Meet the People
Sidney W. Mintz
William L. Straus Jr. Professor Emeritus,
Department of Anthropology
Johns Hopkins University
When asked what anthropology has to offer the mission of the Center, Dr. Sidney Mintz replied this way: “Anthropology is useful to Center programs because of its attention to human cultural variability. Attitudes toward living: nature, resource use, food and drink, and all else, vary from one society to another. So it’s not enough to talk about ‘human nature,’ or what’s ‘natural’ to people, or what’s instinctive or biologically forecast; we need to study their cultures. “Anthropology cares why people produce and consume in one way rather than another - why they’re dead set against change on the one hand, yet are able to change very quickly on the other. It’s a good tool for studying stability and change. If we want to understand food production and consumption in the modern world, for example, anthropology can really help us.” Dr. Mintz’s career began more than 50 years ago as a member of a field research team in Puerto Rico, where he chose a sugar cane plantation community to study. He says the experience was electrifying for him; he saw history unfold before his eyes. As he worked with local people, many bearing the same family names as the names of the plantations, the slavery and sugar past came alive. He discovered abandoned slave barracks, remnants of the traditional drainage-irrigation cycle of sugar-cane farming, and old craft skills, slowly fading away. After writing part of the book, The People of Puerto Rico, his first field experience led him eventually to write Worker in the Cane, the autobiography of a cane laborer, and many years later, Sweetness and Power, an historical account of sugar worldwide.
After Puerto Rico, Dr. Mintz studied in Jamaica and Haiti. In Jamaica he looked at how peasant villages were created by the newly freed people in the Baptist missionary churches at the end of slavery. In Haiti, he studied the economic strategies of the market women who buy produce in the countryside and sell it in the cities. Such experiences confirmed his belief that history and anthropology are intimately related. To the study of the Caribbean and its peoples, he has now added the anthropology of food. Food has always interested him, he says, and credits his father, who was a cook, and to whom Mintz dedicated his book Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. He aims to show how important food is to our symbolic, as well as our material existence, and communicates our individual and group identities. Mintz considers teaching the most important thing he does, professionally; he sees opportunities to do research and to write as bonuses in a teacher’s life. From 1951 to 1975 Mintz taught at Yale, where his introductory anthropology course regularly drew 600 to 700 students each term. He also helped to create the Afro-American Studies Program there. Mintz’s interest in Afro-American cultures grew from his knowledge of slavery and plantation history. He has long admired the societies that arose from what were really forced experiments in culture-building. He is among the first ethnographers to study such peoples day to day, up close. In recent years, Dr. Mintz has launched a research program on soybean food production and consumption in Hong Kong. He is continuing this research now with colleague Christine DuBois. Together they are looking at modern soy products in the U.S., especially soy milks and nutraceuticals, as American soy use moves more visibly toward food consumption and quasi-medical application. (See "FOOD PATTERNS IN AGRARIAN SOCIETIES: THE CORE-FRINGE-LEGUME HYPOTHESIS", Dr. Mintz's talk from the CLF conference, “Dietary Protein: Options for the Future”) Dr. Mintz came to Johns Hopkins in 1975, to found the Department of Anthropology, and taught there until his retirement in 1997. He has since taught at University of California-Berkeley, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Adelaide (Australia), The University of Otago (New Zealand), and Florida International University. In 2003, he will deliver the Elsa Goveia Lecture at the University of the West Indies in Barbados, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University. |
