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 childâs 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 parentsâto Korea and to the Korean languageâallowing 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 experienceâan intimate engagement with the emotional reality of migration and the inheritance of mass displacement and deathâinviting us to explore categories such as âcatastrophe,â âwar,â âviolence,â and âkinshipâ in a brand-new light.
Les mer
Foreword by Richard Rechtman | ix
Introduction | 1
Part I: Loss and Awakenings | 35
Interlude 1: Affliction and War in the Domestic | 61
Part II: A Future in Kinship, a Future in Language | 65
Interlude 2: Homeward Bound | 87
Part III: The Kids | 93
Interlude 3: Siblings and the Scene of Inheritance | 119
Part IV: Mother Tongue | 125
Epilogue: Seeing Like a Child | 153
Acknowledgments | 157
Notes | 161
Works Cited | 167
Les mer
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 familyâs memorable characters. A must-read.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780823289462
Publisert
2020-12-01
Utgiver
Vendor
Fordham University Press
Høyde
203 mm
Bredde
127 mm
AldersnivĂĽ
01, G, 01
SprĂĽk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Forfatter
Foreword by