Arthur Michael Kleinman (born March 11, 1941) is an Americanpsychiatrist,social anthropologist and a professor ofmedical anthropology,psychiatry andglobal health andsocial medicine atHarvard 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.

Arthur Kleinman received his A.B. and M.D. fromStanford University and M.A. inSocial Anthropology from Harvard. He did an internship in internal medicine at theYale School of Medicine and his psychiatric residency at theMassachusetts General Hospital.

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.^[1]

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).^[2]

In 2011, Kleinman was named a Harvard College Professor and given the Distinguished Faculty Award.

In 1976, he founded the journalCulture, Medicine and Psychiatry,^[3] and was its Editor-in-Chief until 1986.^[4] The journal was continued by Byron and Mary-Jo Good and Peter J. Guarnaccia.^[5]

Kleinman directed the World Mental Health Report, released at the UN in 1995, and also directed the World Bank Out of the Shadows Report in 2016. He co-chaired theAmerican Psychiatric Association's Taskforce on Culture andDSM-IV, co-chaired the 2002Institute of Medicine report on Preventing Suicide, and also co-chaired in 2001 and 2002 both theNIH conference on the Science and Ethics of the Placebo and the NIH conference on Stigma. In September 2003, he gave the Distinguished Lecture sponsored by theFogarty International Center at NIH on the Global Epidemic of Depression and Suicide. He was on the Counsel of the Fogarty International Center, NIH, and on the NIH Council of Councils. He was a consultant to theWHO where he chaired the technical advisory committee of the Nations for Mental Health Action Program, and in December 2002, gave the keynote address to the WHO's first international conference on global mental health research.

Kleinman has authored seven books and over 350 articles, book chapters, reviews and introductions. Perhaps Kleinman's most influential work isPatients and Healers in the Context of Culture (1980), followed byThe Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (1988) andSocial Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China (1986). His book,What Really Matters (Oxford University Press, 2006), addresses existential dangers and uncertainties that make moral experience, religion, and ethics so crucial to individuals and society today. This book has been translated and published in Chinese editions both inShanghai andTaipei. His most recent bookThe Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor was published by Penguin in 2019.

Kleinman is the co-author of four books includingA Passion for Society: How We Think About Human Suffering (2016) with Iain Wilkinson andDeep China: The Moral Life of the Person. What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell us about China Today (2011) with six of his former students. Kleinman has co-authored many works with other psychiatrists, anthropologists and researchers in the field of global health including the latePaul Farmer (his former student),Veena Das,Margaret Lock,Michael Phillips,Byron Good, Mary Del-Vecchio Good,Tsung-yi Lin andLeon Eisenberg (his former teacher).

Kleinman is co-editor of 29 volumes, including:Social Suffering; Culture and Depression; SARS in China;Global Pharmaceuticals;Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations;Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction;The Culture of Illness and Psychiatric Practice in Africa; andThe Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy. He has also co-edited 11 special issues of journals and published essays inThe Lancet,New England Journal of Medicine,The Harvard Magazine, among other media.

Kleinman is a member of theNational Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) of the National Academies and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has delivered numerous lectures on a variety of topics at universities around the world. He has been a fellow of theGuggenheim Foundation and theCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford). He is Distinguished Lifetime Fellow of theAmerican Psychiatric Association and the American Anthropological Association.

Kleinman has twice given the Distinguished Lecture at NIH and was a member of its Council of Councils (the advisory board to the director) from 2007 to 2011. He was also appointed by the Secretary of theDepartment of Health and Human Services of the U.S. Government to the Advisory Council of theFogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health. In 2003, Kleinman chaired the Selection Committee for the NIH's new Pioneer Awards.

In 2006, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from theSociety for Medical Anthropology, and in 2008, he received from the Society for Medical Anthropology the George Foster Award. In 2004, he was awarded theDoubleday Medal in Medical Humanities byUniversity of Manchester,England. In 2007, he received an award in the medical humanities atImperial College,London He is a winner of the Wellcome Prize of theRoyal Anthropological Institute; a recipient of an honoraryDoctorate of Science fromYork University (Canada); and the 2001, was winner of theFranz Boas Award of theAmerican Anthropological Association, its highest award. He was awarded an honorary professorship atFudan University. Shortly thereafter, he wasCleveringa Professor at theUniversity of Leiden in theNetherlands.^[6] Most recently, he was elected Honorary Academician, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

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).

• 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 Univ ersity 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, 1991ISBN 0-02-917441-4
• 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 andarrow-searchable preview, 2019

• Richard A. Shweder (1988), "Review of Kleinman's (1986) bookSocial Origins of Distress and Disease",Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry,12:479–497,doi:10.1007/BF00054499,S2CID 143493154 (See also chapter 8 inThinking through cultures, which is substantially the same text with minor amendments).
• Shweder, Richard A (1991), "Suffering in Style: On Arthur Kleinman",Thinking through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 313–331,ISBN 0-674-88416-7
• Peter J. Guarnaccia (2003), "Editorial",Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry,27 (3):249–257,doi:10.1023/A:1025390614115,ISSN 1573-076X,PMID 14672095
• 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.

• Mitsuho Ikeda (2002)."Bibliography of Arthur Kleinman, 1941-". Archived fromthe original on 2006-01-17. Retrieved2006-04-13.
• "Department of Social Medicine People". Harvard Medical School. Archived fromthe original on 17 January 2007. Retrieved2006-12-16.