Arthur Michael Kleinman

Arthur M. Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, and Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He taught Harvard’s first course in medical anthropology, and, in 1982, he inaugurated Harvard’s PhD program in medical anthropology. He chaired the Department of Social Medicine at HMS for a decade.

Kleinman is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. The 2001 winner of the Franz Boas Award of the American Anthropological Association (its highest award), he is a distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He has studied caregiving in the United States and China, stigma and mental health, the appropriate uses of culture in clinical practice, and moral conflicts in medicine and everyday life. 

He received the A.B. degree (1962) with highest honors from Stanford University, the M.D. (1967) from Stanford University Medical School, and the A.M. (1974) in social anthropology from Harvard University. He did an internship in internal medicine at Yale and his psychiatric residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital.