‘Not Twenty Feet Away’: The Caribbean – and Race – in Sidney W Mintz’s Puerto Rican Fieldwork

Abstract

Focusing in the early years of Sidney W Mintz’s career and his ‘anthropological record’, this essay examines aspects of his legacy to the field of Caribbean studies. Using materials from Mintz’s fieldwork in Puerto Rico during the 1940s and 1950s, the author discusses experiences that may have influenced Mintz’s ideas and future scholarship in two specific areas. First, the localized fieldwork in the island’s southern town of Jauca (Santa Isabel), specifically on the plantation, is seen as a launching pad for scale-up thinking into large-scale analysis: from the Caribbean to hemispheric and Atlantic connections. Second, exposure to, and analysis of, complex issues of race during Mintz’s Puerto Rican fieldwork suggest the initial opening to future interventions he made on this topic.

Sidney W Mintz: Charting an anthropology of the Caribbean

“…For example, there is Roseberry’s (1978) critique that, despite a focus on the processes of proletarianization by Mintz, Wolf, and some of the others on the project, there wasn’t an explicit analysis forthcoming of capitalism an sich . To charges that the project couldn’t account for systemic racism (e.g., Giovannetti, 2018; Godreau, 1999), Mintz admitted early on that ‘what Steward’s students did not do sufficiently’ was ‘to reflect enough over a racist ideology that succeeds by co-opting the victims, and by systematically underplaying the African component in Puerto Rican tradition’ (Mintz, 1978a: 8). But in general Mintz defended The People of Puerto Rico as a positive and innovative social science turning point (Mintz, 2001, 2011).…”