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oapen-20.500.12657-222892024-03-22T19:23:27Z Ethnography #9 Klima, Alan ghosts financial crash immaterialism fiction ethnography Northern Thailand thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social and cultural anthropology 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. 2020-03-27 11:04:28 2020-04-01T06:48:14Z 2020-04-01T06:48:14Z 2019 book 1007889 9781478007111; 9781478006213; 9781478005445 http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22289 eng application/pdf n/a 9781478090205_OA.pdf https://www.dukeupress.edu/ethnography-9 Duke University Press 10.1215/9781478090205 10.1215/9781478090205 f0d6aaef-4159-4e01-b1ea-a7145b2ab14b 9781478007111; 9781478006213; 9781478005445 Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) 192 Durham 2020-03-27 11:00:41, Funder name: University of California, Davis/ Funding project name: Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem TOME open access
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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.
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