Fast-paced and marked by frequent forays into radical and deconstructionist theory, The Funeral Casino is less a book about Thailand than about how to make sense of violence, death, and the possibilities of sociality in the “neoliberal” global era. Klima knits together three disparate ethnographic scenes that seem to have little in common other than the overarching theme of death: the May 1992 massacre of prodemocracy protesters on the streets of Bangkok, a Buddhist meditation practice focused on corpses, and the economy of gambling and exchange at the upcountry funeral for his Thai father-in-law. Although at times it is easy to lose track of what connects each of these threads of Klima’s story, his analysis of funeral exchanges and Buddhist meditation on images of death ultimately circles back to and sheds light on the photographic representations and ritual commemorations of those killed in Bangkok during “Black May.” Klima’s aim is not only to make sense of Black May and the mass-mediated images of violence and death marketed and circulated in the aftermath of the killings; he also attempts to theorize and thereby come to terms with his own encounters with the dead. Taking his cue from Benjamin, he constructs a “philosophical ethnography” in which philosophy (or what we might call “ethical theory”) is built out of ethnography rather than being caged in a totalizing frame (p. 8). It is in this sense that Klima claims to have inverted the conventional relationship between ethnography and theory.

In Klima’s study, although Buddhist meditation practices and funerary economies are sources of “theory,” these perspectives do not significantly displace the Western critical theory with which they are juxtaposed. Instead, these Thai ways of contemplating relationships between the living and the dead are illuminating precisely at the points when they run parallel to the insights of theorists such as Derrida, Mauss, Benjamin, or Kristeva. This strategy allows Klima to bring a wide range of ideas and perspectives into productive dialogue. Thus, his discussion of exchange and the spirit of the gift is informed by, but goes well beyond, his experience collecting funerary contributions and making merit for a particular dead man in northern Thailand. Klima extrapolates his analysis of moral economies and the logic of a return to the shifting international exchanges of military aid and investment capital. Similarly, he examines the proliferation of mass-mediated images of dead bodies in relation to the technologies of photography and satellite transmissions, but he is wary of deterministic accounts that look at media structures outside of specific historical and material relations. Klima also considers the visual aspect of images of death through a discussion of sensory experience and the abject, showing how Buddhist meditation practices might help deconstruct an overly essentialized (and humanistic) understanding of the senses. Readers with interests in any of these areas of theoretical concern will find Klima’s book provocative and full of creative interventions.

Klima’s ethnographic contributions are also significant, although Thai specialists and Southeast Asianists might be disappointed that there is not more ethnographic detail and context to flesh out his keen observations. Likewise, those unfamiliar with Thailand may gain a highly selective perspective on Thai society and politics. The most substantial ethnographic material deals with the events leading up to and evolving out of the 1992 massacre of prodemocracy protestors by the military. Klima’s riveting first-hand account of scenes from the streets of Bangkok is coupled with an analysis of the historical precedents and the place of memories of military killings in 1973 and 1976. The echoes of the past reverberate in his narrative of the deadly confrontation with the military. We can see him sitting through the long, hot nights of speeches and songs; in these pages the building tension and fear is palpable. After fleeing from bullets and escaping to safety, Klima returns to the scene of violence and picks up with the story, now one of images of death and their political power. His descriptions of spattered brains, bullet-riddled pieces of flesh, and blood-soaked sidewalks evoke the feelings of shock and fascination that street vendors of photographs and videos readily tapped into as they hawked their wares. And at each turn, Klima situates his account within global flows of mass media, capitalist investment, and military aid. He shatters the harmonious, docile image of Thai society projected by anthropologists and tourist brochures alike. Behind the clean, smiling faces of the Miss Universe contest and the World Bank meetings, both hosted in Bangkok in the months leading up to the massacre, Klima shows us the brutal side of the “New World Order” and the bourgeois-dominated modernity in which Thailand is compelled to take part.

Klima’s challenge to the Western and Thai middle-class narrative of progress and democratization is one of his most valuable contributions. His critique of the neoliberal “New World Order,” a new order that forgets where it came from and the sacrifice of lives that made it possible, rests on a rereading of Mauss using the concept of kamma (karma) and Buddhist gift giving. Here the sources and nuances of Mauss’s ideas are unraveled and read against Bataille and Derrida. By examining Buddhist meritmaking as a type of exchange, and showing how gambling at funerals is itself a form of making merit, Klima explores the linkages between the spirit of the gift and the wagering of high-capitalist finance. Explicating the intersections between material and spiritual exchanges, between the living and the dead, is Klima’s way of giving back and insisting that those who died on the streets of Bangkok in May 1992 did not die in vain.