Position Title
Professor of Anthropology
Currently Alan Klima’s research concerns the formation of “global moralities” and their political effects as they are furthered in and through local and national communities. In particular, he is concerned with the local application of global moralities of finance, including ideas and practices of debt, reason, and haunting in Thailand since the currency crash of 1997. His film Ghosts and Numbers and current ethnographic writing project, titled The Nextworld, concern local money-lending, gambling, and other irregular financial instruments among small-time local organizations in Thailand, including spirit-mediumship and other religious phenomena connected with money. He is also exploring what he calls "The Meditation Machine," a social biofeedback mechanism in which meditation practice is being reformulated in cultures of biomedicine and education.