Suffering, through an Asian lens
Suffering is “one of those things that defines the human condition,” Arthur Kleinman told a gathering at the Harvard Faculty Club. More than a year ago, Kleinman, the Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center, and David McCann, director of the Korea Institute and the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature, discussed organizing an Asia-focused symposium in response to Harvard President Drew Faust’s 2008 Civil War book “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.” Kleinman and McCann’s conversation culminated in a Harvard panel on Friday (Nov. 5) with a collection of scholars who discussed the history, politics, poetries, prose, and anthropologies of suffering in Asian societies. In exploring examples of the literature of suffering, Karen Thornber said Chinese works on the Nanking Massacre, Korean writings about the Korean War, and Japanese prose and poetry dealing with the atomic bomb “graphically depicted the anguish of both soldiers...