Sidney Mintz

Sidney Wilfred Mintz (November 16, 1922 – December 27, 2015) was an American anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food.

Mintz studied at Brooklyn College, earning his B.A in psychology in 1943.

After enlisting in the US Army Air Corps for the remainder of World War II, he enrolled in the doctoral program in anthropology at Columbia University and completed a dissertation on sugar-cane plantation workers in Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico under the supervision of Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict.

While at Columbia, Mintz was one of a group of students who developed around Steward and Benedict known as the Mundial Upheaval Society.

Many prominent anthropologists such as Marvin Harris, Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, and Robert F. Murphy were among this group.

Mintz carried out his first fieldwork in the Caribbean in 1948 as part of Julian Steward’s application of anthropological methods to the study of a complex society.

Mintz taught as a lecturer at City College (now City College of the City University of New York), New York City, in 1950, at Columbia University, New York City, in 1951, and at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut between 1951 and 1974.

Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico.

Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities.

He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career.

Mintz's history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.

Mintz was born in Dover, New Jersey, to Fanny and Soloman Mintz.

His father was a New York tradesman, and his mother was a garment-trade organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World.

Mintz had a long academic career at Yale University (1951–74) before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University.

He has been a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the Collège de France (Paris) and elsewhere.

His work has been the subject of several studies., in addition to his reflections on his own ideas and fieldwork.

Mintz has served as a consultant to various institutions including the Overseas Development Program, he has conducted field work in several countries, and he has 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.

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 Europe 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 repeatedly insisted on the Caribbean region’s particularities to contest pop notions of “globalization” and “diaspora,” that would make of the region a mere metaphor without acknowledging its historical distinctiveness.

At Yale, Mintz started as an instructor, but was Professor of Anthropology from 1963 to 1974.

He was awarded a master's 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 Humanities fellow, 1978–79.

Mintz was also a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1964–65 academic year, a Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 1970–1971.

Mintz was a member of the American Ethnological Society and was President of that body from 1968 to 1969, a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

He was a Lewis Henry Morgan Lecturer at the University of Rochester in 1972, a Visiting Professor at Princeton University in 1975–1976, a Christian Gauss Lecturer, 1978-1979, Guggenheim Fellow in 1957, a Social Science Research Council faculty research fellow, 1958-59.

He also served as Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland since 1974.

In his training Mintz was particularly influenced by Steward, Ruth Benedict (Mintz 1981a), and Alexander Lesser, and by his classmate and co-author, Eric Wolf (1923-1999).

Combining a Marxist and historical materialist approach with U.S. cultural anthropology, 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 capitalist 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.'"

This orientation found varied expressions in Mintz’s works, from his life history of “Taso” (Anastacio Zayas Alvarado), a Puerto Rican sugar worker, to debating whether the Caribbean slave could be considered a proletarian.

He reasoned that, because slavery in the Caribbean was implicated in capitalism, slavery there was unlike Old World slavery; but also that because slave status meant unfree labor, Caribbean slavery was not a fully capitalistic labor-form for the extraction of surplus value.

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” agriculture 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 and elsewhere, Mintz claimed that modernity originated in the Caribbean—Europe’s first factories were embodied in a plantation complex devoted to the cultivation of sugar cane and a few other agricultural commodities.

He was honored by the establishment of the annual Sidney W. Mintz Lecture in 1992.

He received the Franz Boas Award at the 2012 American Anthropological Association.

He died on December 26, 2015, at the age of 93, following severe head trauma resulting from a fall.