abduction

athwart theory

nomadic geography

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

anthropologist

university professor

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

prizes and famous lectures

Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture

Diana Forsythe Book Prize

innovator in the field of

Science and Technology Studies (STS)

STS scholar

anthropology

Alien Ocean

Silicon Second Nature

is a style of reasoning that moves not from the particular to the general (i.e. induction) nor from the general to the particular (I.E. Deduction) but from premises which may materialize in the future.

While induction is reasoning by inference from particulars toward general conclusions, and deduction the drawing of conclusions from known principles or theories, abduction is reasoning from premises that may materialize in the future'(Helmreich 2006).

is a method of tacking back and forth between seeing theory as tools for explaining worlds and as phenomena in the world to be examined.

In Alien Ocean, I read anthropological and oceanographic materials and theories through one another. In this process, I treat theories-whether in anthropology or marine biology-both as tools for explaining worlds and as phenomena in the world to be examined. I think of such tacking back and forth as working athwart theory. This is not the anti-philosophy of science offered by Paul Feyerabend in Against Method in which 'anything goes'... it is precisely a method, one that does not take for granted the difference between things and forms of explanation or abstraction, tracing instead how these items exist in alignment and tension. Neither is this working against theory, a practice proposed by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels to argue that all interpretations-whether they offer schemes for understanding everything or deny the idea of correct interpretation at all-founder on a 'single mistake': the assumption that problems set by theoretical frames are themselves real. Working athwart theory, I not only cross-wire ethnographic and marine microbiological theories (of, e.g., space, place, and community) but also claim that such transverse, oblique, operations can produce compelling renderings of a real world. (Helmreich Alien p.23)

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Stefan Helmreich

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Stefan Helmreich