Sidney Mintz

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Sidney Wilfred Mintz (born November 16, 1922 in Dover , New Jersey , † December 27, 2015 in Plainsboro , New Jersey) was an American social anthropologist who became known through his studies in Latin America and the Caribbean .

Life

Sidney Mintz received his BA from Brooklyn College in 1943 and his Ph.D. 1951 at Columbia University , where he was part of a group of students that arose around Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict . This group, known as the Mundial Upheaval Society, included other prominent anthropologists such as Marvin Harris , Eric Wolf , Morton Fried , Stanley Diamond and Robert F. Murphy.

Mintz was a member of the American Ethnological Society and from 1968 to 1969 president of this institution, which was affiliated with the American Anthropological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland . He taught at City College in New York in 1950, at Columbia University in 1951, and from 1951 to 1974 at Yale University in New Haven , Connecticut . At Yale he began as a lecturer, but was professor of anthropology from 1963 to 1974. He had the same function from 1974 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore , Maryland . He also worked as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the academic year 1964/65 and as Directeur d'Etudes at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris 1970/71. In 1972 he was a lecturer for Lewis Henry Morgan at the University of Rochester , 1975/76 visiting professor at Princeton University , and Christian Gauss lecturer in 1978/79 .

He also worked as a consultant for various institutions: The Overseas Development Program , 1958/1959 for the Social Science Research Council , 1957 to 1962 for the Ford Foundation , 1964/1965 for the US-Puerto Rico Commission on the Status of Puerto Rico and 1978 / 1979 for the National Endowment for the Humanities .

Honors

  • 1966/67 and 1970/71: Fulbright Senior Research Award
  • 1972: William Clyde DeVane Medal
  • 1990: Admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 1992: Establishment of an annual Sidney W. Mintz lecture.
  • 2012: Franz Boas Award from the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

power

Sidney Mintz became a spokesman for Caribbean anthropology by studying three different Caribbean societies in the following years:

Based on a Marxist and historical- materialist approach, linked to US ethnology , Mintz concentrated on the one hand on the socio-political processes that began in the 15th century: the arrival of European capitalism and its expansion in the Caribbean. On the other hand, Mintz examined the local cultural responses to these processes. His ethnography dealt with the question of how these reactions manifested themselves in the lives of the Caribbean people. Global forces have always faced local reactions that influenced cultural outcomes. Mintz wrote:

“ It must be emphasized that the integration of different forms of job creation within a region has an impact on how this region as a whole fits into the so-called world system. There was a give and take between the demands and initiatives that arose in the metropolises of the world system and the ensemble of typical forms of work of the area with which they were entangled ... The assumption of a world system repeatedly forces us to shift our gaze from the details of the to avert local history, which I find instructive. But just as instructive is the constant preoccupation with the events on the ground , so that the architecture of the world system can be revealed. "

Mintz's orientation found expression in his works in several ways: from the life story of the Puerto Rican sugar worker Taso alias Anastacio Zayas Alvarado to the debate about the status of a Caribbean slave as a proletarian .

In his work Caribbean Transformations (1974), Mintz claims that modernity originated in the Caribbean: the first European factories were integrated into a plantation complex that was used for the cultivation of sugar cane and some other agricultural purposes. The arrival of the capitalist mode of production had a profound impact on Caribbean plantation society. The commercialization of sugar production is a historic part of the Industrial Revolution . After all, sugar has permanently changed eating habits and taste and consumer behavior in Europe.

Sidney Mintz made another contribution to Caribbean anthropology with his analysis of the origins and development of farmers: He suspected that Caribbean farmers appear during or after industrialization , possibly more than anywhere else in the world. By defining them as "restored" because they started out as something other than farmers, Mintz offered a makeshift group typology. Such groups divided into "squatters" who settled the land shortly after Columbus' conquest , "early landowners", plantation workers hired by Europeans who fulfilled their contracts, the "proto-farmers", who developed their farming and marketing skills refined while enslaved, and the "runaway peasants" ( cimarrón ), who formed communities outside of colonial authority based on on-demand agriculture in mountainous or forested areas. For Mintz, this adjustment was a "kind of response" to the plantation system and a "form of resistance" to the superior power.

Fearful of portraying the complexity and diversity of the Caribbean and the similarities that span cultural, linguistic and political boundaries, Mintz wrote in The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area that “the very diverse origins of the Caribbean population, the complicated history the cultural imports from Europe and the lack of continuity of the culture of the colonial power in such societies resulted in a very heterogeneous cultural picture “if one considers the region historically as a whole. “And yet the societies of the Caribbean - whereby the word society here refers to forms of social structure and social organization - reveal similarities that cannot be explained by pure chance,” so that every “pan-Caribbean equality is ultimately essentially made up of parallels in the economic and social structure and organization, a consequence of the long and rather rigid colonial rule ”, which is why many Caribbean societies“ also share similar or historically connected cultures ”.

In a dialectical approach, Sidney Mintz emphasized the contradicting forces: According to this, the Caribbean slaves were individualized through the process of slavery and through the connection to modernity, "but not thereby dehumanized". Once free, they “revealed quite elaborate notions of collective activity or cooperative unity. The pressure in Guyana to buy plantations together, the use of collaborative workgroups to build houses, harvest and plant, the establishment of credit institutions, and the combination of kinship and coordinated work all make it clear that the powerful individualism triggered by slavery does not fully make group activity destroyed. "

Mintz compared slavery and forced labor in the different islands, times and colonial structures such as in Jamaica and Puerto Rico (1959b) and examined whether different colonial systems produced different degrees of cruelty, exploitation and racism . Some historians and political leaders in the Caribbean and Latin America associated the Iberian colonies with more humane slavery because of their Catholic tradition and sense of aesthetics , while the northern European colonies, with their individualizing Protestant religions, tended to exploit the slaves and have clear social categories to build. However, Mintz suggested that the treatment of slaves depended on the colony's integration into the global economic system, the metropolis' control of the colony, and the intensity of the use of labor and land.

Together with the anthropologist Richard Price , Sidney Mintz discussed the question of the creolization of African-American culture in the publication The Birth of African-American Culture. An Anthropological Approach (1976): The authors describe the view of the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits that African-American culture emerged from African. But they contradict the statements that the African culture has been taken from the slaves, so that nothing African is left. By combining Herskovits' ethnological approach with the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss , Mintz and Price argue that Afro-American can be characterized by deep “grammatical principles” of various African cultures and that these principles relate to motor behaviors, kinship practices, gender relationships and allow religious cosmologies to expand. An anthropology of the African diaspora has developed from the argument .

Sidney Mintz conducted further research in Iran (1966/67) and in Hong Kong (1996, 1999).

Publications

author

  • The Plantation as a Socio-Cultural Type . In: Vera Rubin (Ed.): Plantation Systems of the New World . Pan-American Union, Washington 1959, pp. 42-53.
  • Labor and Sugar in Puerto Rico and in Jamaica 1800-1850. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History. 1 (3), 1959, pp. 273-281.
  • Worker in the cane . A Puerto Rican Life History. Yale University Press, New Haven 1960.
  • Caribbean transformations . Aldine, Chicago 1974.
  • The Rural Proletariat and the Problem of Rural Proletarian Consciousness . In: Journal of Peasant Studies. 1 (3), pp. 291-325, 1974.
  • The So-Called World System. Local Initiative and Local Response . In: Dialectical Anthropology. 2 (2), pp. 253-270, 1977.
  • Ruth Benedict . In: Sydel Silverman (Ed.): Totems and Teachers. Perspectives on the History of Anthropology. Columbia University Press, New York 1981, pp. 141-168.
  • Economic Role and Cultural Tradition . In: Filomina Chioma Steady (Ed.): The Black Woman Cross-Culturally. Schenkman, Cambridge 1981, pp. 513-534.
  • Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History . Viking, New York 1985; German under the title: Die süße Macht. Cultural history of sugar. Translated from the English by Hanne Herkommer, Campus, Frankfurt / New York, 2nd edition 2007, ISBN 978-3-593-38325-5 .
  • Panglosses and Pollyannas; or Whose Reality Are We Talking About? In: Frank McGlynn u. Seymour Drescher (Ed.): The Meaning of Freedom. Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery . University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh 1992, pp. 245-256.
  • Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past . Beacon Press, Boston 1996.
  • People of Puerto Rico Half a Century Later. One Author's Recollections . In: Journal of Latin American Anthropology. 6 (2), 2002, pp. 74-83.

editor

  • The People of Puerto Rico. A Study in Social Anthropology . Together with Raymond L. Scheele, Julian H. Steward, Robert A. Manners, Eric R. Wolf u. Elena Padilla Seda .: University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1956.
  • History, Evolution and the Concept of Culture. Selected papers by Alexander Lesser . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985.
  • Caribbean Contours . Together with Sally Price. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1985.

literature

  • Ronald Duncan (Ed.): Antropología Social en Puerto Rico / Social Anthropology in Puerto Rico. In: Special Section of Revista / Review Interamericana. 8 (1), 1978.
  • Ashraf Ghani: Routes to the Caribbean. An interview with Sidney W. Mintz. In: Plantation Society in the Americas. 5 (1), 1998, pp. 103-134.
  • David Scott: Modernity that Predated the Modern. Sidney Mintz's Caribbean. In: History Workshop Journal. 58, 2004, pp. 191-210.
  • Kevin A. Yelvington: Caribbean. In: Alan Barnard , Jonathan Spencer (Eds.): Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Routledge, London 1996, pp. 86-90.
  • Kevin A. Yelvington: The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean. Diasporic Dimensions. In: Annual Review of Anthropology. 30, 2001, pp. 227-260.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sidney Mintz, Father of Food Anthropology, Dies at 93
  2. ^ Sidney Mintz: An Impartial History of the Mundial Upheaval Society . AnthroWatch , Vol. 2, No. 3, 1994.
  3. ↑ Boas Prize Winner Sidney Mintz dies at the age of 93
  4. ^ Sidney Mintz: The So-Called World System. Local Initiative and Local Response. In: Dialectical Anthropology. 2 (2) 1977, pp. 254f.
  5. ^ Sidney Mintz: Worker in the Cane. Yale University Press, New Haven 1960.
  6. ↑ Sidney Mintz: Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian? In: Review 2 (1), 1978, pp. 81-98.
  7. ^ Sidney Mintz: The Plantation as a Socio-Cultural Type . 1959a. In: Vera Rubin (Ed.): Plantation Systems of the New World. Pan-American Union, Washington 1959, pp. 42-53.
  8. ^ Sidney Mintz: Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Viking, New York 1985.
  9. ^ Sidney Mintz: From Plantations to Peasantries in the Caribbean . In: Sidney W. Mintz and Sally Price (Eds.): Caribbean Contours . The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1985, pp. 127-153.
  10. ^ Sidney Mintz: 1966 The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area . In: Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale 9/1966, p. 915.
  11. ↑ Sidney Mintz: Panglosses and Pollyannas. Or Whose Reality Are We Talking About? In: Frank McGlynn u. Seymour Drescher (Ed.): The Meaning of Freedom. Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh 1992, pp. 252-254.
  12. ↑ Sidney Mintz: Caribbean Transformations . Aldine, Chicago 1974, pp. 59-81.
personal data
SURNAME Mintz, Sidney
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mintz, Sidney Wilfred (full name); Mintz, Sidney W.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Dover , New Jersey, USA
DATE OF DEATH December 27, 2015
Place of death Plainsboro , New Jersey, USA