Ep. 23 Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War

This episode features a conversation with Clara Han and Andrew Brandel. They discuss Dr Han's recent book, Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2020), which explores the violence of the Korean War through the perspective of a child. In this book, Clara Han writes from inside her childhood memories as the daughter of parents who were displaced by war, and simultaneously, as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents— Korea and the Korean language. Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life and invites us to explore categories such as “catastrophe”, “war”, “violence”, and “kinship” in a brand-new light.

Clara Han is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2020), Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile (UC Press, 2012), and co-editor of Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (UC Press, 2015).

Andrew Brandel is an anthropologist at Harvard University, where he is a faculty member of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies. His forthcoming book, A World Of Ciphers: Literature and Migration in “Global” Berlin (under contract with University of Toronto Press) is an ethnographic study of the claims made on, in, and for literature as it carries people through Berlin on irregular and intersecting paths. He is the co-editor of Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (Fordham University Press, 2021)