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Ghosts of the New City - Spirits, Urbanity, and the Runs of Progress in Chiang Mai (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,523
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Ghosts of the New City - Spirits, Urbanity, and the Runs of Progress in Chiang Mai (Hardcover)
Series: Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Chiang Mai (literally, "new city") suffered badly in the 1997 Asian
financial crisis as the Northern Thai real estate bubble collapsed
along with the Thai baht, crushing dreams of a renaissance of
Northern prosperity. Years later, the ruins of the excesses of the
1990s still stain the skyline. In Ghosts of the New City, Andrew
Alan Johnson shows how the trauma of the crash, brought back
vividly by the political crisis of 2006, haunts efforts to remake
the city. For many Chiang Mai residents, new developments harbour
the seeds of the crash, which manifest themselves in anxious
stories of ghosts and criminals who conceal themselves behind the
city's progressive veneer. Hopes for rebirth and fears of decline
have their roots in Thai conceptions of progress, which draw from
Buddhist and animist ideas of power and sacrality. Cities, Johnson
argues, were centres where the charismatic power of kings and
animist spirits were grounded; these entities assured progress by
imbuing the space with sacred power that would avert disaster.
Johnson traces such magico-religious conceptions of potency and
space from historical records through present-day popular religious
practice and draws parallels between these and secular attempts at
urban revitalization. Through a detailed ethnography of the
contested ways in which academics, urban activists, spirit mediums,
and architects seek to revitalize the flagging economy and
infrastructure of Chiang Mai, Johnson finds that alongside the hope
for progress there exists a discourse about urban ghosts, deadly
construction sites, and the lurking anxiety of another possible
crash, a discourse that calls into question history's upward
trajectory. In this way, Ghosts of the New City draws new
connections between urban history and popular religion that have
implications far beyond Southeast Asia.
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