Sidney Mintz

Sidney Wilfred Mintz ( born November 16, 1922 in Dover, New Jersey) is an American anthropologist who is best known for his studies in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Life

Sidney Mintz received his BA in 1943 at Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. 1951, which was created at Columbia University, where he belonged to a group of students to Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict. This group under the name Mundial Upheaval Society were among other prominent anthropologists such as Marvin Harris, Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Stanley Diamond, and Robert F. Murphy.

Mintz is a member of the American Ethnological Society and was 1968-1969 president of this body, which was associated with the American Anthropological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. He taught in 1950 at City College in New York in 1951 at Columbia University, and from 1951 to 1974 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. At Yale, he began working as a lecturer, but was from 1963 to 1974 professor of anthropology. He had the same function also in 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 Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris 1970 /71. He was a lecturer in 1972 Lewis Henry Morgan at the University of Rochester, 1975/76 Visiting Professor at Princeton University, 1978/79 Christian Gauss Lecturer.

He also worked as a consultant for various institutions:

• Overseas Development Program
• Social Science Research Council 1958/59
• Ford Foundation 1957-1962
• U.S. Puerto Rico Commission on the Status of Puerto Rico 1964/65
• National Endowment for the Humanities 1978/79

Honors

Performance

Sidney Mintz has become a spokesman for the Caribbean Anthropology, where he has studied three different Caribbean society in the following years:

• Puerto Rico: 1948/49, 1953 and 1956
• Jamaica: 1952 and 1954
• Haiti: 1958 /59 and 1961.

Starting from a Marxist and historical materialist approach, associated with the American Ethnology to Mintz one hand, focused on the beginning of the 15th century socio-political processes: The arrival of European capitalism and its expansion in the Caribbean. On the other hand, examined Mintz local cultural responses to these processes. His ethnography addressed the question of how these reactions have been manifested in the lives of Caribbean people. Global forces were always confronted with local reactions influenced the cultural results. To this end, Mintz writes:

Mintz orientation is repeatedly expressed in his works: from the life story of the Puerto Rican sugar worker Taso alias Anastacio Zayas Alvarado to the debate on the status of a Caribbean slave as a proletarian.

In his book Caribbean Transformations ( 1974) asserts Mintz, modernity have an origin in the Caribbean: The first European factories were integrated into a plantation complex that served the cultivation of sugar cane and some other agricultural purposes. The arrival of the capitalist mode of production had a broad impact on the Caribbean plantation society. The commercialization of sugar production is a historical part of the Industrial Revolution. After all the sugar has changed the eating habits and the taste and consumer behavior in Europe sustainable.

Sidney Mintz made ​​with his analysis of the origin and development of the farmers a further contribution to the Caribbean Anthropology: He suspects that the Caribbean peasants occurring during or after industrialization, perhaps as nowhere else in the world. Raising them " restored " as defined because it began as something other than farmers, Mintz offered a provisional group typology. Such groups were divided into " squatters ", who settled in the country shortly after the conquest by Columbus, "early landowners ," committed by Europeans plantation workers who fulfilled their contract, the " proto- peasants " that their skills of farm system and marketing refined, while they were still enslaved, and the " runaway peasants " ( Cimarron ), the communities outside the colonial authority made ​​that were based on bedarfsdeckendem agriculture in mountainous or forest areas. For Mintz, this adjustment was a "kind of response" to the plantation system and a " form of resistance " against the superior power.

Fearing the representation of the complexity and diversity in the Caribbean and the commonalities that bridge 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 story cultural imports from Europe and the lack of continuity of the culture of the colonial power in such societies in a very heterogeneous cultural image resulted "when one considers the historical region as a whole. " And yet reveal the societies of the Caribbean - where the word society here refers to forms of social structure and social organization - similarities that can not be explained by pure chance ", so any "pan -Caribbean equality ultimately essentially of parallels is the economic and social structure and organization, a consequence of the long and fairly rigid colonial rule ", which is why many Caribbean societies" also similar or historically related cultures share.

In a dialectical approach Sidney Mintz highlighted the conflicting forces out: According to the Caribbean slaves were indeed individualized through the process of slavery and the connection to the modern, "but this does not dehumanized ." Once they were free, they revealed " fairly sophisticated notions of collective activity or cooperative unit. The pressure in Guyana together to buy plantations, the use of collaborative work groups to build houses, crops and plants, the establishment of credit institutions and the connection of kinship and coordinated work to illustrate all that the powerful individualism that triggered the slavery that group activity is not completely destroyed. "

Mintz compared the slavery and forced labor in the different islands, times and colonial structures like in Jamaica and Puerto Rico ( 1959b ) and examined the question whether different colonial systems produce varying degrees of cruelty, exploitation and racism. Some historians and political leaders in the Caribbean and Latin America joined the Iberian colonies due to their Catholic tradition and their sense of aesthetics with a more humane slavery, while the colonies of Northern Europeans with their individualizing Protestant religions more inclined to exploit the slaves and significant social categories form. Mintz said, however, that the treatment of slaves by the integration of the colony into the global economic system, the control of the metropolis of the colony and the intensity of use of labor and land depended.

Together with the anthropologist Richard Price discusses Sidney Mintz, the question of 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, after the African American culture had emerged from the African. But they contradict the statements that African culture had been deprived of the slaves, so that nothing was left for more African. By combining Herskovits ' ethnological approach to the structuralism of Claude Lévi- Strauss, argue Mintz and Price, that the African- American could be characterized by low-lying " grammatical principles " of various African cultures, and that these principles on motor behaviors, kinship practices, gender relations can expand and religious cosmologies. From the argument, an anthropology of the African diaspora has been able to develop.

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

Publications

• The Plantation as a Socio -Cultural Type. In: Vera Rubin ( Eds.): Plantation Systems of the New World. Pan-American Union, Washington, 1959, pp. 42-53.
• Labor and Sugar in Puerto Rico and in Jamaica from 1800 to 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, p 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.
• Panglosses and Polly Annas; or Whose Reality Are We Talking About? In: Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher (eds.): 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.
• The sweet power. Cultural history of the sugar. Translated by Hanne Herkommer. Campus, Frankfurt 2007 / second Auflg. ISBN 359338325X

• The People of Puerto Rico. A Study in Social Anthropology. Together with Raymond L. Scheele, Julian H. Steward, Robert A. Manners, Eric R. Wolf & 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.