Sidney W. Mintz: Field Notes About a Life

Abstract

Sidney W. Mintz (1922-2015), anthropologist, leaves a body of work of world importance where he treated subjects as diverse as the life of a sugar worker, the complexity of slavery, the contradictions of modernity, and the anthropology of food, in the context of an ongoing inquiry on the emergence and scope of modernity in the Caribbean. He was born in New Jersey of immigrant parents from Belarus and obtained his Ph.D. in Columbia. At Columbia, he participated in the project that generated The People of Puerto Rico. From 1953 to 1975 was a professor at Yale University, and then at Johns Hopkins, until his retirement in 1996. His writings on the Caribbean and on slavery, rural proletarians, peasants, plantations and sugar remain fundamental. He devoted his last years to the study of food and eating, which he also produced path breaking work.