Ethnography #9As Alan Klima writes in Ethnography #9, “there are other possible starting places than the earnest realism of anthropological discourse as a method of critical thought.” In this experimental ethnography of capitalism, ghosts, and numbers in mid- and late-twentieth-century Thailand, Klima uses this provocation to deconstruct naive faith in the “real” and in the material in academic discourse that does not recognize that it is, itself, writing. Klima also twists the common narrative that increasing financial abstractions in economic culture are a kind of real horror story, entangling it with other modes of abstraction commonly seen as less “real,” such as spirit consultations, ghost stories, and haunted gambling. His unconventional, distinctive, and literary form of storytelling uses multiple voices, from ethnographic modes to a first-person narrative in which he channels Northern Thai ghostly tales and the story of a young Thai spirit. This genre alchemy creates strange yet compelling new relations between being and not being, presence and absence, fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and reality. In embracing the speculative as a writing form, Klima summons unorthodox possibilities for truth in contemporary anthropology. |
Contents
World Gothic | |
Betting on the Real | |
Prove | |
Regendered Debt | |
Men and Our Money | |
The Godfathers | |
Reversing the Mount | |
Deterritory | |
Everywhere and Nowhere | |
The End of the World | |
Fossil | |
Notes | |
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abstract anthropology Asian Ba Jae baht Bangkok become body Buddhist capital cham chaa course crash dark dead dealers debt Deleuze and Guattari Derrida deterritorialization discourse economy Ee Nieo ether ethnographic everything exist eyes fact fantasy feeling fiction film forest Freud funeral casinos gamblers gambling Ghostly Matters ghosts global godfathers godmothers Gongkam Gothic happened haunting hauntology imagined immaterial Iy Lert Jae’s knew Lampang laughing literature Little Prince living loans look lottery Mae Nak megamarts mind money tree monks moral hazard mother movie Nang Nak neoliberal never night numbers ontological perhaps precisely prophecy reality Reality1 realm representationalism Ringu samanera sense social science speak specter spectral spirit mediums spirit world story strange teak Thai Thai baht things thought Tree Woman turn uncanny Uncle Chai Uncle Wua village voice women writing