Caribbean free villages: Toward an anthropology of blackness, place, and freedom

Abstract

In the 1950s, Sidney Mintz carried out a short study of Caribbean settlements known as free villages. These communities were designed by Baptists as postemancipation social and economic living spaces for formerly enslaved Afro‐descendant peoples. Mintz was ultimately interested in establishing a village typology, describing how the church shaped villagers’ social and moral lives and gauging the communities’ capacity as a site of Afro‐Caribbean peasant resistance to plantations. This work influenced later studies of creolization, land, and the peasantry in free villages, as well as inquiries into the contemporary political‐economic and historical context of Afro‐Caribbean villages generally. Mintz's analysis can also be helpful for thinking through questions about social processes of rural place‐making and investments in freedom among people of African descent. [peasantries, land, place, community, freedom, Sidney Mintz, Caribbean]

Trends, Trendsetting, and Shifting Trends in Caribbean Anthropology

“…I come to this question, personally, as a self-avowed Caribbeanist who, for the past fifteen years, has studied race, place, and history among African Americans and Native Americans in Oklahoma. I have written about how I can connect my work in Oklahoma to my roots studying independent farm communities within a plantation region of St. Lucia (Slocum 2017). I claim my Caribbeanist identity to be in continuous conversation with my studies in the U.S.…”

Sidney W Mintz: Charting an anthropology of the Caribbean

“…His fieldwork in Jamaica in 1952 and 1954 was in the ‘Free Villages’ set up by Baptist missionaries in the 1830s and 1840s for the newly emancipated slaves that affected the development of the peasantry (Mintz, 1958; cf. Slocum, 2017). Fieldwork in Haiti in 1958–1959 and 1961 among market women (see Figure 2) produced pioneering economic anthropological studies of capital formation, money, savings, credit, trade, units of measure, distribution, and moral economies (e.g., Mintz, 1960b, 1961, 1964a, 1964b; cf.…”

Forum introduction

“…His Caribbean fieldwork in Puerto Rico (1948–49, 1953, 1956), Jamaica (1952, 1954), and Haiti (1958–59, 1961) yielded sensitive life histories (Mintz ), studies of Haitian market women (Mintz ), and studies of village Jamaica (Mintz ; cf. Slocum ). In 1966–67 he conducted fieldwork in Iran with his wife, Jacqueline Wei Mintz, and then in Hong Kong in 1996 and 1999.…”

“…Caribbeanist anthropologist and ethnographer of neoliberalism Karla Slocum () discusses Mintz's () historical and ethnographic study of Jamaica's system of “free villages,” which was established by Baptist missionaries in the 1830s and 1840s to help the now ex‐slaves transition to postslavery “freedom.” Slocum uses Mintz's study as a point of departure for her new research on “black towns” in the United States. There are many similarities between Jamaican free villages and the US black towns: their majority‐black populations emerged from plantation slavery and colonialism in geographically limited spaces in a context of ongoing societal racism and class conflict.…”