AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
OBITUARY
Sidney Mintz in 1989. (Johns Hopkins University Homewood
Photo)
Sidney W. Mintz (1922–2015)
Sidney W. Mintz, founder of the modern ethnographic and
historical study of contemporary Caribbean societies and of
the anthropology of food, died in Plainsville, New Jersey,
on December 27, 2015. Born in Dover, New Jersey, on
November 22, 1922, Sid was one of four children of Jewish
Eastern European immigrants. His father, Solomon Mintz,
was a diemaker and had served in the Czarist army before
emigrating to the United States, where he initially worked
as a clothing salesman and dishwasher. His mother, Fannie
Mintz, who had been active in the Jewish socialist Bund
back in imperial Russia, joined the International Workers
of the World as an organizer in New York City’s garment
industry, where she had taken a job. Late in her life, she
told Sid that when—not if—the Great Proletarian World
Revolution came, he should go to the cemetery and stomp
on her grave three times. The occasion never arose.
Sid’s father eventually came to own a restaurant and
hotel, but he lost nearly everything in the Depression, then
worked as the cook in a diner that he had managed to hold
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 00, No. 0, pp. 1–4, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12601
onto. Sid wrote about his father’s views of proper cuisine and
diet (1996a), adding that (according to some customers) “his
was the only restaurant in the world where the customer was
always wrong” (Mintz 1996a:xvi). Sid attended Brooklyn
College, majoring in psychology, but he also took a course
in anthropology with Alexander Lesser (earning a C). After
graduating in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air
Corps and served stateside teaching celestial navigation.
After the war, Sid entered Columbia University’s grad-
uate program in anthropology on the G.I. Bill. He took
classes with Ruth Benedict and worked as her assistant in
1947–1948. But he also encountered fellow veteran grad-
uate students who shared a radical political outlook and
a keen interest in Marxist theory. They formed a study
group they jokingly called the Mundial Upheaval Soci-
ety. It included Eric Wolf, with whom Sid formed a life-
long friendship and sometimes collaborated (e.g., Wolf
and Mintz 1957), Stanley Diamond, Morton Fried, Robert
Manners, Robert Murphy, Elman Service, and occasionally
John Murra.
In 1946 Julian H. Steward came to Columbia, and his
ecological materialism found a receptive audience among
these students. While Steward had worked largely with
small-scale societies in the American West, at this point
he was designing a project that would test his theories of
“levels of sociocultural integration” in a complex society,
so as to articulate community studies with what was then
emerging as “area studies” in the so-called Third World.
Steward chose the U.S. neo-colony Puerto Rico, and once
he secured funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and
the cooperation of the University of Puerto Rico, he re-
cruited graduate students from Columbia and the University
of Chicago for the project’s ethnographic staff. They were
given a semester’s preparatory course, in which they were
assigned some of the first community studies undertaken in
complex societies. Among these was Malinowski’s student
Hsiao-Tung Fei’s 1939 monograph Peasant Life in China —a
study of a Chinese peasant community involved in silk pro-
duction for the world market, which, as Sid later remarked
(Tomich 2013), gave him a first inkling of how local lifeways
were interconnected with global market structures. But the
students were poorly prepared for the task ahead; several
of the project’s members, including Mintz and Wolf, had
not even learned Spanish when they shipped out in 1947,
and they knew next to nothing about the island’s history and
turbulent present.
The plan was for each participant in the project to
study a community distinct in its ecological and productive
C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association.
2 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016
adaptation. Sid chose a small company town attached to a
large US-owned agroindustrial plantation complex: Barrio
Jauca in the municipality of Santa Isabel on the south coast
of Puerto Rico (anonymized as “Cañamelar”). The aggregate
of these studies, Steward hoped, would eventually allow
for an analysis of crosscutting linkages on scalar levels of
sociocultural integration. As Sid pointed out (2001, 2011),
it did no such thing, and as William Roseberry’s (1978)
comparison of the two introductions to the resulting book
demonstrated, the chapter written by “The Staff” (i.e. Wolf
and Mintz) departed dramatically from Steward’s vision. In
fact, Sid wrote (2001), chances are that Steward had lost
interest in the project even before it was concluded. But
what it did achieve was to anticipate a historically sensi-
tive, materialist anthropology of a globally interconnected
capitalist modernity, which had hardly begun to register as
a legitimate concern within the discipline at the time (see
Scott 2004).
Sid’s choice to work in “those big cane plantations that,
aside from the military, were the most naked, imperialis-
tic, in-your-face exhibition of American power on the is-
land” (2001:4) was as unconventional for the time, as it
was prescient. It anticipated what by the 1980s became
theoretical and methodological common sense in anthropol-
ogy: the need to understand local lifeways in their inter-
connectedness and their structural determination by global
capital. “The south coast sugar worker,” Sid wrote of Bar-
rio Jauca in 1948–1949, “must buy cotton clothing from
Tennessee; dried codfish from Newfoundland; rice from
Louisiana; shoes, machetes, and clocks from Massachusetts;
canned beer from Wisconsin or New York; and radios from
Michigan in exchange for money earned in the production
of raw sugar which is refined and sold within the continental
United States” (1956:354–355). Yet while Sid always in-
sisted on the analytical importance of historical structures of
domination, he also argued that power finds its expression
in the quotidian—as do the ways in which human actors try
to resist it, or at least try to carve out spaces of individual
and collective dignity for themselves.
Sid demonstrated this in a pioneering life history of his
Puerto Rican informant and friend Anastacio Zayas Alvarado
(Don Taso), which he recorded on return trips to the island
in 1953 and 1956. While anthropologists had published life
histories of “tribal peoples,” Worker in the Cane (1960a) was
the first life history of an agroindustrial worker in a mod-
ern, neocolonial setting. Here we see a man laboring under
crushing, externally imposed constraints, all the while strug-
gling to achieve a meaningful life for himself and his family:
aiming to make his own history, as it were, while under
conditions not of his choosing, circumstances directly found,
given, and transmitted by the colonial past and neocolonial
present. This paraphrase of Marx’s famous formulation is
entirely apt here. The dialectical vision that Sid espoused
emphasizes not just abstract structures of domination but
also the sheer human will and ingenuity that presses against
them. It does so in terms of the cultural resources—equally
found, given, and transmitted by the past—through which
actors like Don Taso understood and engaged their present.
As such, and this was Sid’s point throughout his career, their
choices of “maneuver” within a given “structure of opportu-
nity and constraint” (1970) literally are the stuff of history.
He said that he only came to realize belatedly how Don
Taso’s life was a lens through which to understand the his-
tory of post-1898 U.S. agroindustrial capitalism in Puerto
Rico (Thomas 2014:502). Indeed, as he told Dale Tomich
(2013), his two books Worker in the Cane (1960a) and Sweetness
and Power (1985) stand to each other in an inverse relation—
as if seeing the same historical social reality in macroscopic
or microscopic scale.
While on Steward’s project, Sid met the eminent his-
torian (and later prime minister of Trinidad) Eric Williams
and read his 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery. Williams’s
analysis of the relation between industrial plantation slavery
in the Caribbean, British abolitionism, and the belated ad-
vent of massive industrial proletarianization in the metropole
came to mark a watershed in Sid’s theoretical orientation.
It led him not only to a comparative study of Europe’s old-
est colonies but also toward an anthropology of what Philip
D. Curtin called “the South Atlantic System” and pithily
defined as a “complex economic organism centered on the
production in the Americas of tropical staples for consump-
tion in Europe and grown by the labor of Africans” (Curtin
1969:3). Having done fieldwork in a former Spanish colony
and having begun to write about the links between a Spanish
past of slavery, nominally free agregado labor, and a U.S.-
dominated proletarian present, Sid planned to investigate
the worlds generated by this system—and their contem-
porary legacies—in three other major colonial spheres of
the Caribbean: the British, French, and Dutch colonies or
excolonies—the “peripheral” birthplaces of a modernity that
took at least two centuries before it came to assert itself in
“the core” (1996b; Scott 2004).
Sid’s next field project took him to Jamaica, where he
spent two summers (1952 and 1954) studying peasant life in
the Baptist-founded “free village” of Sturge Town and devel-
oped his abiding interest in Caribbean marketing patterns.
This resulted in a series of publications (1955, 1958, 1961,
1973a, 1973b, 1978) on the origins of “reconstituted peas-
antries,” characteristic of many Caribbean locations, which
emerged from patterns of provision ground-agriculture that
took hold in Jamaica and elsewhere well before the formal
end of slavery. These publications had a major influence on
the historiography of slavery and on peasant studies. His
third field site was in Haiti, where he focused on peasant
women’s marketeering in the northern town of Fonds-des-
Nègres. While he never managed to work in the Dutch
Caribbean, Sid’s research in Haiti (in 1958–59 and 1961)
yielded a number of writings on the fundamental rationality
of the economic conceptions and transactional practices of
deeply impoverished sellers and buyers (1960b, 1964, 1995,
2010; see also Carnegie 2006), which should still be read by
development economists. Another study arising from this

work, “Men, Women and Trade” (1971), was inspirational
for a generation of feminist economic anthropologists.
In 1951 Sid joined the faculty at Yale University, where
he was instrumental in building up Caribbean studies, com-
plete with a book series. From 1969 on, he was also a
prime force in establishing Yale’s Afro-American studies
program—the first in the United States—for which he
served as the initial curriculum committee chair. “There
was” then, he told Jonathan Thomas (2014:507), “a certain
amount of fear and apprehension about the students and
what they might do—a lot of talk about black power and the
history of repression,” and none of his colleagues in anthro-
pology seemed prepared to take any steps. But Sid invested
large amounts of time, energy, and academic capital in this
project because “of its inherent interest but also because it
was the right thing to do . . . It came off better than just
about anything I’ve had a chance to do, and I’m very proud
of Yale’s African American Studies program.”
In 1974 Sid was invited to help found an anthropology
department at Johns Hopkins University, which was soon
to be one of the finest graduate programs in the discipline.
Together with colleagues in History, he also inaugurated
a Program in Atlantic History, Culture and Society that
would become one of the driving forces in an emerging in-
terdisciplinary focus on the history and anthropology of the
post-Columbian Atlantic world. It was then that he and his
colleague Richard Price published an extended essay that
radically reoriented the anthropological study of African
American cultures away from a Herskovitsian search for
African origins and toward a social history of culture build-
ing among the enslaved (Mintz and Price 1976, 1992). Sid
also began to turn toward a systematic study of sugar—
the crop, substance, and commodity that became the initial
focus and fulcrum of the modern capitalist world system.
Sid had formulated the outline of what was to become the
central argument in Sweetness and Power (1985) as early as in
his groundbreaking attempt to characterize the Caribbean
as a “sociocultural area” (1966). There he wrote that “to-
gether with other plantation products such as coffee, rum
and tobacco, sugar formed part of a complex of ‘prole-
tarian hunger killers’,” thus locking Caribbean slaves and an
emerging metropolitan proletariat into a common history—
that of the making of the modern world. Now he expanded
this argument in a monograph that became foundational not
only for an anthropology of food and cuisine but also for
contemporary studies of commodity chains.
Sid continued to write on questions of slavery, peasant
adaptations, and rural proletarians; intervened in debates
about anthropology’s belated discovery of Caribbeanist con-
ceptions such as “creolization” (1996b); and published a ret-
rospective analytical summation of his Caribbean research
(2010). But the last phase of his career centered on the an-
thropological and historical study of food, food systems, and
conceptions of cuisine (including fieldwork in Hong Kong in
1996 and 1999, on which his contributions to DuBois et al.
2008 were based). He praised the pioneering (but in their
Obituary 3
time utterly marginal) contributions of people like Audrey
Richards and Rosalind Firth to the anthropology of food, and
he acknowledged the precedent of historians of sugar like
Edmund O. von Lippmann or Noel Deerr. But what proved
so inspirational for the anthropology of food and cuisine
was Sid’s inimitably dialectical sense of seeing the world in
a grain of sand: of extrapolating from the ostensibly most
banal minutiae of everyday life—what could be more trivial
than the satisfaction of our metabolic requirements?—to the
realm of how humans make their foodways and cuisines, if
under conditions not of their choosing. In a collection of
essays (1996a) ranging from how slaves attained a (however
limited) sense of self-mastery from the systemic switch from
imported rationing to local provision ground-agriculture to
how cuisines could be defined (and whether the United States
could be said to have one), Sid laid the groundwork for what
has become an established field within the discipline.
When he retired from Hopkins in 1997, Sid had many
plans: to learn Chinese and orchestral composing (he had a
lifelong interest in music and loved to sing), write a book
about the history of the herring industry (he said that if it
hadn’t been for the humble little herring, there would be no
Jews), and develop a project on fermentation. At the urging
of his wife of 51 years, Jacqueline Wei Mintz, a linguist
turned lawyer, he was working on a book about people he
had encountered during his Depression-era childhood. Sid
was an accomplished raconteur, a master of the kind of story
telling born from a deep appreciation of our shared human
condition. He also was a beloved and inspirational teacher.
Though I was never his student in any formal sense, there
are few people from whom I have learned more than from
the inimitable and utterly irreplaceable Sidney W. Mintz.
Stephan Palmié Department of Anthropology, The University of
Chicago, Chicago, IL, 60637; palmie@uchicago.edu
REFERENCES CITED
Carnegie, Charles V.
2006 The Anthropology of Ourselves: An Interview with Sidney
W. Mintz. Small Axe 19(1):106–179.
Curtin, Philip D.
1969 The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
DuBois, Christine, Chee-beng Tan, and Sidney W. Mintz, eds.
2008 The World of Soy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hsiao-Tung Fei
1939 Peasant Life in China. New York: Dutton.
Mintz, Sidney W.
1955 The Jamaican Internal Marketing Pattern: Some Notes and
Hypotheses. Social and Economic Studies 4(1):95–103.
1956 Cañamelar: The Subculture of a Rural Sugar Plantation
Proletariat. In The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social
Anthropology. Julian H. Stewart, Eric Wolf, Elena Padilla
4 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016
Seda, Sidney W. Mintz, and Raymond L. Scheele, eds. Pp.
314–417. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
1958 The Historical Sociology of the Jamaican Church-Founded
Free Village System. De West-Indische Gids 38(1–2):
46–70.
1960a Worker in the Cane. New Haven: Yale University Press.
1960b A Tentative Typology of Eight Haitian Market Places.
Revista de Ciencias Sociales 4(1):15–58.
1961 The Question of Caribbean Peasantries: A Comment.
Caribbean Studies 1(3):31–34.
1964 The Employment of Capital by Haitian Market Women.
In Capital, Savings and Credit in Peasant Societies. Raymond
Firth and B.S. Yamey, eds. Pp. 256–286. London: George
Allen and Unwin.
1966 The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area. Cahiers d’Histoire
Mondiale 10(4):912–937.
1970 Foreword. In Afro-American Anthropology. Norman E.
Whitten, Jr. and John F. Szwed, eds. Pp. 1–16. New York:
The Free Press.
1971 Men, Women and Trade. Comparative Studies in Society
and History 12(3):247–269.
1973a A Note on the Definition of Peasantries. Journal of Peasant
Studies 1(1):91–106.
1973b The Rural Proletariat and the Problem of Rural Pro-
letarian Consciousness. Journal of Peasant Studies 1(3):
291–325.
1978 Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian? Review 2(1):81–98.
1985 Sweetness and Power. New York: Viking.
1995 Slave Life on Caribbean Sugar Plantations: Some Unan-
swered Questions. In Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slav-
ery. Stephan Palmié, ed. Pp. 12–22. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press.
1996a Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. Boston: Beacon.
1996b Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Re-
gion as Oikumenê. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Insti-
tute 2(2):289–311.
2001 The People of Puerto Rico Half a Century Later: One
Author’s Reflections. Journal of Latin American Anthropology
6(2):74–83.
2010 Three Ancient Colonies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
2011 Did the Puerto Rico Project Have Consequences? A Personal
View. Identities 18(3):244–249.
Mintz, Sidney, and Richard Price
1976 An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past:
A Caribbean Perspective. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study
of Human Issues.
1992 The Birth of African American Culture. Boston: Beacon.
Roseberry, William
1978 Historical Materialism and The People of Puerto Rico. Re-
vista/Review Interamericana 8(1):26–36.
Scott, David
2004 Modernity That Preceded the Modern: Sidney Mintz’s
Caribbean. History Workshop 58(1):191–210.
Thomas, Jonathan
2014 And the Rest Is History: A Conversation with Sidney Mintz.
American Anthropologist 116(3):497–510.
Tomich, Dale
2013 Caribbean Journey: Conversations with Sidney Mintz. 111
min. Binghampton: The Fernand Braudel Center.
Williams, Eric
1944 Capitalism and Slavery. Chapell Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press.
Wolf, Eric R., and Sidney W. Mintz
1957 Haciendas and Plantations in Middle America and the
Caribbean. Social and Economic Studies 6(3):380–412.