"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