Ethnography #9

Alan Klima’s Ethnography #9—winner of the 2020 Bateson Prize—is a set of meditations on ghosts, numbers, and capitalist crisis in Thailand. As an experimental ethnographic critique of secular materialism, Klima’s “gothic ethnography” calls into question “the real” through stories that interweave ghosts, godmothers, and non-secular forms of abstraction.

The review essays in this series are also unconventional, reflective, speculative, and experimental. They do not necessarily follow the logic and structure of the book. Nor do they summarize Ethnography #9. Indeed, Klima’s ethnographic meditations refuse a singular or a linear narrative—a reader has to begin to learn to read differently as he encounters the materials in the text. As you will find out, the reviewers in this series are skillful writers. But they are also good readers. They pay close attention to sentences, utterances, images, concepts, and the in-between spaces. This is no easy task. Sometimes they would take a small phrase, or a tiny figure, and place them under a different light to generate something new. The new materials the reviewers bring to our attention are as interesting as Klima’s text itself.

Tanzeen Rashed Doha introduces the symposium by engaging with the texts (the author’s and the reviewers’) from within to think about secular history’s destabilization by the dynamic between the ethereal and the corporeal. Rajbir Singh Judge thinks with Klima's work in relation to the interpretive requirements of the social sciences and queries the orientation of our own desire. Gil Anidjar asks us to think about numbers and ghosts--numbers that proliferate around us today especially as the pandemic rages. Erica Robles-Anderson considers Klima’s work as a media theorist and raises important questions about motherhood, screens, and gender, urging us to examine where theorization emerges. Lastly, Allen Feldman’s essay proposes hauntology as the ontology of both late capitalism and western anthropological gaze.The symposium concludes with Alan Klima’s response to our reviewers' comments and questions.

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The Last Sky, Above Ground Zero: Introducing Ethnography #9 [1]

Tanzeen Rashed Doha

January 16, 2021

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. Not Hegel’s speculative ghosts—"the Mahometans”—who advance in world-history only to fall behind Christianity (later, secularity). Not Derrida’s specters, where ghosts work as metaphors. But actual spirits of/from another realm who physically, literally force the secular world to halt and look itself in the mirror.

Ghosts Count

Gil Anidjar

January 16, 2021

I have finally begun to develop an interest in numbers. Taking my cue from Alan Klima, I will have to assume that none of this has anything to do with Christianity, global or other, though it may yet reveal something of “Christian accounting.” At the time of writing, in any case, “it is 2001 by Christian accounting, which is not quite foreign to … anyone around here, where it is also 2544 in the Buddhist calendar.”

What Is Called Ghostly?: A Mother’s Story[1]

Rajbir Singh Judge

January 21, 2021

The goal of this review of Ethnography #9 is not to till and plough its arguments in order to legitimate it as a rigorous work of academic inquiry, demanding it be admitted into the canon of the social sciences. There are more important gatekeepers and experts who can provide that critical examination. Instead, I read the text in order to see again and again, to encircle its insights, to think about questions of debt, ghosts, and, importantly, the question of reality itself, as they appear and reappear—as they proliferate.

Girl No Thing but Screens

Erica Robles-Anderson

January 24, 2021

Ethnography #9 opens with a scene of a woman in her sixties watching television. It is September 11, 2001 and Kamnoi is glued to her flat-screen witnessing four planes crash and two towers fall. She is not caught in the thrall of spectacular death nor overwhelmed by terror or any other extraordinary feeling. If anything she is operating from her head. She makes notes, keeps counts, and looks for patterns in the chaos. She will use what she discerns to place her bets. Like a broker at a Bloomberg terminal watching the market crash, Kamnoi is “dubbing the numberstream.”

Phantomography

Allen Feldman

January 27, 2021

Alan Klima’s opening meditation on hauntology launches serial catastrophes-- the crash of the twin towers, the global deflation of subprime derivatives, the crash of silverware angrily thrown to the floor by no hand, the tumbling of a teak column that once upheld an aesthetic economy of homeliness, and the simulacral implosion of ethnographic realism founded on an anthropology that either precludes the unhuman or subjects it to recursive anthropomorphic expropriation.

Nothing Is

Alan Klima

September 30, 2021

The thinking mind has trouble with nothingness. As long as that trouble reigns supreme, I don’t know how easily anthropology or scholarship in general will be able to interact with certain forms of life and being out and about in the world and there will always appear to be somewhat of an impasse. To me, at this moment, I would call that impasse one between the secular and the religious.

Table of Contents

Ethnography #9