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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.