I had to put this book down and then take it back up later, then put it down, and take it up again. The images were gruesome and hard to take, and I connected these images to the radio reports I hear every day of suicide bombings in the Middle East. I also accidentally saw too much of a videotaped murder, and the images in Klima’s text connected those images in my mind as well. By the end of the book, I was a bit desensitized to the images, much as the monk describes moving past the revolting. I was still moved and disturbed though not by the images of the bodies and the gore, but by the sadness of the mothers and the families. It’s hard to say after reading the text, what really to make of the market in protest deaths following Black May. It may be connected to survivor’s guilt, merit-making, meditating on the revolting, or it may have been a kind of funeral casino. One of the strengths of this text for me was showing how kamma was everywhere—from the vendors and buyers at the Black May market, to the military leaders, to the governments, to the families of the deceased. All around there were gifts made and debts incurred. What changed was who made the gift and how and when the debts were paid. Klima showed us that the cycle of the gift-giving and debt making did not cease, but kept reproducing itself, and will into forever.
I’d like to discuss in class how this was a project of “ethnography as theory” as Klima calls it. I may need more time to digest and compare it to the other works we have read, but at this point, I am not sure how to read this ethnography as theory. Is it one unified theory like “friction” or something more heterogeneous?
This book is, as many people have mentioned, formally very different than When Nature Goes Public, Friction, and even Everything Was Forever… It is visceral, at times conversational, and he uses the word fucking. Which, admittedly, I use in my regular life seventy-five times a day. But it was a little shocking to see it in an “academic” text. But just like reading Taussig last year, the difference of this work makes it more compelling, more alluring, and you never ask the question, where’s the ethnography? I hope we can talk more about this style in class, why it evokes something particular in the reader, and how this can be dangerous—how it makes us a little less theoretically critical. And what does he mean by “This text is the artificial employment of ethnography as theory”? (25)
Klima’s idea of the “public sphere of the corpse” or the “Thai public cadaver” made me think instantly of the film Bus 147, which we watched in Beatriz’s Shock of the Real class last week. The fact that the student protesters used the military’s own media visibility as a shield against violence in 1991 spoke to the same mechanisms at place in this Brazilian documentary. In it, a man hijacks a public bus in Rio, and the entire situation plays out in front of a television station, as well as countless photographers and onlookers. An order comes down to the police from the governor—the hijacker is not to be killed on camera. The way in which the scene unfolds is then contingent on the fact that it is being watched by everyone in the country, live. Cameramen, home viewers, and even the victims on the bus become frustrated with the lack of action by the police, as the hijacker repeatedly sticks his head out the window of the bus and shouts, “This isn’t an action movie! This is real life!”
The politics of representation and reality in the film are too multifarious to go into here, but as in The Funeral Casino what “actually” happens and how images function in an economy, “has not only with the production of copies, but also with the production of more originals” (83). In the end, ineluctably, Bus 147 the film, the incident, the lives of those involved, ends tragically, with a hostage killed on camera, and the hijacker murdered by police off screen.
Further, what about the most recent Thai coup, which happened merely a month ago? Almost every news report I read emphasized the junta imposed censorship of television and radio stations, and the outcry over this “restriction of human rights and freedom of expression.” What has the military learned from all those Bloody Octobers? How is the politic of death imagery working/being kept from working here?
3 Comments:
At 4:36 PM,
Kadija Ferryman said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
At 4:41 PM,
Kadija Ferryman said…
I had to put this book down and then take it back up later, then put it down, and take it up again. The images were gruesome and hard to take, and I connected these images to the radio reports I hear every day of suicide bombings in the Middle East. I also accidentally saw too much of a videotaped murder, and the images in Klima’s text connected those images in my mind as well. By the end of the book, I was a bit desensitized to the images, much as the monk describes moving past the revolting. I was still moved and disturbed though not by the images of the bodies and the gore, but by the sadness of the mothers and the families. It’s hard to say after reading the text, what really to make of the market in protest deaths following Black May. It may be connected to survivor’s guilt, merit-making, meditating on the revolting, or it may have been a kind of funeral casino. One of the strengths of this text for me was showing how kamma was everywhere—from the vendors and buyers at the Black May market, to the military leaders, to the governments, to the families of the deceased. All around there were gifts made and debts incurred. What changed was who made the gift and how and when the debts were paid. Klima showed us that the cycle of the gift-giving and debt making did not cease, but kept reproducing itself, and will into forever.
I’d like to discuss in class how this was a project of “ethnography as theory” as Klima calls it. I may need more time to digest and compare it to the other works we have read, but at this point, I am not sure how to read this ethnography as theory. Is it one unified theory like “friction” or something more heterogeneous?
At 6:09 PM,
amber said…
This book is, as many people have mentioned, formally very different than When Nature Goes Public, Friction, and even Everything Was Forever… It is visceral, at times conversational, and he uses the word fucking. Which, admittedly, I use in my regular life seventy-five times a day. But it was a little shocking to see it in an “academic” text. But just like reading Taussig last year, the difference of this work makes it more compelling, more alluring, and you never ask the question, where’s the ethnography? I hope we can talk more about this style in class, why it evokes something particular in the reader, and how this can be dangerous—how it makes us a little less theoretically critical. And what does he mean by “This text is the artificial employment of ethnography as theory”? (25)
Klima’s idea of the “public sphere of the corpse” or the “Thai public cadaver” made me think instantly of the film Bus 147, which we watched in Beatriz’s Shock of the Real class last week. The fact that the student protesters used the military’s own media visibility as a shield against violence in 1991 spoke to the same mechanisms at place in this Brazilian documentary. In it, a man hijacks a public bus in Rio, and the entire situation plays out in front of a television station, as well as countless photographers and onlookers. An order comes down to the police from the governor—the hijacker is not to be killed on camera. The way in which the scene unfolds is then contingent on the fact that it is being watched by everyone in the country, live. Cameramen, home viewers, and even the victims on the bus become frustrated with the lack of action by the police, as the hijacker repeatedly sticks his head out the window of the bus and shouts, “This isn’t an action movie! This is real life!”
The politics of representation and reality in the film are too multifarious to go into here, but as in The Funeral Casino what “actually” happens and how images function in an economy, “has not only with the production of copies, but also with the production of more originals” (83). In the end, ineluctably, Bus 147 the film, the incident, the lives of those involved, ends tragically, with a hostage killed on camera, and the hijacker murdered by police off screen.
Further, what about the most recent Thai coup, which happened merely a month ago? Almost every news report I read emphasized the junta imposed censorship of television and radio stations, and the outcry over this “restriction of human rights and freedom of expression.” What has the military learned from all those Bloody Octobers? How is the politic of death imagery working/being kept from working here?
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