The Funeral Casino (ebook)

Argumento de The Funeral Casino (ebook)

"In bringing together an ancient Buddhist practice of meditation of the corpse with globalised technologies of massacre in Thailand, Alan Klima has written an amazing book that makes you rethink your body and the body politic. There are few interventions into Western theory that have been as productive as this breathtaking endeavor. Bataille and Benjamin will never seem the same. A stirring endorsement of anthropology as a radical discipline, this book also appeals on account of its uniquely down to earth populist style that at manic speed propels you into the crowds on the streets, the charnel house and temples, and intimate portraits of real people no less than of the sleaze of the World Bank and elites that have, as yet, to experience what Klima has experienced in meditating over the corpse."--Michael Taussig

"Alan Klima's hallucinatory account of death in the streets of Bangkok and his indictment of the efforts to convert death into mere exchange value has enormous potential for the field of Thai studies, where it is likely to erupt onto the scene like a small bomb. It offers a relentless repudiation of those saccharine tropes through which Thailand has mainly been read."--Rosalind Morris

"Klima's attempt to bring philosophy into ethnography is important. . . . This book is an important contribution to the ongoing critique and dialogue in anthropology about visuality, representation and symbolic exchange."--Christophe Robert, Anthropological Quarterly

Co-Winner of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology and American Anthropological Association0List of Illustrations vii
Note on Transcription and Monetary Conversion ix
Acknowledgments xi
1. Introduction 1
PART I: The Passed
2. The New World: Bangkok and the World Order without History 31
3. Revolting History: The Necromantic Power of Public Massacres 53
4. Bloodless Power: A Moral Economy of the Thai Crowd 89
5. Repulsiveness of the Body Politic: An Economics of the Black May Massacre 122
PART II: Kamma
6. The Charnel Ground: Visions of Death in Buddhist Asceis and the Redemption of Mechanical Reproduction 169
7. The Funeral Casino: A Mindful Economy 231
Notes 291
Bibliography 305
Index 313