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Book Cover
E-book
Author Klima, Alan, 1964- author.

Title The funeral casino : meditation, massacre, and exchange with the dead in Thailand / Alan Klima
Published Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, ©2002

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 317 pages) : illustrations
Series Anthropology online
Contents The Passed : The new world : Bangkok and the world order without history -- Revolting history : The necromantic power of public massacres -- Bloodless power : the moral economy of the Thai crowd -- Repulsiveness of the body politic : an economics of the Black May Massacre -- Kamma : The Charnel Ground : visions of death in Buddhist ascesis and the redemption of mechanical reproduction -- The funeral casino : a mindful economy
Summary 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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-311) and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Massacres -- Thailand.
Violence in mass media.
Funeral rites and ceremonies -- Thailand
Death -- Religious aspects -- Buddhism.
Meditation -- Buddhism.
Death -- Religious aspects.
HISTORY.
Death -- Religious aspects -- Buddhism
Funeral rites and ceremonies
Massacres
Meditation -- Buddhism
Politics and government
Violence in mass media
Dood.
Geweld.
Politieke aspecten.
Riten.
Massamedia.
Boeddhisme.
SUBJECT Thailand -- Politics and government -- 1945-1988. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh99005513
Thailand -- Politics and government -- 1988- http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh99005518
Subject Thailand
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2001055195
ISBN 1400814421
9781400814428
9781400824960
1400824966
9780691074597
0691074593