Arthur Michael Kleinman (born March 11, 1941) is an American psychiatrist, social anthropologist and a professor of medical anthropology, psychiatry and global health and social medicine at Harvard University.
Kleinman's medical anthropology research has largely focused on China. He began his work in Taiwan in 1968, and then expanded to mainland China in 1978.
At Harvard, Kleinman has taught at all levels for decades. These efforts include teaching, supervision and mentorship of undergraduate students, anthropology graduate students, medical students, and post-doctoral fellows.
Education
Arthur Kleinman received his A.B. and M.D. from Stanford University and M.A. in Social Anthropology from Harvard. He did an internship in internal medicine at the Yale School of Medicine and his psychiatric residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Career
Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard and professor of medical anthropology and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Kleinman has held a variety of administrative positions, including chair of Harvard's Department of Anthropology, chair of Harvard Medical School's Department of Social Medicine, and director of Harvard's Asia Center (2008–2016).
In 2011, Kleinman was named a Harvard College Professor and given the Distinguished Faculty Award.
In 1976, he founded the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, The journal was continued by Byron and Mary-Jo Good and Peter J. Guarnaccia. Most recently, he was elected Honorary Academician, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
Personal life
Kleinman was born and raised in New York. He was married to the late Joan Kleinman (who died in 2011), a sinologist and his research collaborator, for 45 years. They have two children (Peter and Anne) and four grandchildren (Gabriel, Kendall, Allegra and Clayton).
Selected list of published works
- Patients and healers in the context of culture : an exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry / Arthur Kleinman. -- University of California Press, 1980.
- Culture and depression : studies in the anthropology and cross-cultura l psychiatry of affect and disorder / edited by Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good. -- University of California Press, 1985. --
- Social origins of distress and disease : depression, neurasthenia, and pain in modern China / Kleinman—Yale University Press, 1986
- The illness narratives: suffering, healing, and the human condition / Kleinman—Basic Books, 1988
- Rethinking psychiatry : from cultural category to personal experience / Kleinman; Free Press, 1991
- Social suffering / edited by Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock—University of California Press, 1997 & Oxford University Press, 1997
- Writing at the margin : discourse between anthropology and medicine / Kleinman. -- University of California Press, 1995
- What really matters: living a moral life amidst uncertainty and danger / Kleinman—Oxford University Press, 2006. Translated into Chinese: Shanghai Joint Publishing Company, Shanghai, P.R. China, 2007; translated in Chinese: PsyGarden Publishing Company, Taiwan, 2007
- The soul of care: the moral education of a husband and a doctor / Kleinman— Penguin, description and arrow-searchable preview, 2019
Further reading
- (See also chapter 8 in Thinking through cultures, which is substantially the same text with minor amendments).
- The Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge. Joao Biehl and Vincanne Adams, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2023 (In Press). A Festschrift to honor Arthur Kleinman, including an introduction by the late Paul Farmer.
- Kleinman, A. "An Intellectual Journey and Personal Odyssey." Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Spring 2015 LXVIII, No. 3, 58–59.