A01=Alan Klima
Activism
Alterity
Asceticism
Author_Alan Klima
Awareness
Bangkok
Buddhism
Buddhist meditation
Capitalism
Category=JBFK
Category=JHBZ
Category=JHM
Category=JPWG
Category=QRF
Censorship
Charnel ground
Civil society
Cleanliness
Coffin
Commodity
Counter-insurgency
Cremation
Criticism
Customer
Democracy Monument
Dukkha
Economy
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ethnography
Evocation
Exclusion
Failed state
Generosity
Gift economy
Giorgio Agamben
Headline
Hunger strike
Hungry ghost
Ideology
Incense
Instance (computer science)
Jacques Derrida
Laity
Military dictatorship
Modernity
National flag
Newspaper
Nonviolence
Patpong
Photography
Pickup truck
Political philosophy
Politician
Politics
Postmodernism
Pro-Test
Protest
Public Culture
Public sphere
Resignation
Santi Asoke
Scarcity
Suffering
Taonga
Technology
Thai people
Thailand
The Other Hand
Tourism
Uncertainty
United States
Vendor
Walter Benjamin
Wealth
Word
Wreath
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691074603
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 03 Mar 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The Funeral Casino is a heretical ethnography of the global age. Setting his book within Thailand's pro-democracy movement and the street massacres that accompanied it, Alan Klima offers a strikingly original interpretation of mass-mediated violence through a study of funeral gambling and Buddhist meditation on death. The fieldwork for the book began in 1992, when a freewheeling market of illegal "massacre-imagery" videos blossomed in Bangkok on the very site where, days earlier, for the third time in two decades, a military-controlled government had killed scores of unarmed pro-democracy protesters. Such killings and their subsequent representation have lent force to Thailand's transition from military control to a "media-financial complex." Probing the ways in which death is marketed, visualized, and remembered through practices both local and global, Klima inverts conventional relationships between ethnography and theory through a compelling narrative that reveals a surprising new direction available to anthropology and critical theory. Ethnography here engages with the philosophy of activism and the politics of memory, media representation of violence, and globalization.
In focusing on the particular array of tactics in Thai Buddhism and protest politics for connecting death and life, past and present, this book unveils a vivid and haunting picture of community, responsibility, and accountability in the new world order.
Alan Klima is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College.
