1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910172216503321

Autore

Klima Alan <1964->

Titolo

The funeral casino : meditation, massacre, and exchange with the dead in Thailand / / Alan Klima

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, N.J., : Princeton University Press, c2002

ISBN

1-4008-1682-3

1-282-15915-1

1-4008-1442-1

9786612159152

1-4008-2496-6

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (331 p.)

Disciplina

959.304/4

Soggetti

Massacres - Thailand

Violence in mass media

Funeral rites and ceremonies - Thailand

Death - Religious aspects - Buddhism

Meditation - Buddhism

Thailand Politics and government 1945-1988

Thailand Politics and government 1988-

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [305]-311) and index.

Nota di contenuto

pt. 1. The passed -- pt. 2. Kamma.

Sommario/riassunto

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.