Modernity that predated the modern: Sidney Mintz's Caribbean

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 191-210

  Scott, David ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347263649     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/58.1.191     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. The epigraph is taken from Sidney Mintz's Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture, 'Goodbye Columbus: Second Thoughts on the Caribbean Region at Mid-Millennium', delivered at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick in May 1993 and subsequently published by them as a pamphlet.
2. I develop this theme in somewhat different directions in David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: the Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham, 2004.
3. Sidney W. Mintz, Foreword to Jean Besson, Martha Brae's Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica, Chapel Hill, 2002, pp. xv-xvi.
4. Julian H. Steward, Robert A. Manners, Eric R. Wolf, Elena Padilla Seda, Sidney W. Mintz, and Raymond L. Scheele, The People of Puerto Rico: a Study in Social Anthropology, Urbana, 1956.
5. Perhaps the most comprehensive study of this work remains Antonio Lauria-Perricelli, A Study in Historical and Critical Anthropology: the Making of The People of Puerto Rico', unpublished doctoral dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1989.
6. See also Review/Revista Interamericana 8:1, spring 1978, guest-edited by Ronald J. Duncan, comprising the contributions to a symposium held at Inter American University in San Germán, Puerto Rico, March 1977, to reconsider The People of Puerto Rico.
7. Thomas C. Patterson, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States, New York, 2001, chap. 4.
8. Franz Boas, 'The History of Anthropology', Science 20, 1904, pp. 513-24.
9. See Sidney Mintz, 'American Anthropology in the Marxist Tradition', in On Marxian Perspectives in Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoijer, 1981, ed. Jacques Maquet and Nancy Daniels, Malibu, Undena [for UCLA Department of Anthropology], 1984, pp. 14-15.
10. See, usefully, Stanley Diamond, 'On the Origins of Modern Theoretical Anthropology', American Anthropologist 66:1, February 1964, pp. 127-9.
11. Paul Radin (1883-1959), The World of Primitive Man, New York, 1953;
12. Stanley Diamond (1922-1991), In Search of the Primitive: a Critique of Civilization, New Brunswick, 1974. Diamond told me that he had himself initially been a member of the Puerto Rico Project but left it early.
13. There is now a considerable literature dealing with the relation between the universities, government intelligence-gathering agencies, and the foundations. See, for example, Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson, New York, 1998.
14. See Julian H. Steward, Area Research: Theory and Practice, New York, 1950;
15. and Introduction, People of Puerto Rico, pp. 1-27.
16. Eric Wolf, 'Remarks on The People of Puerto Rico', Revista/Review Interamericana 8:1, spring 1978, p. 17.
17. René Velázquez, 'Julian H. Steward's Perspective on Puerto Rico', Revista/Review Interamericana 8:1, spring 1978, p. 51, writes: 'Steward, together with Leslie White and Robert Redfield, Americanized anthropology in the United States. They shifted the emphasis from non-material to material aspects of culture and returned for theoretical inspiration to the nineteenth century American evolutionist Lewis H. Morgan' (his emphasis).
18. For a useful discussion see Eleanor Leacock, 'Marxism and Anthropology', in The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, ed. Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff, New York, 1982.
19. See William Roseberry, 'Historical Materialism and The People of Puerto Rico', Review/Revista Interamericana 8:1, spring 1978, pp. 26-36.
20. There was also a folklorist interest in the Caribbean in the 1920s, it is important to remember, out of which came Martha Beckwith's Black Roadways: a Study of Jamaican Folk Life, Chapel Hill, 1929. Beckwith, who taught at Vassar College, was a student also of Native American dance forms and Hawaiian mythology.
21. One thinks of such work of Melville Herskovits as: 'The Negro in the New World: the Statement of a Problem', American Anthropologist 32, 1930, pp. 145-55;
22. (with Frances S. Herskovits), Rebel Destiny: Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana, New York, 1934;
23. Life in a Haitian Valley, New York, 1937;
24. The Myth of the Negro Past, New York, 1941;
25. and (with Frances S. Herskovits), Trinidad Village, New York, 1947.
26. See Walter Jackson, 'Melville Herskovits and the Search for Afro-American Culture', in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality, ed. George Stocking Jr, Madison, 1986;
27. David Scott, 'That Event, this Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World', Diaspora 1:3, 1991, pp. 261-84.
28. See also Richard Price and Sally Price, The Root of Roots: How Afro-American Anthropology got its Start, Chicago, 2003.
29. See Sidney W. Mintz, Introduction to Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston, 1990.
30. There are now, of course, a variety of books dealing with the post-war rise of 'development' as a paradigm for solving the problems of the 'Third World'. See, for example, Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, 1995.
31. Gordon K. Lewis, Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean, New York, 1963, p. 20.
32. Lewis, Puerto Rico, pp. 143-4.
33. See also Lauria-Perricelli, 'The Making of The People of Puerto Rico'.
34. Sidney W. Mintz, Worker in the Cane: a Puerto Rican Life History, New Haven, 1960.
35. Sidney W. Mintz, 'Cañamelar: the Contemporary Culture of a Rural Puerto Rican Proletariat', unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, Columbia University, February 1951;
36. and 'Cañamelar: the Subculture of a Rural Sugar Plantation Proletariat', in The People of Puerto Rico, ed. Steward and others.
37. Mintz, 'Cañamelar', p. 315.
38. As previous note.
39. Sidney Mintz, 'The Role of Puerto Rico in Modern Social Science', Review/Revista Interamericana 8:1, spring 1978, p. 7.
40. Mintz, 'Role of Puerto Rico', p. 14.
41. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, second and expanded edition, New York, 1998.
42. Most comprehensively in the short book written with Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: a Caribbean Perspective, Philadelphia, 1976
43. republished (with a new Preface) as The Birth of African American Culture: an Anthropological Perspective, Boston, 1992.
44. Sidney W. Mintz, 'The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area', Journal of World History 9:4, 1966, pp. 914-5.
45. Mintz, 'The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area', p. 918.
46. Sidney W. Mintz, 'Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: the Caribbean Region as Oikoumenê ', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2:2, June 1996, p. 295.
47. Mintz, 'Enduring Substances'.
48. In Mintz's thinking about the new time-consciousness of modernity he is clearly indebted to E. P. Thompson's famous essay, 'Time, Work discipline and Industrial Capitalism', Past and Present 38, 1967, pp. 56-97.
49. Mintz, 'Enduring Substances', pp. 295-6.
50. C. L. R. James, 'From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Fidel Castro', in The Black Jacobins, second edition, New York, 1963, p. 392.
51. For more of this argument see David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, chap. 3.
52. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York, 1985.
53. The Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University came into being in the academic year 1974-5 in the context of a commitment (supported by the Rockefeller Foundation) to build what was called the Atlantic Program in History, Culture, and Society (launched in 1973) at the university. Richard Price also moved from Yale University with Mintz to be part of this project. For two decades this department was the premier training institution for Caribbeanist anthropologists.
54. See Sherry Ortner's remarks on this moment in her well-known essay, 'Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties', Comparative Studies in Society and History 26:1, 1984, pp. 138-44.
55. Dell Hymes, Introduction to Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Hymes, New York, 1972, pp. 6-7.
56. I am thinking of the well-known essay by André Gunder Frank, 'The Development of Underdevelopment', Monthly Review 18, 1966, pp. 17-31;
57. and volume one of Wallerstein's The Modern World-System, New York, 1974.
58. See Sidney Mintz, 'On the Concept of a Third World', Dialectical Anthropology 1:1, 1976, pp. 277-82;
59. and his 'The So-called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response', Dialectical Anthropology 2:4, 1977, pp. 253-70.
60. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History, Berkeley, 1982.
61. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. xv.
62. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 185.
63. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 173.
64. Among the more interesting reviews, see #Stanley J. Stein in American Historical Review 91:2, 1986, pp. 362-3;
65. Clark G. Ross in Ethnohistory 34:1, 1987, pp. 103-5;
66. and John A. Marino in Journal of Modern History 50:3, 1987, pp. 549-51.
67. See Michael Taussig, 'History as Commodity', Critique of Anthropology 9:1, 1989, pp. 7-23.
68. This was a review essay on both Eric Wolf's Europe and the People without History and Mintz's Sweetness and Power. Mintz and Wolf responded vigorously to Taussig in 'Reply to Taussig', Critique of Anthropology 9:1, 1989, pp. 25-31.
69. See Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Chapel Hill, 1980.
70. This is the problem, remember, that Johannes Fabian takes up in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York, 1983.
71. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. xxvii.
72. See Mintz, 'American Anthropology in the Marxist Tradition', pp. 18-19.