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Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War
Winner, 2022 Senior Book Prize, Association for Feminist Anthropology
Finalist, 2022 Victor Turner Prize
An utterly original and illuminating work that meets at the crossroads of autobiography and ethnography to re-examine violence and memory through the eyes of a child.
Seeing Like a Child is a deeply moving narrative that showcases an unexpected voice from an established researcher. Through an unwavering commitment to a child’s perspective, Clara Han explores how the catastrophic event of the Korean War is dispersed into domestic life. Han writes from inside her childhood memories as the daughter of parents who were displaced by war, who fled from the North to the South of Korea, and whose displacement in Korea and subsequent migration to the United States implicated the fraying and suppression of kinship relations and the Korean language. At the same time, Han writes as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents―to Korea and to the Korean language―allowing her, as she explains, to find and found kinship relationships that had been suppressed or broken in war and illness. A fascinating counterpoint to the project of testimony that seeks to transmit a narrative of the event to future generations, Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life.
Seeing Like a Child offers readers a unique experience―an intimate engagement with the emotional reality of migration and the inheritance of mass displacement and death―inviting us to explore categories such as “catastrophe,” “war,” “violence,” and “kinship” in a brand-new light.
Finalist, 2022 Victor Turner Prize
An utterly original and illuminating work that meets at the crossroads of autobiography and ethnography to re-examine violence and memory through the eyes of a child.
Seeing Like a Child is a deeply moving narrative that showcases an unexpected voice from an established researcher. Through an unwavering commitment to a child’s perspective, Clara Han explores how the catastrophic event of the Korean War is dispersed into domestic life. Han writes from inside her childhood memories as the daughter of parents who were displaced by war, who fled from the North to the South of Korea, and whose displacement in Korea and subsequent migration to the United States implicated the fraying and suppression of kinship relations and the Korean language. At the same time, Han writes as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents―to Korea and to the Korean language―allowing her, as she explains, to find and found kinship relationships that had been suppressed or broken in war and illness. A fascinating counterpoint to the project of testimony that seeks to transmit a narrative of the event to future generations, Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life.
Seeing Like a Child offers readers a unique experience―an intimate engagement with the emotional reality of migration and the inheritance of mass displacement and death―inviting us to explore categories such as “catastrophe,” “war,” “violence,” and “kinship” in a brand-new light.
- GenresAnthropology
208 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 2020
About the author
Clara Han
5 books7 followersClara Han is Professor in the Department of Anthropology. She received a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and an MD from Harvard Medical School in 2007. She received a BA in Molecular Biology and International Affairs from Princeton University in 1997.
Professor Han's investigates the intersections of neighborhood, medical and legal institutions, and intimate life in contexts marked by both the slow, corrosive violence of economic precarity and the catastrophic violence of torture, extrajudicial killing and war. Two thematic clusters that cross-cut anthropology undergird this research: first, the experience of illness in contexts marked by economic deprivation; and second, the articulation of violence, affliction, and kinship. For over twenty years, Professor Han has conducted research in low-income neighborhoods in Santiago, Chile. More recently, she has conducted research in Korea, focusing particularly on the Korean War and the partitioning of the two Koreas.
Professor Han is the author of Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile (UC Press, 2012; traducción en español, LOM Ediciones, 2022) and Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021), awarded the 2022 Association for Feminist Anthropology Senior Book Prize and a finalist for the 2022 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. Based on over a decade of research in a low-income neighborhood in Chile, Life in Debt explores the slow shifts in subjectivity and small fluctuations of care and neglect in intimate relations as they are interpenetrated by economic precarity, and state programs on poverty, mental health, and human rights. Writing from inside childhood memories, Seeing Like a Child reverses the social science method of emplotting experience within existing historical narratives to instead see as a child, recasting a picture of inheritance from one based on the transmission of memory to the child's learning to inhabit a world marked by violence. For discussions of these books in forums, please see the book symposium on Life in Debt and the book forum on Seeing Like a Child. Professor Han is also the co-editor with Veena Das of the 45-chapter volume, Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (UC Press, 2015).
Professor Han's investigates the intersections of neighborhood, medical and legal institutions, and intimate life in contexts marked by both the slow, corrosive violence of economic precarity and the catastrophic violence of torture, extrajudicial killing and war. Two thematic clusters that cross-cut anthropology undergird this research: first, the experience of illness in contexts marked by economic deprivation; and second, the articulation of violence, affliction, and kinship. For over twenty years, Professor Han has conducted research in low-income neighborhoods in Santiago, Chile. More recently, she has conducted research in Korea, focusing particularly on the Korean War and the partitioning of the two Koreas.
Professor Han is the author of Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile (UC Press, 2012; traducción en español, LOM Ediciones, 2022) and Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021), awarded the 2022 Association for Feminist Anthropology Senior Book Prize and a finalist for the 2022 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. Based on over a decade of research in a low-income neighborhood in Chile, Life in Debt explores the slow shifts in subjectivity and small fluctuations of care and neglect in intimate relations as they are interpenetrated by economic precarity, and state programs on poverty, mental health, and human rights. Writing from inside childhood memories, Seeing Like a Child reverses the social science method of emplotting experience within existing historical narratives to instead see as a child, recasting a picture of inheritance from one based on the transmission of memory to the child's learning to inhabit a world marked by violence. For discussions of these books in forums, please see the book symposium on Life in Debt and the book forum on Seeing Like a Child. Professor Han is also the co-editor with Veena Das of the 45-chapter volume, Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (UC Press, 2015).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 9, 2024
As a third-gen Korean immigrant, I did not find myself relating to the affect experienced by Han in her exploration of her childhood, but I still cried probably about four times while reading this. Truly incredible insight, always preceded by rich prose and story-telling. This is wonderful intellectual work. Passionate, curious, well-intentioned, and painstakingly critical of the theories we as adults (those who engage with theoretical constructs to define our experiences) use that might overwrite the meaning of one’s formative experiences that, surely, eludes capture by a formalistic “reflection.” Reflection is mere philosophical abstraction if it remains outside of affect. I felt this book. I felt Han. One of the most striking insights is her reflection on the “lethality of care.” Making sense of the double binds that followed her throughout her entire life reflects a mind involved in manners far beyond a project of self-actualization. She makes sense of her life for all of us. A great gift to us all.
April 3, 2023
I read this book for an anthropology class in college, and it was one of the most striking readings we've had all semester. At first I was intimidated that we had to read an entire book in a short amount of time, but now I'm glad that the professor asked us to read the whole thing rather than an excerpt.
Most of the book consists of beautifully written, detailed memories. Then, the interludes reference the wider field of scholarship and analyze the memories academically. I was very interested in these balances, between personal and scholarly writing, first person and third person, and present and past tense.
Most of the book consists of beautifully written, detailed memories. Then, the interludes reference the wider field of scholarship and analyze the memories academically. I was very interested in these balances, between personal and scholarly writing, first person and third person, and present and past tense.
March 9, 2025
A complex yet interesting auto- ethnography
June 5, 2026
Memory, Affliction, Care, Language, Growing up, Domestic space, Catastrophe, separateness, Kin, Life and Death, Language and Mother tongue, Everyday, Aging, illness, Selfhood
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews