In the Place of Origins

by Morris, Rosalind C.; Appadurai, Arjun; Comaroff, John L.; Farquhar, Judith

• ISBN13: 9780822325178
• ISBN10: 0822325179
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-03-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

"With this astutely conceived and exquisitely written account of the complexities of mediumship in Thai modernity, Rosalind Morris has taken ethnographic practice to a whole new level of theoretical as well as descriptive sophistication. It is a dazzling accomplishment."--Rey Chow, University of California, Irvine "Travelling from spirit mediumship to the ethnography of the finance capitalmarket, "In the Place of Origins" combines theoretical bravura with brilliant narrative skill. As it comments on ethnographic self-fashioning in Thailand, it also examines the mediumship of disciplinary ethnography, and the alterity it so anxiously seeks to expell. This is a text of dazzling instructive simplicity."--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Note on Transcription	x
Introduction	1	(12)
Writing, Exchange, Translation: A Poetics of the Modern	13	(42)
Ruin, or, What the New City Remembers	55	(25)
First, Forgetting	80	(27)
The Appearance of Order	107	(43)
The Secret of the Dish	150	(31)
Transmissions, or, the Appearance of Culture	181	(59)
Representations: Locality and the Spirit of Democracy	240	(47)
Outside, Eyeless, and on Fire: The Apotheosis of Representation	287	(45)
After All Else: The End of Mediumship?	332	(19)
Bibliography	351	(20)
Index	371