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Ethnography #9
As Alan Klima writes in Ethnography #9, “there are other possible starting places than the earnest realism of anthropological discourse as a method of critical thought.” In this experimental ethnography of capitalism, ghosts, and numbers in mid- and late-twentieth-century Thailand, Klima uses this provocation to deconstruct naive faith in the “real” and in the material in academic discourse that does not recognize that it is, itself, writing. Klima also twists the common narrative that increasing financial abstractions in economic culture are a kind of real horror story, entangling it with other modes of abstraction commonly seen as less “real,” such as spirit consultations, ghos...
The Funeral Casino
Table of contents
The Signs of Language
In a book with far-reaching implications, Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi present a full exploration of a language in another mode--a language of the hands and of the eyes. They discuss the origin and development of American Sign Language, the internal structure of its basic units, the grammatical processes it employs, and its heightened use in poetry and wit. The authors draw on research, much of it by and with deaf people, to answer the crucial question of what is fundamental to language as language and what is determined by the mode (vocal or gestural) in which a language is produced.
My Crazy Century
Spanning six decades that included war, totalitarianism, censorship, and the fight for democracy, My Crazy Century reflects on Ivan Klíma's remarkable life while also looking at this critical period of twentieth-century history. From World War Two to the oppressive grip of Communism, from the brief hope of freedom during the Prague Spring of 1968 to the eventual collapse of the regime in 1989's Velvet Revolution, Klíma's revelatory account contemplates the ways in which this crazy century led mankind astray and impacted the lives of not only Klíma's generation but today's generations still grappling with totalitarian societies. Including an appendix of insightful essays that compliment each chapter - on topics ranging from social history and political thinking to love and liberty - My Crazy Century provides a profoundly rich and moving personal and national history.
Buddhism and Postmodern Imaginings in Thailand
This book presents a rethink on the significance of Thai Buddhism in an increasingly complex and changing post-modern urban context, especially following the financial crisis of 1997. Defining the cultural nature of Thai 'urbanity'; the implications for local/global flows, interactions and emergent social formations, James Taylor opens up new possibilities in understanding the specificities of everyday urban life as this relates to perceptions, conceptions and lived experiences of religiosity. Changes in the centre are also reverberating in the remaining forests and the monastic tradition of forest-dwelling which has sourced most of the nation's modern saints. The text is based on ethnograph...
The Dead Janitors Club
It had been well over a month since I had seen or heard from Dirk, and it was showing in my bank account...I was tempted to start searching for another job. I still had faith, though, that somehow, someway, I was meant for this line of work... "Hello?" I mumbled, not recognizing the number on the caller ID. "Jeff, it's Dirk," said the voice. I waited curiously, wondering who the hell Dirk was. "We've got one," he eventually said when I failed to answer. We had never bothered to get together for any sort of training, and now, it was too late. After toiling for minimum wage for years, Jeff Klima got an unexpected offer: to head up a brand new crime scene cleanup company in Orange County. The u...
The Funeral Casino
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 f...
Logorrhea
“Delightful . . . A treat for dictionary hounds and vocabulary-challenged word lovers everywhere.”—Booklist For most of us, these prizewinning spelling bee words would be difficult to pronounce, let alone spell. We asked twenty-one of today’s most talented and inventive writers to go even further and pen an original tale inspired by one of dozens of obscure and fascinating championship words. The result is Logorrhea—a veritable dictionary of the weird, the fantastic, the haunting, and the indefinable that will have you spellbound from the very first page. Including twenty-one stories and the inscrutable words that inspired them: Chiaroscuro: “The Chiaroscurist” by Hal Duncan Ly...
A Kingdom in Crisis
‘Perhaps the best introduction yet to the roots of Thailand’s present political impasse. A brilliant book.’ Simon Long, The Economist Struggling to emerge from a despotic past, and convulsed by an intractable conflict that will determine its future, Thailand stands at a defining moment in its history. Scores have been killed on the streets of Bangkok. Freedom of speech is routinely denied. Democracy appears increasingly distant. And many Thais fear that the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej is expected to unleash even greater instability. Yet in spite of the impact of the crisis, and the extraordinary importance of the royal succession, they have never been comprehensively analysed – until now. Breaking Thailand's draconian lèse majesté law, Andrew MacGregor Marshall is one of the only journalists covering contemporary Thailand to tell the whole story. Marshall provides a comprehensive explanation that for the first time makes sense of the crisis, revealing the unacknowledged succession conflict that has become entangled with the struggle for democracy in Thailand.
Saving Us
United Nations Champion of the Earth, climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe changes the debate on how we can save our future.
