Awards
- Joint winner for Victor Turner Prize 2003.
- Joint winner of Victor Turner Prize 2003
- Joint winner of Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Humanistic Anthropology/American Anthropological Association 2003 (United States)
- Winner of Victor Turner Prize 2003.
Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Alan Klima
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.10cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.510kg
ISBN: 9780691074603
ISBN 10: 0691074607
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 03 March 2002
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Language: English
Reviews
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 Association ""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
Author Information
Alan Klima is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
