Alan Klima

Education
1996 Ph.D., Department of Anthropology, Princeton University
1988 M.A., Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
1987 B.A., Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University

Research Interests
My research has concerned pro-democracy activism in Thailand, military massacre, and the political effects of the representation of death in public media and political ritual. In searching for alternative ways of understanding such matters, Buddhist methods of visualizing death and Buddhist funerary rituals have proven to be insightful ethnographic contexts that can work as forms of theory or commentary, rather than simply as “data.” Work in this direction has necessitated reflection on ethnographic and visual-cultural form, in order to write philosophy of community and activism through narrative ethnography.

Currently my research concerns the formation of “global moralities” and their political effects as they are furthered in and through local and national communities. In particular, I am concerned with the local application of global moralities of finance, including ideas and practices of debt, reason, and haunting in Thailand since the currency crash of 1997. My film Ghosts and Numbers and current ethnographic writing project concerns  the suppression of local money-lending, gambling, and other irregular financial instruments among small-time local organizations, and discrediting of spirit- mediumship and other religious phenomena connected with money. I am currently also exploring what I call "The Meditation Machine," a social bio-feedback mechanism in which meditation practice is being reformulated in the cultures of Biomedicine and Education.

Recent Publications

2010  Ghosts and Numbers. Documentary Educational Resources: 68 min. (Director, Cinematographer, Writer) http://www.der.org/films/ghosts-and-numbers.html

2007  “Ghosts, Numbers, and the Real” in Ghost Entertainment - Entitled: Magazine for the International Exhibit, Goethe Institute: 21-26. 

2006  “Spirits of ‘Dark Finance’: A Local Hazard for the International Moral Fund” Cultural Dynamics 18(1): 33-60.

2004 “Thai Love Thai: Financing Emotion in Post-crash Thailand” Ethnos 69(4):445-464.

2002 The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2001 “The Telegraphic Abject: Buddhist Meditation and the Redemption of Mechanical Reproduction.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43(3):552-582.

Document