Author: Alan Klima File Type: pdf The Funeral Casino is a heretical ethnography of the global age. Setting his book within Thailands 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 Thailands 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.ReviewKlimas attempt to bring philosophy into ethnography is important. . . . This book is an important contribution to the ongoing critique and dialogue in anthropology about visuality, representation and symbolic exchange. ReviewKlimas attempt to bring philosophy into ethnography is important. . . . This book is an important contribution to the ongoing critique and dialogue in anthropology about visuality, representation and symbolic exchange. (Christophe Robert Anthropological Quarterly )

Author: Ita Mac Carthy File Type: pdf Certain words played a crucial role in the making of the European Renaissance, and still recur today in our shifting understanding of it. Discretion and grace, to take two examples studied here, express how individuals thought about themselves, each other and their experience of the world, yet they are as hard to define as they are ever-present in Renaissance discourse. In this collection of essays, scholars from across the Humanities offer new interpretations of these and other keywords, to adopt Raymond Williamss term, and investigate the vocabulary that not only accompanied, but also produced, the cultural transformations that made the Renaissance so distinctive. A keywords approach to Renaissance Europe provides a rich contextual framework for the exploration of its central ideas. It also highlights the need for fresh thinking on current histories of the age. Renaissance Keywords engages with the ongoing debate about the term Renaissance itself, perhaps more our keyword than theirs, and seeks alternative ways to understand a culture and society which produced conceptions of the self as much as it did art and science. The result is an exploration at the cutting edge of contemporary research. Ita Mac Carthy is Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Birmingham. **