Delaneys call for music!), one akin to that describedby anthropologist of science Natasha Myers (2006) in herethnographic exploration of howbiologists who model pro-teins develop bodily intuitions about how molecules move,crafting a habitus that has their ngers, hands, and bod-ies responding to, miming, computer models of the proteinstructures theystudy.Myerswritesthat,throughtheirintra-actions with each other andwith their models, protein mod-ellerscanbeseentotransduceandsopropagatethemolecu-laraffects andgesturesthey have cultivated in order to com-municate their feeling for protein forms and mechanisms(2006:23).Here,transductionreachesoutoftheauditoryintothe tactile, and sometimes toward the gestural, continuing

all the while to refer to materiality. 28 Transduction, My-ers argues, forces me to account for the specicity of themodelling media, and the kinds of bodies involved in thesemimeticexchanges(2006:24).Thesespecicsmatter,too,inDelaneys performance of merging with the data: The trans-

ductive mediaof water, ofthe Imagenexsonarsystem,and of thescientists bodyitself areall calledinto play. Transductionalsotunesmeintothemanysortsofbodiesstudents,tech-nicians, submarine pilots, computer scientiststhat are allpart of the transductive chain through which, for Delaney,the deep sea becomes the intimate, immersive, ocean. Thepresences produced through these transductions and im-mersions operate at scales beyond the individual, beyondthe three passengers in the sub, to produce one version of the oceanographic eld as such, a sense of oceanspace as akind of virtual reality through which the appropriately cy-borg subject might swim.

Immersion versus transduction

Mody asks of laboratory practice, Do sounds merely sur-round knowledge making in labs, or are they also bound upin theknowledge that gets made?(2005:185186).A consid-eration of sound in ocean science can extend such curiosity to an examination of how knowledge is crafted not only inthe lab but also in the eld. Indeed, sounding with soundhas fundamentally enabled the very making of the under-sea realm as a eld. Historian Sabine H ohler documents thetransition from sounding with piano wire to using sonar and writes in her Floating Pieces, Deep Sea, Full Measure: Spa-tial Relations in Oceanography as a Field Science that

oceanographicresearch could not rely on thedirectob-servationofitsobject.Ithadtocreateitsimagesofoceandepth by sinking instruments into the deep. . . . Depthbecame a matter of scientic denitions, of the righttools to seebeyondthe visible surface,of huge amountsof sounded data, and of their graphic representations.. . .The opaque ocean was transformed into a scienti-cally sound oceanic volume. [2001:2, and see Goodwin1995 on seeing in depth]

A full history of the making of this oceanic volumeand of the soundscape of the searemains to be written (H ohler2002 takes the story from 1850 to 1930). What I hope tohave illustrated here ishowsubmarinesoundhas these dayssunkenintothescienticbackground;heard,notlistenedto.How is this process bound up in the knowledge that getsmade? When cybernetic practiceslike echolocationbecome fully automated, they can slide into an epistemicground that spirits them into an unacknowledged commonsense, into a cultural medium in which people are thenimmersed.

This has epistemological and methodological res-onance for anthropology as a eld science. How are

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transductions bound up in the knowledge that gets madein ethnography? In this extended conclusion, my answertakes me through a continued critique of immersion and todiscussionofafewrecentethnographiesthatIthinklistenfortransductive fashionings of subjects, objects, presence, and

eldsin contexts ranging from humananimal relationsto projects of imagining national anddiasporic community.From these ethnographies of transduction I offer the exper-imental claim that one might consider ethnography itself astransduction.

It is clich e to say that anthropologists specialize inplacing themselves in the eld to immerse themselves inculturewhether in social worlds distinct from their every-day lives or in more nely inhabited versions of something they already thought was familiar (Kirsten Hastrup, e.g., in-vokes Mead to argue that immersing oneself in local lifeis good . . . eldwork implies that the well-established op-position between subject and object dissolves [1990:46]).

But what might anthropologists mean by this? What are thepossibilities and limits of the image of immersion? How can we use the story I have told here to meditate on what thismetaphor includes and excludes?

Immersion has been a signature demand of anthropo-logical eldwork.An articulation in the old-school languageof the discipline comes from Alexander Goldenweiser, pro-nouncing in a review in American Anthropologist that

a eld student who is also an ethnologist must com-bine two rarely existing qualities: the ability to forgethis own culture and immerse himself sympathetically (Einf uhlung) into theprimitive viewpoint, and theabil-

ity to forget not only his own but also hisfavorite tribesstandpoint, as local and subjective, in order to be pre-pared to view the subject at hand in a broader perspec-tive and with critical objectivity. [1933:349]

Goldenweiser here describes immersionsomething likeparticipant-observationas a matter of seeing and sympa-thizing (and,do not forget, of forgetting).Later anthropolog-ical formulations move into the register of sound, with lan-guage immersion the paradigmatic (andpedagogical)modeof such forms (this meaning entered English, according tothe OED, in 1965 with Berlitzs total immersion languagecourses). Here, immersion in what bilingual educatorsMer-rill Swain and Sharon Lapkin (1982) refer to as a languagebath has a person surrounded bya sonic medium in which words ideally move from the diffusely listened to or for toward the automatically overheard (sloshing up any hardand fast distinction between hearing and listening). Lan-guage as culture becomes a medium analogized to water. 29

No wonder diving in Alvin felt like perfect anthropologicaleldwork. 30

What does immersion leave out? I submit that immer-sion is a poor tool for thinking about the structure of space,aboutthematerialityofthemediainwhichethnographersas

participant-observersauditors move. 31 To borrow anotherterm from Haraway (1991b), immersion is not necessar-ily situated knowledge. Oceanographers do not just merge with their data. Submarines do not just dive in unstructuredspace. And anthropologists do not just soak up culture. One

way immersion functions as a rhetorical tool promising ex-periential truth is by eliding the question of the organiza-tion of space, of medium, of milieuwhether of an ecosys-tem or a social orderpositing a uid osmosis of environ-ment by an emplaced participant-observerauditor. 32 Im-mersion has come to suggest being submerged in a space as well as becoming one with it, dissolving into it. Immersiondoes notimmediately openup questionsof how boundariesare produced and crossed.

Transductioncan beusedasa devicefor recognizing thehiddenconditionsofimmersion.Themetaphoroftransduc-tion can tune one in to textures of disjuncture, to the corpo-real character of transferring signals, particularly in cybor-

gian settings. If the information sciences have it that infor-mation is an abstractpropertythat canbe transferred acrossboundaries and substratesthe transcoding dream of thecyborgthe concept of transduction recalls the physical,materialdimensionofsuchtransfersandsummonsupques-tions of resistance and distortion, complicating a rhetoricof ow with one of turbulence (see Sarai Editorial Collec-tive 2006). Silversteins (2003:83) example of the hydroelec-tric generator as the kind of transducer one might think of when translating between languages is perfect for my pur-poses, because it adds turbulence to conceptions of wateras always a gure of immersion.

One ethnography that queries the construction of im-mersion and that I think is consonant with the transductiveapproach I advocatehereis JosephMascos (2004)analysisof theimmersivetheaterinwhichnuclearweaponsscientistsexperience simulated explosions. Mascos study describesthe structures that must be comprehended, inhabited, andswept out of attention to produce immediacy. Another isNatashaSchullsstudyofgamblersaddictedtovideogaming, which examines how genres of attention come into being,describing how the zone, a state of absorption character-ized by ow and continuity (2005:78), emerges for gamersasaphenomenologicalworldinwhichhumanandmachineseemto merge (2005:76). Schulloffersa mapping of thema-chinic translations that unfold for immersion rather thanperspective (2005:79) to take hold. Those translations aretransductions.

I hear transduction as one tool with which to answerBill Maurers call for a lateral, postreexiveanthropology, ananthropology that attends to the transformations that per-mit the very production of texts and contexts, that mightregure the practices delineating the interior and exteriorof inquirythe observer and the observed, the sensoriumand the sensed (2005:5). A simply personal reexivity toooften merely reinforces the perspective and voice of the

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lone,introspective eldworker (Marcus 1998:193),whereasthesociologicaldemandforobjectifying theobjectivitythatruns through the supposed site of subjectivity (Bourdieu1990:20)stillholdssteadyinsideandoutsideboundariesandpresumes a subsequent extraction of the researcher from

the researched and a retreat to the study (Maurer 2005:6).Reexivityas the politics of locationareexiveawarenessof the historical connectionsthat alreadylink [ethnography]toitssubjectmatter(Marcus1998:197)ismorepromising,although it risks assuming that such connections exist al-ready and remain only to be discovered (Robertson 2002).

A transductive ethnography would hear things out oracross. According to phenomenologist Gilbert Simondon,transduction mapsoutthe actual coursethat invention fol-lows, which is neither inductive nor deductive but rathertransductive, meaning that it corresponds to a discovery of the dimensions according to which a problematic can bedened (1992:313). 33 Transductive ethnography would be

a mode of attention that asks how denitions of subjects,objects, and eld emerge in material relations that cannotbe modeled in advance. Most modestly, I offer it as one id-iom for thinking through anthropologies of sound. (Thereare other idioms. After all, although transducers operate ona very simple set of physical principles, they are also cul-tural artifacts [Sterne 2003:22].)More expansively, I suggestthat a transductive ear can help to audit the boundaries, tolisten for how subjects, objects, and presencesat variousscalesare made. Let me offer further examples.

Laura Kunreuthers Technologies of the Voice: FM Ra-dio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmanduexplores how a diasporic community is made present to urban Nepalis through the hearing and voicing of tele-phone calls made between Nepalis in Kathmandu andthoseabroad that are broadcast on a popular Kantipur FM pro-gram (2006:324). The presence of a Nepali diaspora inKathmandu (Kunreuther 2006:325), then, is not so muchmediated by phone and radio as it is produced through aseries of transductions that are then shuttled out of atten-tion. FM radio, writes Kunreuther, is perceived in con-temporary Kathmandu as a medium of transparent, directconnection (2006:327). But, as she points out, FM radio isnot simply a medium for broadcasting conversations withNepalis abroad, but it produces, as one of its persuasive ef-fects, the ideathat urbanNepalisand a Nepalidiaspora areentities that exist prior to their mediation through the tele-phone or the radio (Kunreuther 2006:325). This is an imag-ined communitycreated throughtransduction. Part of whatKunreuthers ethnography of soundand, I would argue, of transductionoffers is a wayof thinking about how publicsandtheir presences are made (italsosidestepsworriesabout whether presences are nally real, phantom, or prosthetic,because all are produced in transduction). 34 As Michael M.J. Fischer puts it in a recent article in Cultural Anthropology,the juxtaposition of different cultures can make account-

able the network of transductions and changes that culturalassumptionsandrecognitionsundergoastheyscaleortravelup and down, across, around, over, and through networks(2007:42). Transduction offers ways of thinking about scalesof presence. 35

Joshua Barkers Engineers and Political Dreams: In-donesia in theSatelliteAge (2005)offers promisingmaterialfor an ethnography of transduction. In this piece, Barker ex-aminesthe Indonesiansatellite system, Palapa, inauguratedin 1976, and argues that engineers working on this systemduring the early years of the Suharto regime sought to im-bue the project with nationalist meanings. They hoped thesystem, employed in television broadcasting, could makethe nation present to itself. But the view that territorial ob-stacles to nationalist unity could be overcome by electronicmedia(Barker2005:711)dependedinpartonmakingmediatransparenton a dream in which, as Philip Kitley summa-rizes it,the fragmented, far-ung archipelago is unied in a

seamless electronic net that annihilates space and imposesitsowntime,drawingthe vastnessand diversityof Indonesiainto a whole, structuring for the periphery a clear and con-stant x on the centre (Barker 2005:708). The nationalistdiscourse portrayed the ether through which communica-tion signals passed as the truest and purest medium for thenew nation (Barker 2005:711), but, as I understand it, a se-ries of transductions had to be negotiated. These includedtheuseofparticularbrandsoftransmittersandthedensityof groundstations, both of which hadimplications forthe geo-graphical reach of the system. The National Planning Board worried that in Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, people wouldbewatchingMalaysiantelevisionbecausethesignals werecoming inmuchmoreclearly (Barker2005:717).Barkerasks how meaning is assigned to the system as engineersmediate between nationalist discourses and the system it-self.Buttransductionmightbea ner tool than mediationtomakemanifest theconsequences of theencounterbetweenmeaningandmatter,asWebbKeane(2005:720)putsitinhiscritiqueofBarker.AsBarkerhimselfpointsout,Signalsfromthe satellite were not restricted to the space inside nationalborders (2005:708). Transduction can tune ethnographersin to how the object of Indonesia is technically createdand not only or simply semiotically stabilized by engineerstrying to control a discourse. Transduction can also permitus to ask how entitiesand ethnographic elds (such asIndonesia) are made present in our own ethnographies.Ethnography entails its own transductions.

Transductiveapproachesto comprehending thecoales-cence of presencepartial, full, or otherwiseneed not always have auditory or technical articulations. In HowDogsDream: Amazonian Nature and the Politics of TransspeciesEngagement (2007), Eduardo Kohn outlines an ethno-graphic practice describing relations between humans andnonhumans, relations he says are fundamentally semiotic.He writes that semiosis is always embodied in some way

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or another, and it is always entangled, to a greater or lesserdegree, with material processes (Kohn 2007:5). It is just thismaterial process to which transduction can attune ethnog-raphers and ethnologists (and, perhaps, ethologists). Kohngives an example of biosemiosis that is quintessentially

transductive:

The cilia of a single-celled paramecium function asan adaptation that facilitates the organisms movementthrough a liquid medium. Their specic organization,size, shape, exibility, and capacity for movement cap-ture certain features of the environmentnamely theresistance afforded by the characteristics of the partic-ular uid medium in question. [2007:6]

Kohn argues that selvesmaterializeas lociand products of such interpretative capture. Considering the paramecium asubmarinecyborg, I wouldamplify thesecond partof Kohns

claim: Selves emerge at different boundaries depending on where meaning is made to materialize. A transductive frameallows one to understand a moment in Kohns piece whendog dream interpretation creates the conditions by whichdogs and people come together as part of a single affectiveeld that transcends their boundariesas speciesan emer-gent and highly ephemeral selfdistributed over two bodies(2007:17).Transductionscreateandenable immersions,sin-gular and plural.

Rather than thinking immersively or reexively, then, what about thinking transductively? In Transductions: Bod-ies and Machines at Speed, Adrian Mackenzie, building onSimondon,writes, To think transductively is to mediate be-tween different orders, to place heterogeneous realities incontact, and to becomesomething different(2002:18). 36 Tothinktransductivelyistoattendtotheearache,toimbalance,to all the embodied capacitances of the ethnographerandtotheworknecessarytoplaceoneselfinparticularnetworks,machinic and social. To think transductively is to pay atten-tion to impedance and resistance in cyborg circuits, to the work that needs to be done so that signals can link machinesand people together, at a range of scales, from the privateto the public. To think transductively is to think from insidethe infrastructure that supports the transmission of infor-mation across media. To think transductively is not only tolisten to the changing qualities of signals as they propagateacross media but also to inquire into the idea of the signalitself (which then leads back to theuidmetaphors that suf-fuse discussions of electricity, with its ows and currents). 37

Indeed, to think transductively demands inquiry into thevery histories and languages that organize conceptions of sensingand is,therefore, an endeavor in dialogue with theanthropology of sensing more generally (see Classen 1993;Desjarlais 2003; Stoller 1997; Sutton 2001). To think trans-ductively is thereby also to consider ethnography itself astransductionandtheethnographerasakindoftransducer.

It does not follow, though, that transduction shouldbe taken as a universal frame through which to (re)think ethnography; rather, it is one tool among many possible.I do not mean to inate transductive ethnography into aprogrammatic demand, a slogan. I argue for its necessary

modesty; unlike the more sight-centered idiom of reexiv-ity, which scaled up its perspectivalism into a grand epis-temological claim with methodological and theoretical im-plications (piggybacking, perhaps, on the notion of the-ory, a term that, ttingly, derives from the ancient Greek for both to look on and to contemplate), transductionmight be heard as a heuristic, most immediately appropri-ate, perhaps, for doing anthropology in sound (Feld andBrenneis 2004), for getting at acoustemologies formattedby the soundscape of modernity (Thompson 2002), and formapping otologies not ontologies.How far transduction canbe pushed beyond particular practices of hearing, listening,sounding, soundscaping, transmitting, touching, and ges-

turing remains to be known. One can well imagine othersensory addresses for ethnographic epistemologyin taste(e.g., Serematakis 1994; Terrio 2000), smell (Latour 2004),or balance (Geurts 2003)starting points that can gener-ate a variety of organizing metaphors for anthropologicalaccounts. What can emerge from such studies are not thesimple recursive studies of ourselves studying that my co-passengerin Alvin jokedaboutbut, rather, transductive,gus-tative, palpative ethnographies, tunedto the conditions thatallow and produce anthropological senses of presence, dis-tance, association, and dissociation at all.

Notes

Acknowledgments. Thanks to Tom Boellstorff, Joseph Dumit,Michael Fischer, DouglasKahn, BillMaurer, DavidMindell, HeatherPaxson, and Trevor Pinch for helpful soundings on early versionsof this article. Gratitude as well to members of biogroop EtienneBenson, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, and Sara Wyliean MITreading collective with whom I developed many of the ideas ex-ploredhere.I also thank Chris Kelty, Hannah Landecker, and mem-bers of the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, where Ipresented a portion of this argument.I owe a particular debt to Hil-lel Schwartz, who generously shared with me a chapter draft fromhis forthcoming book on noise and who tested this article for itshistorical and argumentative soundness. Virginia Dominguez andan anonymous reviewer helped me tune this discussion to specic AE frequencies. My deep thanks to Deb Kelley, chief scientist onthe MayJune 2004 Atlantis trip, who gave me the chance to dive in Alvin, andto JohnDelaney andBruceStrickrott, mycompanionsonDive #4020.I also acknowledge the Alvin support team andthe crew of Atlantis. My research was funded by MITs School of Humanitiesand Social Science and, at one remove, by Kelleys grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation and the NSFs Ridge 2000 Program.

1. Also advocated by Gregory Bateson in the second edition of Naven (1958) and in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).

2. Trevor Pinch andKarinBijsterveld write that the eld of soundstudies is characterized by a focus on the materiality of sound, itsembeddedness not only in history, society, and culture, but also in

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science and technology and its machines and ways of knowing andinteracting (2004:636).

3. The U.S. Navy owns Alvin, although most research conductedbythe subis civilian,withaccessgrantedthroughtheOfceof NavalResearch and NSF.

4. Felds phrasing avoids Thompsons cleaving of the world into

physical and cultural components.5. Adifferentcircumstanceobtainsin saturationdiving, whichac-climatizesdivers to pressures greater than one atmosphere for pro-longed periods and requires extended decompression. Saturationdiving allows people to live in air-lled undersea facilities main-tained at ambient (high) pressure. To prevent oxygen poisoning,heliumis oftenadded to themix,causingdiversvoices to rise,mak-ingthem sound like the 1950s novelty act Alvin andthe Chipmunks(whose castrati songs were the result of speeding up tape record-ings). Access Historic Naval Ships Association (n.d.) to listen to a1965 recording of Commander Scott Carpenter of Sealab II leading his crew of saturation divers in a helium-voiced version of Good-night Irene.

6. SabineH ohlerwritesthatacousticmethodsofdepthmeasure-mentbasedonthebinauraltechniquereliedonmakinghumansandtheir sense of hearing a crucial part of the sounding technology(2003:134).

7. This brings up the question of whether the inside of the headcan be considered a soundscape. The long history of inner voices would suggest this possibility. Friedrich Kittler, however, in Gramo-phone, Film, Typewriter (1999), argues that the specically stereospatializationof cranial interiors arrives onlywith headphones. Roy Wagner, urging a biosemiotic take on the question, plays with theidea that the human is an introversion of the bat, with its caveon the inside (2001:xiv). For me, this echo-subject is constitutedthrough transduction.

Another way to think about interior bodily soundscapesandtheir commingling with exterior soundscapesis through an oft-told story about composer John Cages 1950s visit to an anechoicchamber, an acoustically insulated room that prevents sounds res-onating withinit. Left alone in this space,Cage reported hearing the

sound of his own blood owing and concluded that there was nosuch thing as silence. Douglas Kahn points out that, although hehad internalized acoustical space, he did not transform it to an in-nerspace of themind (2005:6)at thesame time that this melting of body boundaries required a transcendent, disembodied mind totakenoteofitsowndissolution.KahnarguesthatthisCageanepiste-mologicalarmaturekeepsthe immersiveediceupright (2005:7).

8. On the reading of transcriptional techniques into bodily on-tologies,see Lenoir 1994.An earlyconference on sensationas trans-duction was held by the National Academy of Sciences in 1962. Inthe foreword to the pamphlet published in connection with thatmeeting, the reader learns that

engineers arebecoming increasingly intrigued by the factthat biological transducers exhibit fantastic sensitivities.

One species of sh can recognize a change of electricaleld of 3/1000ths of a microvolt per millimeter in wa-ter; the rattlesnake has an infrared sensing device thatrecognizes temperature changes of 1/1000th of a degreeCentigrade at the surface of the sensing organ. The B-17 airplane, developedin 1940, hadsome2,000electronicparts,butthepresentB-58has97,000electronicelements.Functionally this is beginningto simulate in complexity aliving system. [Cannan et al. 1962:v]

In 1992, a meeting on sensory transduction was held at WoodsHole; consult Block 1992 and Shepherd and Corey 1992. See also

Borsellino et al. 1990. On hearing as transduction, consult Geleocand Holt 2003.

9. The transposition of sonic into visual data describes the his-torical trajectory of muchoceanographic representation.Othersci-ences have lately seen moves to sonify rather than visualize data.NASAs sound representation of the Huygens probes January 2005

entryinto theatmosphere ofSaturns moonTitanresults frombring-ing vibrations up in pitch (into the frequency range of human au-dition) and compressing them in time (see Johnson and Lecusay 2005). The sonocytology of University of California, Los Angeles,chemist Jim Gimzewski, meanwhile, brings vibrations of cells upin volume (amplitude) so that humans can hear them (see Roosthn.d.). One of Gimzewskis collaborators reports that the frequency of theyeast cells theresearchers tested hasalways been in thesamehigh range, about a C-sharp to D above middle C in terms of mu-sic, . . . Sprinkling alcohol on a yeast cell to kill it raises the pitch(Wheeler2004).Lessmimeticversionsofsonicationarebeingcon-sidered for apprehending high-dimensional data (e.g., Hermannand Ritter 2004).

10. Hillel Schwartz notes that listening and hearing on occasionchange places: Listening itself might well be indiscriminate andautomatic, as for example with te legraph and telephone operators,and hearing might well be specic and voluntary, as with hypnoticcommands, only some of which would be heard and acted upon(2003:488).

11. For a thorough review of underwater acoustic ecology as itpertains to marine animals,see Stocker 200203. Researchinto ventsounds has begun, with the claim made that acoustic energy fromthese settings may provide some local organisms with behavioralor navigational cues (Crone et al. 2006:1).

12. Delaney reminds me of the SOFAR (SONAR Fixing and Rang-ing) channel,a layerof seawaterin whichthe speedof soundreachesits underwaterminimum.Low-frequency vibrationscan travel long distances through this conduit (which sits about 800 to 1,000 me-ters deep at midlatitudes and higher toward the surface in temper-ate zones) before they dissipate. Marine scientists have been ableto listen in on whale calls and other submarine sounds by placing

hydrophones in this channel (consult Munk et al. 1995).13. Sound remains important in marine bioacoustics research

although submarines like Alvin are too disruptive to be used asprimary instruments in this enterprise. Sound is also key to oceanacoustic tomography, the study of ocean temperature using sounddata, although human listeners are hardly necessary for this work.

14. And these days, for cars at least,

designers of factory-installed stereos can know exactly what listening spaces and what speaker and listener po-sitions they aredealing with, thingsthey cant know whendesigning home systems. With this knowledge and a lotof detailed measurements, they can design systems thatat least partially overcome that cars acoustical decien-cies. Systems caneven be tailored to thesound-reecting

character of the car interiors materialsleather or clothupholstery, for example. [Berger 2003]

This tailoring, pioneered by Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy professor Amar Bose for 1983 General Motors cars (Bose 1984),engineers soundscapes into cars from the get-go.

15. Somecomposers haveattemptedquite literallyto fusethe im-mersivelyoceanicandthemusical.MichelRedol(1989)hascreatedpieces to be played underwater. His Sonic Waters was performedin the early 1980s just beneath and beyond the pier of the ScrippsInstitution for Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Listen also toDavid Dunns 1992 Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond,

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a collage of underwater recordings of aquatic insects in ponds inNorth America and Africa.

16. Musical atmospheres recall the more literal one atmosphereof pressure that obtains inside the sub, a necessary condition of our immersion in senses both poetic and technical; atmos, fromthe Greek o (vapor) and the earlier Sanskrit atman (breath or

spirit), signals thelife-sustainingfunction of theair we breathe,andsphere, ofcourse,ndsa materialhousingin thetitaniumorbwithin which Alvin divers breathe.

17. I leave aside in this piece metaphors that congure the deepas a primitive and hostile environment in which scientists questfor secretknowledge of a lost worlda formulation animating pro-nouncements such as the following, by Van Dover: Raw and pow-erful, black smokers look like cautionary totems of an inhospitableplanet (1996:101).

18. Compare Karen Barads discussion of the ongoing trans-duction between feminist and queer studies and science studies(2001:102)in herPerformingCulture/PerformingNature: UsingthePiezoelectric Crystal of Ultrasound Technologies as a Transducerbetween Science Studies and Queer Theories. Barad employs thepiezoelectric transducer, similarly to the way I use the metaphor of transduction, as a tool to examine the question of the relationshipbetween the material and the discursive more generally (2001:99).

19. Insofar, too,as cultureis always relational, an inscriptionof communicative processes that exist, historically, between subjectsin relations of power (Clifford 1986:15), more attention is neededto how this betweenness is made; transduction offers one tool.

20. CompareHaraways ironic (re)visionof cyberneticswith Bate-sons irenic usage.

21. Note that scuba divers are not sonic submarine cyborgs,monitoring their equilibrium, rather, through visual checks of divecomputer screens and surrounding space. Insofar as Scuba diversregister sound, it is primarilythe noiseof theirown DarthVaderlikebreathing.

22. Maritime military history entwines with musical history, asJames Hamilton-Paterson reports:

In the early days of submarine warfare the help of peo-plewith musical knowledge andperfect pitch wassoughtin order to classify the sounds made by submerged craft.In World War I the composer and conductor Sir Hamil-ton Harty was called in by the British Admiraltys Boardfor Invention andResearch to identify the most likelyfre-quency bands of hull and propeller noises, anticipating by a whole war a similar attempt in America, where theconductor Andr e Kostelanetz was approached for muchthe same purpose. . . . Ernest Rutherford also took a col-leaguewithperfect pitch out ina small boatas part ofthe war effort. At a prearrangedspot one of the great names inatomicphysics took a rmgrip of hiscompanions ankles while this man stuck his head into the Firth of Forth andlistened to theengine note of a British submarine. Hauled

back into thedinghy andtowelinghis head heannouncedit was a submersible in A-at and he would recognize itanywhere. [1992:114115, citation omitted]

Scientic research on sound transmission through water datesback at least to the early 18th century. In an issue of the Royal So-cietys Philosophical Transactions, Francis Hauksbee published anAccountof anExperimentTouchingupon thePropagationof Soundthrough Water, in which he pronounced that a bell rung underwa-ter sounded much more mellow, sweet, and grave at least threenotes deeper than it wasbefore (1708:372). Seealso Colladon1973on 1826 experiments at Lake Geneva.

23. The temperature proles of many of the worlds waters werepublic knowledge. Information about the area around Japan, obvi-ously of keen interest to the United States during WWII, had beenpublished by the Japanese Hydrographic Department years earlier(Schlee 1973).

24. Galison notes that antisubmarine warfare was the formative

problem for operations research . . . [whereas] antiaircraft re con-trol was the key to cybernetics (1994:232), but this division hadmore to do with knowledge communities than epistemological dif-ferences. Fortun and Schweber argue that

traditional operations research, for the most part, ad-dressed problems where the objectives were precisely spelled out, and the existing systems and weapons (thehardware) wereconsidered xedand unchangeable.OR was usually concerned with tactical problems and couldbe stated quantitatively and mathematically, and the aimof theanalysis wastond more efcientwaysto operate,in situations where themeaning of moreefcientis fairly clear. [1993:606607, citation omitted]

Such an approach is not antithetical to questions of control andfeedback, which, as Mindell 2002 shows, exceed (and, often, preex-ist) cybernetics as an articulated research area.

25. Although Alvin is cramped and cold, the feeling reported by most passengers is of safety, of oating ina bubbleof security. Many joke that being in Alvin islikebeinginawomb,listeningtotheheart-beat ofthe motherlyseaoutside(aninversewomb, with wateron theoutside and air on the inside). In such framings, Alvin is describedas a she, partakingof a historicaltraditionin European languagesof gendering ships female. Van Dovers mention of working insideher follows this lead but suggests something else too. Submerged,the submarines femininity modulates into the maternal, into theship

Helmreich an Anthropologist Underwater

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