Benjamin Smith

Office

Advising Area

• General

Biography

Professor Benjamin Smith is a specialist in how processes of language learning help children to become more fully cultural beings (i.e., processes of “language socialization”). In his early work on this topic, he focused on how these processes of socialization crucially involve non-human agents and things. In a series of studies on boyhood in the Peruvian Andes, he has shown how the emergence of masculine authority in boyhood there hinges on the ability to wield authority over agents conceived of as non-human or not-fully-human: alpacas and sheep, disruptive younger brothers, and material things in the context of game play. His more recent, theoretical work brings a more fully sociopolitical lens onto these processes. Writing with co-author Dr. Elise Berman, he has shown how processes of “growth and learning” are unequally distributed across populations; being framed, ideologically, as a type of person capable of “growth” is privilege. He has published this work across 13 different articles. Along with co-author Dr. Berman, he is currently under contract with the Oxford University Press to produce a new edition of the OUP Handbook of Language Socialization. His broad writing on the sociopolitical contexts of language and culture in childhood inform a broad pedagogical program centered on socialization, language, childhood, and the way that inequality shapes processes of socialization. His interests in social science theory and qualitative methods serve, also, as a foundation for the HD core curriculum.

Another, parallel domain of specialization for Professor Smith is his writing on the history of mental illness and its treatment in the United States. This work has centered on the emergence of concepts of “real selfhood” in the humanistic therapeutic practices developed in the post-World War II era United States. Most recently, Professor Smith has – in collaboration with Dr. Boutin of the Anthropology Department – initiated an investigation of the history of developmental disability at the Sonoma Developmental Center. Professor Smith’s research and writing on these issues also increasingly informs his teaching on mental health, disability, and the culture and language of biomedicine.

Education

PhD, University of Chicago 2011

BA, Wake Forest University 1999

Concentrations

Linguistic anthropology, semiotics, language socialization, cultural approaches to human development, therapeutic and medical discourse, histories of disability and mental health, Andes, United States