Description
Book SynopsisA theoretical account of how spirit mediums mediate the Thai experience of capitalist modernity.
Trade Review“Traveling from spirit mediumship to the ethnography of the finance capital market,
In the Place of Origins combines theoretical bravura with brilliant narrative skill. As it comments on ethnographic self-fashioning in Thailand, it also examines the mediumship of disciplinary ethnography, and the alterity it so anxiously seeks to expell. This is a text of dazzling instructive simplicity.”—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
“With this astutely conceived and exquisitely written account of the complexities of mediumship in Thai modernity, Rosalind Morris has taken ethnographic practice to a whole new level of theoretical as well as descriptive sophistication. It is a dazzling accomplishment.”—Rey Chow, University of California, Irvine
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Note on Transcription x
Introduction 1
1 Writing, Exchange, Translation: A Poetics of the Modern 13
2 Ruin, or, What the New City Remembers 55
3 First, Forgetting 80
4 The Appearance of Order 107
5 The Secret of the Dish 150
6 Transmissions, or, the Appearance of Culture 181
7 Representations: Locality and the Spirit of Democracy 240
8 Outside, Eyeless, and on Fire: The Apotheosis of Representation 287
9 After All Else: The End of Mediumship? 332
Bibliography 351
Index 371
