Sidney W Mintz: Charting an anthropology of the Caribbean

Abstract

The research program established by the anthropologist Sidney W Mintz (1922–2015) in a professional career spanning more than half a century was definitive in charting an anthropology of the Caribbean. Mintz’s family context and early training in anthropology provided the basis for a Marxist/materialist and dialectical theoretical approach that interpreted historical structures and specificities through the paradigm of North American cultural anthropology – and used the lens of cultural anthropology to understand historical processes. Mintz was part of a cohort of doctoral students at Columbia University in the late 1940s and early 1950s who would go on to become prominent within the discipline. Part of the pathbreaking The People of Puerto Rico project, Mintz developed a decidedly historical approach to Caribbean societies and cultures and understood them in relation to, and in interaction with, their imperial past and their contemporary locations within the capitalist world system. This informed his research and writing on comparative forms of slavery and their aftermath, the creolization of cultures in Caribbean history, and applied the insight acquired to the study of food and the complex systems by which it is produced and consumed. Mintz’s work has received great amount of attention, including critical evaluations. Mintz was an active participant in how his work and contributions would be assessed.

Caribbeanist Anthropology and Minerva's Owl: Lessons Forgotten, Lessons Learned

“…True enough, and I don't want to belabor this issue here, except to note that the regime of US welfare cupones , remittances, and service sector jobs apparently did its job in stabilizing this relationship to a degree that the alternative to it nowadays no longer seems to be independence but statehood 8 . Instead, I would like to point out yet another irony fostered, in part at least, by Mintz's own tireless efforts to arrive at an anthropological understanding of the rural sector of Caribbean societies as a vanguard of capitalist modernity (Scott 2004; Yelvington 2018). In part, this is a story of academic institution‐building that remains to be told by somewhat more knowledgeable about such matters than I am.…”

Caribbean and Mediterranean counterpoints and transculturations

“…Mediterraneanists have by and large been more reflexive about the promises and pitfalls of their changing conceptual apparatus and common enterprise than have Caribbeanists. In the latter case, recent key debates have centered on the notion of "creolization" (Mintz 1996(Mintz , 1998Khan 2001;Price 2001Price , 2007andPalmié 2006a, 2007), though some reflection on the history of their regional specialization (Carnegie 1992;Yelvington 2018; Palmié forthcoming) has taken place as well. 8 Still it stands to argue that the literatures produced by specialists in both regions might be seen as an unrealized counterpoint, very much now in Ortiz's terms: consonances as well as dissonances unheard in relation to each other, but possibly discernible once put into perspective.…”

“…13. See the excellent compilation of Ortiz's correspondence edited byPérez Valdés (2014-2018.14 Bremer (1993). reports a hilarious anecdote in which, in 1934, Ortiz told a visiting Italian journalist who intended to interview him on Cuban legal reform and crime among Black Cubans that as far as criminal law was concerned "I am dead."…”