The Funeral Casino : Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand

__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. 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. Alan Klima. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [305]-311) And Index. Contents Illustrations Note on Transcription and Monetary Conversion Acknowledgments Chapter 1. Introduction Part I. The Passed Chapter 2. The New World Chapter 3. Revolting History Chapter 4. Bloodless Power Chapter 5. Repulsiveness of the Body Politic Part II. Kamma Chapter 6. The Charnel Ground Chapter 7. The Funeral Casino Notes Bibliography Index In Bangkok's upscale Royal Hotel, Channel 11 is taping a talk show, a special memorial edition of "Looking from Different Perspectives," the Maung Dang Moom show.