The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand

Review
Klima's 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. – Review

This book is an important contribution to the ongoing critique and dialogue in anthropology. – Christophe Robert, Anthropological Quarterly
Review
In bringing together an ancient Buddhist practice of meditation of the corpse with globalised technologies of massacre in Thailand, Alan Klima has written an amazing book that makes you rethink your body and the body politic. There are few interventions into Western theory that have been as productive as this breathtaking endeavor. Bataille and Benjamin will never seem the same. A stirring endorsement of anthropology as a radical discipline, this book also appeals on account of its uniquely down to earth populist style that at manic speed propels you into the crowds on the streets, the charnel house and temples, and intimate portraits of real people no less than of the sleaze of the World Bank and elites that have, as yet, to experience what Klima has experienced in meditating over the corpse. (Michael Taussig )