The Funeral Casino : : Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand / / Alan Klima.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Asian Studies Backlist (2000-2014) eBook Package
• VerfasserIn: Klima, Alan,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2009]; ©2002
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Illustrations --; Note on Transcription and Monetary Conversion --; Acknowledgments --; Chapter 1. Introduction --; Part I. The Passed --; Chapter 2. The New World --; Chapter 3. Revolting History --; Chapter 4. Bloodless Power --; Chapter 5. Repulsiveness of the Body Politic --; Part II. Kamma --; Chapter 6. The Charnel Ground --; Chapter 7. The Funeral Casino --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9781400824960; 9783110649772; 9783110442502
• DOI: 10.1515/9781400824960
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Alan Klima.

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.