Description
Book SynopsisIn this experimental ethnography, Alan Klima examines moneylending, gambling, funeral casinos, and the consultations of spirits and mediums to predict winning lottery numbers to illustrate the relationship between contemporary Thai spiritual and financial practices and global capitalism's abstraction of monetary value.
Trade Review“Alan Klima's ethnographic writing releases a middle zone, an in-between that haunts the kind of thought accreted by Euro-enlightenment. And it is beautifully done, unfolding, cascading, easing a shift in realism that starts by troubling a conventionally recognized real, material world and ends up dominated by the voice of a double, a possession.
Ethnography #9 is an amazing and wonderful book by a masterful and compelling writer.” -- Kathleen Stewart, coauthor of * The Hundreds *
“In
Ethnography #9, ghosts dance with social theorists, and the spirit-possessed author juggles global financial tips along with winning lottery numbers. In Thailand after the financial crash, loan godmothers, gambling, and unhinging ghosts share the stage with World Bank prescriptions and market-hogging mega-marts. Alan Klima and his spirit familiar stage a wild experiment in telling the real by moving out of common sense.” -- Anna Tsing, coeditor of * Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene *
“
Ethnography #9 is not about Islam, but the book, the ethnography, the ethnographer, the possessed writer, and the haunted reader are all confronted by Islam in the very first instance, by its potential, its catastrophe, its capacities, and its ghosts.... Klima’s approach is meditative, soulful.” -- Tanzeen Rashed Doha * Milestones *
“Klima’s brilliant, fantastically moving and seriously haunting book...[is] not just a book about numbers.... His is, in sum, the story of an uncertain present.” -- Gil Anidjar * Milestones *
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Ethnography #9 is, among so many things, a book about media, mediums, and mediation.... But where media scholars might talk about television as a window on the world, or about how media disrupts geography by binding near and far, Klima guides our attention to something else...a gothic ethnography of the screen.” -- Erica Robles-Anderson * Milestones *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
1. The Ghost Manifesto 1
2. World Gothic 46
3. Betting on the Real 65
4. Prove It 88
5. Regendered Debt 95
6. Men and Our Money 101
7. The Godfathers 114
8. It Has All Happened Before 124
9. The Return of the Dead 132
10. Reversing the Mount 140
11. Deterritory 145
12. Everywhere and Nowhere 149
13. The End of the World 157
14. Fossil 165
Notes 171
Bibliography 177
Index 181
