Alan Klima

Alan Klima serves as a Professor at the University of California, Davis, maintaining an office in Young Hall 220 with Winter 2024 office hours held on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5pm until all students are attended to, plus appointments. His academic profile demonstrates deep engagement with anthropological theory and ethnographic practice.

His educational foundation in anthropology spans three decades:

• Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University (1996)
• M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (1988)
• B.A. in Anthropology from Rutgers University (1987)

Professor Klima's research centers on global moralities as manifested through local financial practices, particularly Thailand's post-1997 currency crash landscape. He investigates debt systems, spirit-mediumship, and irregular financial instruments like gambling within Thai communities, examining how ghosts and numbers intertwine in moral economies. His "Meditation Machine" concept analyzes biofeedback mechanisms reformulating meditation within biomedicine and education. Earlier work addressed pro-democracy activism, military violence, and Buddhist death representations in media and ritual.

His publications from 2001-2019 reveal consistent thematic threads: Thai financial anthropology intersects with Buddhist cosmology and spirit worlds, while global finance collides with local moral frameworks. Methodologically innovative, he blends documentary film with ethnographic writing to explore haunting phenomena, debt morality, and the cultural construction of economic reality across diverse media formats.

No scientific awards or honors are documented in the source material.

While maintaining active teaching responsibilities with structured office hours, the available information does not specify graduate advisees or research grant funding details.

Research infrastructure elements including laboratories, field teams, or collaborative networks are not referenced in the provided documentation.