Sidney Wilfred Mintz
| Dr Sidney Wilfred Mintz | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Born | 1922 | ||||
| Died | 2015 | ||||
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1994 HML Enduring substances and trying theories: the Caribbean region as Oikumenê Delivered 7th Dec. at SOAS
Notes From Elsewhere
Sidney Wilfred Mintz (November 16, 1922 – December 27, 2015) was an anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career. Mintz's history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.[2][3]
Mintz was born in Dover, New Jersey,[4] to Fanny and Soloman Mintz. His father was a New York tradesman, and his mother was a garment-trade organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World.[5] Mintz studied at Brooklyn College, earning his B.A in psychology in 1943.[5] After enlisting in the US Army Air Corps for the remainder of World War II, he enrolled in the doctoral program in anthropology at Columbia University and completed a dissertation on sugar-cane plantation workers in Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico under the supervision of Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict.[2] While at Columbia, Mintz was one of a group of students who developed around Steward and Benedict known as the Mundial Upheaval Society.[2][5] Many prominent anthropologists such as Marvin Harris, Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, and Robert F. Murphy were among this group.
Mintz had a long academic career at Yale University (1951–74) before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University. He has been a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the Collège de France (Paris) and elsewhere. His work has been the subject of several studies.,[6][7][8][9] in addition to his reflections on his own ideas and fieldwork.[10][11] He was honored by the establishment of the annual Sidney W. Mintz Lecture in 1992.[12]
Mintz was a member of the American Ethnological Society and was President of that body from 1968 to 1969, a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Mintz taught as a lecturer at City College (now City College of the City University of New York), New York City, in 1950, at Columbia University, New York City, in 1951, and at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut between 1951 and 1974. At Yale, Mintz started as an instructor, but was Professor of Anthropology from 1963 to 1974. He also served as Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland since 1974. Mintz was also a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1964-65 academic year, a Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 1970-1971. He was a Lewis Henry Morgan Lecturer at the University of Rochester in 1972, a Visiting Professor at Princeton University in 1975-1976, a Christian Gauss Lecturer, 1978-1979, Guggenheim Fellow in 1957, a Social Science Research Council faculty research fellow, 1958-59. He was awarded a master's degree from Yale University in 1963, a Fulbright senior research award in 1966-67 and in 1970-71, a William Clyde DeVane Medal from Yale University in 1972 and was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1978-79. He died on December 26, 2015 at the age of 94, following severe head trauma resulting from a fall.[13]