The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand
by Alan Klima
On This Page
Description
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 show more 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. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
2 Works 43 Members
Alan Klima is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand.
Awards and Honors
Awards
Common Knowledge
- Important places
- Thailand
- Important events
- 14 October 1973; 6 October 1976 Massacre; Black May (1992)
Classifications
- Genres
- Anthropology, Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, History, Politics and Government, Economics
- DDC/MDS
- 959.304 — History & geography History of Asia Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam Thailand
- LCC
- DS586 .K58 — History of Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania Asia History of Asia Thailand (Siam) History
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 35
- Popularity
- 778,276
- Rating
- (3.83)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
