Ethnography #9

Product Description

As 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.

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

“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

About the Author

Alan Klima is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand.