Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War

Seeing Like a Child is an extraordinary book, bursting with critical insight and affective power. Han vividly explores how war and migration are dispersed into a domestic life marked by small corrosions, devastating loss, and tiny solidarities. Courageously probing the plasticity of self and lifeworld, the anthropologist illuminates the fragile but deeply meaningful yearnings of her family's memorable characters. A must read.-João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social AbandonmentWith this deeply moving intimate history, Clara Han reclaims an important legacy of modern anthropology, its capacity to connect the personal with the world-historical. Seeing Like a Child is an audacious attempt to restore kinship as a vital category in historical and political inquiry and a must read for anyone interested in discovering how much of the world is involved in bringing up a child.-Heonik Kwon, author of After the Korean War: An Intimate HistoryIn this deeply moving narrative, 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 whose migrations-from the North to the South of Korea and then to the United States-frayed familial ties. At the same time, she 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 to find and found kinship relationships broken in war and illness. A fascinating counterpoint to the project of testimony that seeks to transmit a narrative 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.Clara Han is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.