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Bridging the fields of medical anthropology, political economy, and phenomenology, my research is mainly concerned with ethnographic and public health dimensions of international agricultural restructuring. I am interested in how agriculture fits into a larger picture of neoliberalism and biopolitics in a globalized world, as well as how the shifting management of markets, labor, and health impacts farm workplace conditions and influences the social, moral, and emotional lives of differently positioned farmers and farmworkers. I have conducted field research in highland Guatemala and in urban and rural settings in the United States .
I am currently completing a book manuscript on the tobacco industry, seen from the perspective of rural North Carolina , where I have conducted field research with tobacco farmers and farmworkers - including Mexican and Central American migrants - for the past four years. The book explores the racialized constitution of citizenship and moral values on tobacco farms amidst rapid changes in the international tobacco industry, transnational farm labor migration, the federal government's changing relationship to tobacco production and consumption, and the public health crisis related to smoking. My work expands tobacco's public health picture beyond a narrow focus on smoking to include important social, health, and workplace safety issues related to agricultural production.
In addition, I recently completed a research project on neoliberalism, political decentralization, and export agriculture in highland Guatemala , which culminated in a coauthored book, Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala. Tracking the commodity chain of the global broccoli trade, this book connects affluent American consumers concerned about their health and diet with Maya farmers desiring and struggling for something better. Broccoli is a starting point for a broader analysis of the social production of power and desire at multiple levels - in shifting frameworks of international trade, in discourses about health and nutrition, and in the vastly uneven worlds that consumers and producers inhabit.
I am currently co-organizing an Advanced Seminar entitled "Markets and Moralities," to take place in the spring 2009 at the School of Advanced Research on Human Experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Featuring an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this seminar explores issues related to the influence of moral, cultural, and religious values on economic behavior, institutions, and systems, especially the values that underpin neoclassical economics and inform neoliberal policies.
For more information see the overview of the department's research in sociocultural anthropology.
Introduction to Public Health; Anthropology and Existentialism; Drugs, Culture, and Society; Tobacco: History, Anthropology, and Politics of a Global Epidemic
Benson, Peter
(2008) El Campo: Faciality and Structural Violence in Farm Labor Camps. Cultural Anthropology 23(4):589-629.
Benson, Peter
(2008) Good Clean Tobacco: Philip Morris, Biocapitalism, and the Social Course of Stigma in North Carolina. American Ethnologist 35(3):357-379.
Benson,Peter, Edward F. Fischer, and Kedron Thomas
(2008) Resocializing Suffering: Neoliberalism, Accusation, and the Sociopolitical Context of Guatemala's New Violence. Latin American Perspectives 35(5):38-58.
Benson, Peter, and Edward F. Fischer
(2007) Broccoli and Desire. Antipode 39(5): 800-820. [pdf]
Benson, Peter, and Kevin O'Neill
(2007) Facing Risk: Levinas, Ethnography, and Ethics. Anthropology of Consciousness. 18(2): 29-55. [pdf]
Fischer, Edward F., and Peter Benson
(2006) Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kleinman, Arthur, and Peter Benson
(2006) Anthropology in the Clinic: The Cultural Competency Problem and How to Fix It. PLoS Medicine 3(10): e294. [pdf]
Benson, Peter
(2005) Rooting Culture: Nostalgia, Urban Revitalization, and the Ambivalence of Community at the Ballpark. City and Society 17(1): 93-125. [pdf]
Fischer, Edward F., and Peter Benson
(2005) Something Better: Hegemony, Resistance and Desire in Guatemalan Export Agriculture. Social Analysis 49(1): 3-20. [pdf]
Benson, Peter
(2004) Nothing to See Hear. Anthropological Quarterly 77(3): 435-467. [pdf]
Kleinman, Arthur, and Peter Benson
(2004) La Vida Moral de los que Sufren Enfermedad y el Fracaso Existencial de La Medicina. Monografías Humanitas 2: 17-26.
