Sidney Wilfred Mintz (born November 16, 1922 in
DoverDover is a Town in Morris County, New Jersey on the Rockaway River. Dover is 39 miles west of New York City and west of Newark, New Jersey...
,
New JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is bordered on the north by New York, and to the east by the Hudson River, Upper New York Bay, the Kill Van Kull, Newark Bay, the Arthur Kill, Raritan Bay, Sandy Hook Bay, Westchester County, New York City, Long Island, and...
) is an
anthropologistAnthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time....
best known for his studies of
Latin AmericaLatin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish, Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,501 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
and the
CaribbeanThe Caribbean is a region consisting of the Caribbean Sea, its islands , and the surrounding coasts...
. Mintz studied at
Brooklyn CollegeBrooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New York...
(now Brooklyn College of the City of New York) gaining his B.A in 1943. He got his doctoral degree from
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
under the supervision of
Julian StewardJulian Haynes Steward was an American anthropologist best known for his role in developing "the concept and method" of cultural ecology, as well as a scientific theory of culture change.-Biography:...
and
Ruth BenedictRuth Benedict was an American anthropologist.She was born in New York City, and attended Vassar College, graduating in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, studying under Franz Boas, receiving her PhD and joining the faculty in 1923...
. Mintz was one of a group of students who developed around Steward and Benedict. Many prominent anthropologists such as
Marvin HarrisMarvin Harris was an American anthropologist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. A prolific writer, he was highly influential in the development of cultural materialism. In his work he combined Karl Marx's emphasis on the forces of production with Malthus's insights on the impact of demographic...
,
Eric WolfEric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology.-Early Life:...
,
Morton FriedMorton Herbert Fried , was a distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City from 1950 until his death in 1986, and a prominent anthropologist of the twentieth century...
,
Stanley DiamondStanley Diamond was an American poet and anthropologist. As a young man, he identified as a poet and attended first the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then New York University, graduating from the latter with a B.A...
, and
Robert F. MurphyRobert Francis Murphy was a distinguished anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, from the early 1960s to 1990...
were among this group.
Career
Mintz had a long academic career first at
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
(1951-74), before helping to found the Anthropology Department at
Johns Hopkins UniversityThe Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Johns Hopkins also maintains full-time campuses elsewhere in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Italy, China, and Singapore...
. He has been a visiting lecturer at the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
, the
École Pratique des Hautes ÉtudesThe École pratique des hautes études is a university in Paris, France. It is part of the University of Paris.The EPHE was created on 31 July 1868, by a decree of Victor Duruy, French Minister of Public Education, and is presently, "a grand institution of higher learning" according to the French...
and the
College de FranceThe Collège de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Ecoles...
(
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
) and elsewhere. His work has been the subject of several studies (see articles in Duncan 1978; cf. Ghani 1998; Lauria-Perriceli 1989; Scott 2004). He has reflected on his own ideas and fieldwork (Mintz 1989, 2002). He was honored by the establishment of the annual Sidney W. Mintz Lecture in 1992.
Mintz is a member of
American Ethnological SocietyThe American Ethnological Society is the oldest professional anthropological association in the United States.- History of the American Ethnological Society :...
and was President of that body from 1968 to 1969, a fellow of the
American Anthropological AssociationThe American Anthropological Association is the world's largest professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology...
and the
Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandThe Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is the world's longest established anthropological organisation, with a global membership. Since 1843, it has been at the forefront of new developments in anthropology and new means of communicating them to a broad audience...
. Mintz has taught as a lecturer at City College (now City College of the City University of New York), New York City, in 1950, at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
, New York City, in 1951, and at
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
, New Haven,
ConnecticutConnecticut is a state in the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and New York to the west and south ....
between 1951 and 1974. At Yale, Mintz started as an instructor, but was Professor of Anthropology from 1963 to 1974. He has also served as Professor of Anthropology at
Johns Hopkins UniversityThe Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Johns Hopkins also maintains full-time campuses elsewhere in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Italy, China, and Singapore...
, Baltimore,
MarylandMaryland is a state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia to the south and west, Pennsylvania to the north, and Delaware to the east. It is comparable in size to the European country of Belgium. According to the U.S...
since 1974. Mintz was also a Visiting Professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
in the 1964-65 academic year, a Directeur d'Etudes at the
Ecole Pratique des Hautes EtudesThe École pratique des hautes études is a university in Paris, France. It is part of the University of Paris.The EPHE was created on 31 July 1868, by a decree of Victor Duruy, French Minister of Public Education, and is presently, "a grand institution of higher learning" according to the French...
in
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1970-1971. He was a Lewis Henry Morgan Lecturer at the
University of RochesterThe University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university located in Rochester, New York. The University grants undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and professional degrees through six schools and various interdisciplinary programs...
in 1972, a Visiting Professor at
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University a private university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and is considered one of the Colonial Colleges....
in 1975-1976, a Christian Gauss Lecturer, 1978-1979, Guggenheim Fellow in 1957, a
Social Science Research CouncilThe Social Science Research Council is a U.S.-based independent nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing research in the social sciences and related disciplines...
faculty research fellow, 1958-59. He was awarded a Masters degree from Yale University in 1963, a Fulbright senior research award in 1966-67 and in 1970-71, a William Clyde DeVane Medal from Yale University in 1972 and was a
National Endowment for the HumanitiesThe National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
fellow, 1978-79.
Additional work and awards
In addition he has served as a consultant to various institutions, such as the Overseas Development Program, has conducted field work in several countries, and been recognized with many awards, including: Social Science Research Council faculty research fellow, 1958-59; M.A., Yale University, 1963; Ford Foundation, 1957-62, and United States-Puerto Rico Commission on the Status of Puerto Rico, 1964-65; directeur d'etudes, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris), 1970-71.
Caribbean anthropology
Sidney W. Mintz is the doyen of Caribbean anthropology.
Mintz carried out his first fieldwork in the Caribbean in 1948 as part of
Julian StewardJulian Haynes Steward was an American anthropologist best known for his role in developing "the concept and method" of cultural ecology, as well as a scientific theory of culture change.-Biography:...
’s application of anthropological methods to the study of a complex society. This fieldwork was eventually published as
The People of Puerto Rico (Steward, et al. 1956). Since then, Mintz has authored several books and nearly 300 scientific articles on varied themes, including
slaverySlavery is a form of forced labor in which people are considered to be the property of others. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation...
, labor, Caribbean
peasantA peasant is an agricultural worker who subsists by working a small plot of ground. The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district A peasant is an agricultural worker who subsists...
ries, and the anthropology of food in the context of
globalizing capitalismGlobalization describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communication and exchange....
. In a field where insularity is common, and anthropologists usually chose one language area and one colonial power for study, Mintz has done fieldwork in three different Caribbean societies:
Puerto RicoPuerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is a self-governing unincorporated territory of the United States located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of the Virgin Islands...
(1948-1949, 1953, 1956),
JamaicaJamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length and as much as in width, amounting to 11,100 km
2. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harboring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
(1952, 1954), and
HaitiHaiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Creole- and French-speaking Caribbean country. Along with the Dominican Republic, it occupies the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago...
(1958-1959, 1961), as well as later working in
IranIran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country in Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanid period and came into international use from 1935, before which the country was known internationally as Persia...
(1966-1967) and
Hong KongHong Kong , officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a highly autonomous territory of the People's Republic of China, facing Guangdong to the north and the South China Sea to the east, west and south...
(1996, 1999). Mintz has always taken a historical approach and used historical materials in studying Caribbean cultures (see Ghani 1998; Scott 2004).
Peasantry
One of Mintz’s main contributions to Caribbean anthropology (see Yelvington 1996) has been his analysis of the origins and establishment of the peasantry. Mintz argued that Caribbean peasantries emerged alongside of and after industrialization, probably like nowhere else in the world (Mintz 1979, 1985c). Defining these as “reconstituted” because they began as something other than peasants, Mintz offered a tentative group typology. Such groups varied from the “squatters” who settled on the land in the early days after the Columbian conquest, through the “early yeomen,” European indentured plantation workers who finished the terms of their contracts; to the “proto-peasantry,” honing farming and marketing skills while still enslaved; and the “runaway peasantries” or maroons, who formed communities outside colonial authority, based on subsistence farming in mountainous or interior forest regions. For Mintz, these adaptations were a “mode of response” to the plantation system and a “mode of resistance” to superior power (Mintz 1974a:131-156). Acknowledging the difficulties in defining “peasantry,” Mintz pointed to the Caribbean experience, stressing internal peasant diversity in any given Caribbean society, as well as their relationships to landless wage-earning agricultural workers or “rural proletarians,” and how the experience of any individual might span or combine these categories (Mintz 1973, 1974b). Mintz was also interested in gender relations and the domestic economy, and especially in women’s roles in marketing (e.g., Mintz 1971, 1981b).
Sociocultural analysis
Anxious to illustrate complexity and diversity within the Caribbean, as well as the commonalities bridging cultural, linguistic, and political frontiers, Mintz argued in
The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area that “The very diverse origins of Caribbean populations; the complicated history of European cultural impositions; and the absence in most such societies of any firm continuity of the culture of the colonial power have resulted in a very heterogeneous cultural picture” when considering the region as a whole historically. “And yet the societies of the Caribbean — taking the word ‘society’ to refer here to forms of social structure and social organization — exhibit similarities that cannot possibly be attributed to mere coincidence” so that any “pan-Caribbean uniformities turn out to consist largely of parallels of economic and social structure and organization, the consequence of lengthy and rather rigid colonial rule,” such that many Caribbean societies “also share similar or historically related cultures” (Mintz 1966:915).
Mintz took a
dialecticDialectic is a method of argument, which has been central to both Eastern and Western philosophy since ancient times. The word "dialectic" originates in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato's Socratic dialogues...
al approach that highlighted contradictory forces. Thus, Caribbean slaves were individualized through the process of slavery and the relationship with modernity, “but not dehumanized by it.” Once free, they exhibited “quite sophisticated ideas of collective activity or cooperative unity. The push in
GuyanaBritish Guiana was the name of the British colony on the northern coast of South America, now the independent nation of Guyana.The area was originally settled by the Dutch as the colonies of Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice...
to purchase plantations collectively; the use of cooperative work groups for house building, harvesting, and planting; the growth of credit institutions; and the links between kinship and coordinated work all suggest the powerful individualism that slavery helped to create did not wholly obviate group activity” (Mintz 1992:252, 253-254).
Slavery
Mintz has compared slavery and forced labor across islands, time and colonial structures, as in
JamaicaJamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length and as much as in width, amounting to 11,100 km
2. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harboring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
and Puerto Rico (Mintz 1959b); and addressed the question of differing colonial systems engendering differing degrees of cruelty,
exploitationThe term "exploitation" may carry two distinct meanings:# The act of using something for any purpose. In this case, exploit is a synonym for use.# The act of using something in an unjust or cruel manner...
, and
racismRacism is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. In the case of institutional racism, certain racial groups may be denied rights or benefits, or get preferential treatment...
. The view of some historians and political leaders in the Caribbean and
Latin AmericaLatin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish, Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,501 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
was that the
IberiaThe Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes modern-day Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar and a very small area of France. It is the westernmost of the three major southern European peninsulas—the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan peninsulas...
n colonies, with their tradition of
CatholicismCatholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole...
and sense of aesthetics, meant a more humane slavery; while north European colonies, with their individualizing Protestant religions, found it easier to exploit the slaves and to draw hard and fast social categories. But Mintz argued that the treatment of slaves had to do instead with the integration of the colony into the world economic system, the degree of control of the metropolis over the colony, and the intensity of exploitation of labor and land (Mintz, 1974a:59-81). In collaboration with anthropologist
Richard PriceRichard Price , was a Welsh moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English Dissenters, and a political pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the...
, Mintz considered the question of “creolization” (a term used to describe the blending of two or more cultural traditions to create a new one) in
Afro-AmericanAfro-American is an alternative to the term African American, referring to an American of African ancestry. It also can be used as an umbrella term to refer to all descendants of Africans slaves to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade. The term had gained currency by 1890 but was surpassed...
culture in the book
The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Approach (Mintz and Price 1992, first published in 1976 and first delivered as a conference paper in1973). There, the authors qualify anthropologist
Melville J. HerskovitsMelville Jean Herskovits was an American anthropologist who firmly established African and African American studies in American academia. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in New York under the guidance of the German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas...
’s view that Afro-American culture was mainly African cultural survivals. But they also oppose those who claimed African culture was stripped from the slaves through enslavement, such that nothing “African” remains in Afro-American cultures today. Combining Herskovits’s cultural anthropological approach and the structuralism of anthropologist
Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss is a French-Jewish anthropologist.-Biography:Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels, grew up in Paris, living in a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he later admired and wrote about...
, Mintz and Price argued that Afro-Americana is characterized by deep-level “grammatical principles” of various African cultures, and that these principles extend to motor behaviors, kinship practices, gender relations, and religious cosmologies. This has been an influential model in the ongoing anthropology of the African diaspora (see Yelvington 2001).
Recent work
More recent work by Mintz has focused on the history and meaning of food (e.g., Mintz 1985b, 1996b; Mintz and Du Bois 2002), including ongoing work on the consumption of soy foods (Mintz and Tan 2001).
Training and influences
In his training Mintz was particularly influenced by Steward,
Ruth BenedictRuth Benedict was an American anthropologist.She was born in New York City, and attended Vassar College, graduating in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, studying under Franz Boas, receiving her PhD and joining the faculty in 1923...
(Mintz 1981a), and Alexander Lesser (Mintz 1985a), and by his classmate and co-author,
Eric WolfEric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology.-Early Life:...
(1923-1999). Combining a Marxist and historical materialist approach with U.S.
cultural anthropologyCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
, Mintz’s focus has been those large processes, starting in the fifteenth century, that marked the advent of capitalism and European expansion in the Caribbean, and the myriad institutional and political forms which buttressed that growth, on the one hand; and on the other, the local cultural responses to such processes. His ethnography centered on how these responses are manifested in the lives of Caribbean people. For Mintz, history did not erode differences to create homogeneity among regions, even while a
capitalistCapitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor...
world-system was emerging. Larger forces were always confronted by local responses that affected the cultural outcomes. Considering this relationship Mintz wrote:
"It must be stressed that the integration of varied forms of labor-extraction within any component region addresses the way that region, as a totality, fits within the so-called world-system. There was give-and-take between the demands and initiatives originating with the metropolitan centers of the world-system, and the ensemble of labor forms typical of the local zones with which they were enmeshed....The postulation of a world-system forces us frequently to lift our eyes from the particulars of local history, which I would consider salutary. But equally salutary is the constant revisiting of events “on the ground,” so that the architecture of the world-system can be laid bare." (Mintz 1977:254, 255).
This orientation found varied expressions in Mintz’s works, from his life history of “Taso” (Anastacio Zayas Alvarado), a Puerto Rican sugar worker (Mintz 1960), to debating whether the Caribbean slave could be considered a proletarian (Mintz 1978). He reasoned that, because slavery in the Caribbean was implicated in capitalism, slavery there was unlike
Old WorldThe Old World consists of those parts of Earth known to Europeans, Asians, and Africans in the 15th century.-Regions:The Old World includes Europe, Asia, and Africa , plus surrounding islands...
slavery; but also that because slave status meant unfree labor, Caribbean slavery was not a fully capitalistic labor-form for the extraction of
surplus valueSurplus value is a concept used famously by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy, although he did not himself invent the concept. It refers roughly to that part of the new value created by production which is claimed by enterprises as "generic gross profit"...
. There were other contradictions: Caribbean slaves were legally defined as property, but often owned property; though slaves produced wealth for their owners, they also reproduced their labor through “proto-peasant”
agricultureAgriculture is the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of human civilization, with the husbandry of domesticated animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more densely populated and...
and market activities, reducing long-term supply costs for the owners. The slave was a capital good, hence not commoditized labor; but some skilled slaves hired out to others produced income for their masters and could keep a share for themselves. In his book
Caribbean Transformations (Mintz 1974a) and elsewhere, Mintz claimed that modernity originated in the Caribbean—Europe’s first factories were embodied in a
plantationA plantation is a large farm or estate, usually in a tropical or subtropical country, where crops are grown for sale in distant markets, rather than for local consumption. The term plantation is informal and not precisely defined....
complex devoted to the cultivation of sugar cane and a few other agricultural commodities. The advent of this system certainly had profound effects on Caribbean “plantation society” (Mintz 1959a), but the commercialization of sugar’s products had lasting effects in
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus Mountains , and the Black Sea to the southeast...
as well, from providing the wherewithal for the industrial revolution to transforming whole foodways and creating a revolution in European tastes and consumer behavior (Mintz 1985b, 1996a). Mintz repeatedly insisted on the Caribbean region’s particularities (Mintz 1996b, 1998) to contest pop notions of “globalization” and “diaspora,” that would make of the region a mere metaphor without acknowledging its historical distinctiveness.
External links