Ethnography #9
By: Alan Klima
Contributors: Duke University Press
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Durham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 182
ISBN-13: 9781478005445; 9781478006213; 9781478007111
Copyright date: 2019
Subjects: Financial crises; Geisterglaube; Kulturanthropologie; Seances; Lotteries; Economic conditions; Numerologie; Lotterie; Sozialer Aufstieg; Economic history
Other titles: Ethnography number nine
Description: "ETHNOGRAPHY #9 looks at Thai spiritual and financial practices, and at the relationship of these local practices to global capitalism's abstraction of monetary value. Through his examination of moneylending, gambling, funeral casinos, and the consultation of spirits and mediums to predict winning lottery numbers, Alan Klima challenges the assumptions of anthropology's "ontological turn" and reveals the limitations of theoretical explanations of capitalist fantasy that are grounded in the rational and the "real." Looking critically at the work done by conventional ethnographic writing in performing the very objectivity and realism that it claims as its method, Klima instead embraces a distinctive literary form of storytelling that hovers between being and not being, presence and absence, fiction and non-fiction, and fantasy and reality"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The ghost manifesto; title: World Gothic; title: Betting on the real; title: Prove it; title: Regendered debt; title: Men and our money; title: The godfathers; title: It has all happened before; title: The return of the dead; title: Reversing the mount; title: Deterritory; title: Everywhere and nowhere; title: The end of the world; title: Fossil.