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.
